At the end of 2013 there were more mobile devices than people on earth, or so says SAP, according to an article from earlier this year, 50 Incredible WiFi Tech Statistics That Businesses Must Know. 

Let’s think about this for a second. That means more than 7 Billion devices are currently connecting to mobile networks around the world. And by 2020, we expect that to more than triple - with the majority using some sort of wireless access to connect.

Mobility isn’t a fad. It isn’t just great big marketing themes like BYOD and Internet of Things. This is the future of communication. Of work. Of teaching. Maybe even of dating :-). A recent Morgan Stanley study said that 91% of Americans have their mobile phone within reach 24/7.

But what it really comes down to, as people have all these devices, work on these devices, play on these devices - is how are you going to manage them all? 

The answer, of course, is that you can’t. At least, not if you keep managing devices the way you always have. In this age of mobility and faster access to information, keeping corporate data secure becomes even more important - safeguarding against a device left unsecured, or granted more access than should be permitted. And who knows what your competitors will have access to? Or malicious users who are trolling for consumer information?

It’s not like the recent events at the big box stores took place like it did in War Games back in the 80s… hackers in this day and age find ways to use devices with existing access to exploit information. On the other side of the spectrum, employees are clamoring for access to the wireless network - not just to do work things on their consumer devices, but because it’s cheaper than paying for a data plan. Or they’re trying to be more fit and want to connect their fitness tracker for progress updates throughout the day. With the job market as hot as it is, “wireless access for personal devices” has become a benefit employers are offering to their employees. 

It’s not like IT teams are getting 5x the number of staff to accommodate the 5x the number of devices they need to manage. So what gives?

Well, Aerohive is pleased to once again pave the way to Simpli-Fi with updates to our ID Manager access management platform.

Employers can now offer SELF-SERVICE guest, BYOD, and employee personal device access to the network. More importantly, this self-service access is simple to access, simple to configure, and SECURE. While traditional username/passwords credentials are available, the highly scalable, flexible, and security offered by Aerohive’s own PPSK is really the key to this functionality.

Employees can easily sponsor their own or guest devices to join the network, grant them a key good for a specified amount of time, and then IT will have COMPLETE CONTROL over what that can device can do on the network. Not just VLAN or SSID, but granular application controls. Tunneling policies. Infrastructure access. Everything that device does on the network can be monitored. Access can be revoked for a specific device or set of devices with a single click. And you can do it all without any complex configuration of certificates, supplicants, or multiple access methods based on type of user/device.

All of this, and something even better - it’s cloud-enabled. That means you need just one no matter how many locations you have, how many devices show up on your network, or how many employees you want to allow to access it.

Oh, and don’t forget the app, available in the app store this October. :-) In fact, all of the info on the app and the rest of today's announcement on onboarding and management of personal and BYO Devices in the enterprise can be found here.

This is the mobile-first world, folks. And Aerohive is your source for connected intelligence. 

It can't be all work and no play here at Aerohive, so bees of all ages gathered last weekend for our Aerohive Annual Company Picnic, complete with yummy BBQ, football, volleyball, water tag, a rock climbing wall, air jumper, and a crowd favorite, the ZIPLINE!

Here's a look into the fun we had at the ranch!

Stay tuned to this space for the next Aerohive Adventures.

Notes from the field: In this blog, Principal Systems Engineer Jeff Haydel writes about how Aerohive AVC was used by a school to both discover and block BitTorrent servers from peer-to-peer file sharing on its WLAN.

As a Field Systems Engineer I am provided the privilege to interact with our gear inboth a pre-sales staging mode as well as in a post-sales production mode. This full sales cycle vision into our products has also provided me with some very interesting “war” stories that are often very useful in helping the pre-sales side of my job.

One such story concerns a school in Alabama and Aerohive’s Application Visibility and Control (AVC) feature.

Early on in the school year my sales guys were receiving frequent calls from the IT admin at a school that had been using Aerohive AP’s for a full year. He was going into his second full year of school with Aerohive yet he was complaining that all of a sudden the Aerohive AP’s refused to work every morning between the times of 9:15am and 11:30am. The IT admin was quite adamant that he wanted someone onsite to fix this problem.  

So one morning I arrived before school started to meet with the IT admin and look into the problem. While he was explaining the problem and symptoms, like clockwork, the wireless network became completely unusable at 9:15am, just 15 minutes after the first bell for class had rung. So I jumped into HiveManager and started investigating the problem.  

After looking at interference reports and configuration settings, neither of which made sense with the symptoms, I browsed over to our AVC Dashboard. It became quickly apparent that the source of the issue was BitTorrent and I told him as much.  

He was quick and loud in his objection stating, “BitTorrent is blocked at my firewall!” By this statement he meant the firewall at his WAN edge, between his network and the Internet. After calming him down a bit, I promised to not only show him his problem was BitTorrent, but to also prove it to him.  

First I showed him how on the Dashboard I was able to see BitTorrent as the top protocol flowing across his Aerohive AP’s. I then clicked into the BitTorrent application on the Dashboard and was able to show the 4devices participating in the BitTorrent data flows.  

Further investigation showed that it was one user acting as a source, and 3 users acting as consumers. I then suggested he let me prove that BitTorrent was his problem.

Using Aerohive’s Stateful firewall engine, I configured a firewall policy blocking BitTorrent at the AP layer of his network and applied it to the student user group.  This firewall was pushed out to his AP’s at 10:30am and, to his amazement, his wireless network became immediately usable. From his perspective, this was a full hour before it normally would have started working.  

Further investigation explained the situation: 

• Once the student owner of the source device was pulled out of class and examined, it was determined that the student had a very fast Internet link at home and would download everything he could overnight. 
• Then every day, during the first period he would bring up his BitTorrent server on the wireless network and his 3 buddies would download whatever it was that he downloaded.  
• This peer-to-peer sharing was why his WAN edge firewall did not see nor block the traffic but why Aerohive’s Stateful L7 capable firewall in each AP could.  

Needless to say the 4 students were a bit unhappy at this result, but that the IT admin and the rest of the school were quite thrilled with the solution.

~~~

In his next installment, Jeff writes about how AVC lets schools manage the notorious WLAN bandwidth hog, Youtube. Stay tuned.

Note to readers: I’m writing a series about iBeacon. This is the fifth installment in the series, explaining how privacy issues are addressed with iBeacon.  

Any time your phone starts interacting with remote services, there is naturally a question about privacy. The technology of iBeacons has some natural features that help protect privacy. iBeacons are transmit-only devices, so an iBeacon cannot easily learn about nearby devices or enable receivers to learn about other nearby devices. An iBeacon does not learn that you are nearby (unlike network technologies that have bi-directional communications). 

In the case of iBeacons, the one-way protocol does not allow an iBeacon to learn about you. Privacy in iBeacons is implemented at the receiver – that is, by the application running on the device, where the user has full control and can opt-in or opt-out.

On iOS devices, iBeacon information is only accessible if a user enables location services. Don’t want an application to know where you are? Don’t let it access location services.

Due to the importance of applications, mobile ecosystems like iOS have an important role in advocating for end users. Many users lack the time and technical expertise to deeply understand the technology. As iBeacons evolve, the underlying application ecosystem will need to meet user demands for increased disclosure about how location information is used (and perhaps stored), and app store approval processes can be used to prevent unacceptable privacy practices.

~~~

Read more on iBeacons

iBeacon Part 1: What the heck is it? 

iBeacon Part 2: How does it work? 

iBeacon Part 3: You need an app

iBeacon Part 4: Ranging

Why is iBeacon important?

iPhone 6 + iBeacons + Wi-Fi: In-store shopping ups its game

iBeacon + Wi-Fi: Finally, "opting in" can be a win-win 

When Naropa University wanted to add additional Cisco licenses, the Boulder-based academic institution quickly learned it would have to overhaul its entire network solution, not the sort of information that's easy on the IT budget. Since a full Cisco rip and replace was out the question, the university looked at other options.

With an Aerohive network in place, the IT team can better manage the entire solution across its five campus locations, and student and staff complaints about reliability have gone away for good. The IT team has far fewer network headaches thanks to many Aerohive enterprise features that allow for centralized management and greater visibility and control.

For all the details, read the full case study here.

Notes from the field: In the continuation from his previous blog, Principal Systems Engineer Jeff Haydel explains how a school optimized its use of Aerohive AVC in order to get YouTube use under control.

After the success with stamping out BitTorrent on the school WLAN, the IT admin was eager to put the Application Visibility and Control (AVC) dashboard through its paces. He was eager to see what else his students were doing that he didn’t think they should have been, and to block it.

So we opened up the Dashboard and looked at the next biggest culprit applications. 

YouTube quickly came up as a top bandwidth hog, and he eagerly proclaimed, “Block it!” (I think he is ex-military so this came with a slammed fist and significant emotion.) I suggested that we research who was using the YouTube traffic, and for what reason before we blocked it, as YouTube can have educational uses.

Our investigation of the YouTube traffic tracked the users down to three students. Because this IT admin was also using Aerohive’s PPSK functionality and providing a unique key to each user, he was able to immediately identify who these three students were.

He explained that the school was trying to assist in integrating six foreign nationals, whose parents were newly hired research assistants at the local large university. These six students knew very little English and almost nothing of American culture, having only arrived in the country a few short weeks ago. These YouTube users were three of those students. 

As it turns out, the students in question had all been in Biology together that period, and we were able to question the biology teacher after class. Her report was that all of the students were using their devices to research an advanced biology topic for a report due at the end of the week. She also was adamant that YouTube should not have been a part of that research. 

Further investigation found one of the students in question and we were able to have that student show us what YouTube video they were watching.  It turned out to be a video of a college professor explaining the topic in question in this student’s native dialect (thank you YouTube for English subtitles). This turned out to indeed be a proper educational use for YouTube.

I was then able to show the IT admin another great feature of Aerohive. Earlier I was able to present Aerohive’s advanced L7 engine providing application visibility followed by Aerohive’s firewall blocking those same applications. 

Now I was able to showcase Aerohive’s QoS engine that allowed for prioritization based upon those same application signatures. The IT admin chose to prioritize the YouTube traffic up higher than standard HTTP traffic in order to ensure those six students could make use of YouTube to further their education while they continued to chip away at the significant language and cultural barriers in front of them.

Not a bad day’s work I say, and all before lunch!

Fullerton School District is one of the largest in Orange County and was well ahead of the digital education curve, deploying its first 1:1 laptop initiative over 12 years ago. As the District grew and added five times as many school-issued Apple devices to the network, the existing Cisco solution became very difficult and expensive to manage.

The Aerohive solution provided the IT team with great visibility and control over the network and the WLAN could be managed from a central location, crucial for a district with 20 schools. Fullerton School District replaced Cisco and overhauled the entire solution with Aerohive access points and switches. Now, that's a switch.

To learn more about the deployment, read the case study here.

When global media company Haymarket Media Group decided to overhaul its Wi-Fi solution, it did its homework. After all, the company's digital business alone represents some of the world's best-known brands, producing apps, live events and online publications. Wi-Fi was mission-critical. 

Haymarket wanted to standardize its WLAN across its offices in the UK and the United States, meet increasing demand for BYOD and offer secure guest access.

A controller-less solution from Aerohive proved invaluable, allowing Haymarket to deploy a scalable solution with centralized management and control. The company now accommodates a large number of devices on the network, and can provide network access at live events.

Check out more details in the full case study here.

Grant Thornton is the sixth largest public accounting firm in the nation, with offices throughout the United States. The company had a limited Cisco deployment in a handful of offices, but the controller was very difficult to manage and the access points were becoming burdened and overwhelmed with increasing users and devices on the network.

Grant Thornton turned to Aerohive and now offers stable and reliable Wi-Fi across the firm, including its service center in India, with robust Wi-Fi access for employees who are heavy users of video and voice. 

For more details, read the full case study here.

Earlier this summer, President Obama announced an exciting new program to help transform education in US schools by 2017. ConnectED is a government initiative focusing on empowering teachers with technology and training to promote individualized learning for our students in 99% of US schools.

This hasn’t come a moment too soon: The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) ran an analysis last year that revealed an unfortunate statistic - as much as 57% of school districts report their wireless networks are incapable of supporting a 1:1 deployment, and 40% of classrooms have NO WI-FI AT ALL. 

As Apple noted on their ConnectED webpage, "A lack of equal access to technology and knowledge puts entire communities and populations of students at a disadvantage, especially minorities.”

At Aerohive, we are very pleased and proud to be partnering with Apple to help deliver transformative technology to 114 schools in 29 states across the nation. The solution includes not only Apple devices requiring enterprise-class Aerohive Wi-Fi, but also curriculum solutions and broadband providers to ensure that every school receiving the iPads, MacBooks, and Apple TVs can access the digital content as needed.

In addition, our friends at Education Networks of America (ENA) will help install and support the equipment and infrastructure that Apple and we at Aerohive have donated to these schools. This combination of best-in-class technology and services paired with passionate, trained teachers empowers our students to connect, inspire, and LEARN more than ever before. 

Since we started selling access points back in 2007, Aerohive has always had a passionate focus on enabling education for students across the globe. From the hyper-attention we pay to assuring quality connectivity for 30+ kids in each classroom to our dedicated classroom management application TeacherView, we have shown over and over again our commitment to promoting, improving, and inspiring education.

Our vision is to provide Mobility without Limitations, and as Margaret Mead once said: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has”.
 
Hive On! 

To learn more about our ConnectED partnership with Apple, visit here.

Note to readers: I’m writing a series about iBeacon. In this sixth and final installment in the series, I talk about iBeacon use cases beyond retail. 

After last month’s iBeacon webinar, we kicked off several discussions on Aerohive's customer community. Much of the early conversation around iBeacons are about using them in retail environments, but the underlying technology can be used for more than just helping connect shoppers with purchase promotions.

After the webinar, we kicked off a thread on the community with a question about where iBeacons could be used and the results came in from many different user groups.

In presentations, I’ve referred to a few different use cases such as building better museum guides, or validating train tickets by calling them up when the conductor is near. In the iBeacon thread, the discussion suggested a few more:

• Using iBeacons in an education setting to assist with recording attendance
• In industrial environments, automating the safety lockout procedures so that machines cannot be turned on as long as they are under maintenance
• When members of a fitness facility are in the area, they can be given notifications on classes that might be of interest
• Checking in people for reservations. One example given was a public computer center, and automatically signing into a reservation upon walking in the door.

In general, iBeacons are useful any time you need to have an application interact with the world around it. I suspect there are also some really neat applications that make IP telephony even better. Now that a phone number does not need to be tied to a copper wire pair, or even a particular IP address, using proximity data as part of call routing decisions could lead to further enhancements in IP PBXes.

What is clear from the discussion is that this is the dawn of the beacon era, and there is many applications that have yet to be discovered. At Aerohive, we continue to be excited by the many possibilities that beacons will bring to Wi-Fi connected devices!

~~~

Read more on iBeacons

iBeacon Part 1: What the heck is it? 

iBeacon Part 2: How does it work? 

iBeacon Part 3: You need an app

iBeacon Part 4: Ranging

iBeacon Part 5: Privacy

Why is iBeacon important?

iPhone 6 + iBeacons + Wi-Fi: In-store shopping ups its game

iBeacon + Wi-Fi: Finally, "opting in" can be a win-win 

Pulaski County Special School District (PCSSD) is the second largest district in the state of Arkansas, and had plans in place to roll out a 1:1 iPad initiative across all 36 district schools. The District had deployed Cisco in several schools, but when it looked at expanding the Cisco solution and installing a controller in each school, it soon realized it needed another option.

Besides the cost barriers, PCSSD required enterprise features and that could help manage over 20,000 iPads. The District also wanted to deploy 802.11ac to set the stage for Gigabit Wi-Fi, and Aerohive fit the bill. 

With features like Bonjour Gateway, network management from HiveManager and a flexible solution that includes deploying Aerohive branch routers for school administration to access the network remotely from home, Aerohive made the grade.

To learn more, read the full case study or check out the video about the deployment.

When a large school district in Indiana rolled out a 1:1 laptop initiative at its high school, the IT team soon realized the existing controller-based Cisco solution was not going to make the grade. Logansport Community School Corporation realized in order to meet its goals for digital learning and enabling administration and staff to be more mobile, it need to make a change.

The district turned to Aerohive for a robust Wi-Fi solution, and chose Aerohive for its simple network management and enterprise features. Now administrators conduct teacher evaluations wirelessly and all schools in the district benefit from reliable Wi-Fi.

For more details, see the full case study here.

You’ve just done your weekly grocery shop, you unload your car and prepare yourself for the trans-Siberian like journey that will take you from the car to the fridge. You brave the treacherous conditions with your supplies in hand, feeling the intolerable ache from the plastic bags digging into your hands. When you finally place the shopping on the floor or on the kitchen counter, you wipe your brow and bask in the glory of your accomplishment. Now you can rest. 

This is exactly how I would feel a few years ago after carrying my first laptop around with me all day long.

At first there was a sense of freedom, I wasn’t chained to my desk anymore, I was mobile. However, it quickly dawned on me that while my chain had been cut away from my desk, it had re-attached itself to a heavy plate that rested in my laptop bag. Luckily, over the years technology advancements have saved my spine with laptops that weigh half as much, and these days I roam freely around the office, with the corporate Wi-Fi facilitating increased mobility, productivity and collaboration on my mobile device. 

Mobility has changed everything, work is now a thing we do, not a place we go. Cloud and Wi-Fi allow us to access both corporate and personal applications from anywhere in the world, at any time. Most organizations provide a corporate laptop, however we all work differently, with efficiency achieved on a range of device types such as notebooks, smartphones and tablets, which we expect to work from. This places a demand on our network infrastructure to become more flexible in order to accommodate consumer grade devices that are flooding in. 

Recognizing that employees wish to operate in their own way, 50 percent of businesses will not supply employee computing devices by 2017, according to Gartner, opting instead to facilitate Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives. Already we are at the point of mobile reliance with 1 in 3 people stating that they couldn’t do their jobs without Wi-Fi connectivity. Forget work, I couldn’t survive life without Wi-Fi connectivity.

The next workforce wave will also expect connectivity. A recent survey by German researcher BITKOM shows that the Internet is accessed through a smartphone by 89 percent of 16-18 year olds. With an understanding that the workplace is changing, educational organizations are sculpting a classroom far beyond four walls, welcoming new ways of engaging students through mobile devices and interactive-enabling technologies in order to prepare the next generation of workers for the mobile world. Mobility sets both the student and teacher free of traditional shackles, no longer does the educator remain a static object in front of a board, and no longer does back of the class boredom exist for students because with mobility, a classroom has no back, everyone is free. 

Mobile technology is fantastic for any individual, giving us access to a wealth of information, whenever we want it. And this is apparent in any public space, 79 percent of smartphone users have their phone with them for 22 hours a day, suggests IDC. According to SAP, 44 percent of people sleep with their smartphone beside their bed and 80 percent check their phone within 15 minutes of waking up say IDC. 

The rise of mobile devices in our lives and on networks is fascinating and has enabled a completely new way of working, learning, and living, but it doesn’t stop there. Over the next few years we will see a new trend, which is the connected world of everything, as an increasing number of organizations utilize network-connected sensors and systems to enhance business potential and operating efficiency. Network connected sensors facilitate increased systems intelligence and awareness, we already see some of this today with personal devices such as Samsung Gear, Nike+ and Google Glass, devices that enhance the way we communicate with people or analyze our sporting successes for example. 

All of these connected sensors, phones, shoes, glasses etc. crave Wi-Fi as much as we do, continually looking for a route to either the Internet or to an internal system. Even though you may not yourself be actively trying to connect your phone to a Wi-Fi network, your phone may still take the decision to search and join itself anyway where possible. A smartphone, whether in your hand or pocket will send ten messages every second into the air with the message “Hey Mr. Wi-Fi where are you? I want you! I need you!”. Retailers have taken note of this behavior and have begun to adopt the concept of presence analytics, taking their wireless LAN infrastructure and using it for much more than basic connectivity. 

Imagine you are walking down the aisle of a supermarket when suddenly a message pops up on your phone that alerts you to a fantastic money saving opportunity for the very item you happen to be stood by. Wow, what are the chances of that? I’m going to take this as a sign that I need this item in my life. Fate? Or a smart retailer? 

Mobile devices are extremely intelligent, as is the infrastructure that they connect to. Working together they are a powerful force that can change the way we make purchasing decisions. We use our devices to compare pricing, check product availability and read reviews while in store, and retailers can now assist us further. Rewarding customer loyalty has always been a priority to retailers, and are giving us our personal shopper through our Wi-Fi connected devices to promote the latest items that they know are of interest to us individually, remembering our preferences from previous purchases such as size or brands.

eMarketer research indicates that by 2017, there will be 2.5 billion smartphone users globally and armed with the knowledge that 90 percent of smartphones are already Wi-Fi enabled, retailers are now beginning to capture device presence information so that they can understand the levels of traffic in and around their stores. Using device count and proximity, retailers can gather vital store information such as how busy the store is versus sales, how effective store front signage and promotions are, and perform regional comparisons of store performance.   

Location based information is extremely powerful and can deliver a wide array of opportunities for all kinds of organizations. Wi-Fi enabled tags can be placed on just about anything such as medical equipment in a hospital, or provide room temperature details in a food storage facility. New age warehouses even use positioning technologies to control and direct mini-robots for stock picking, creating a near complete autonomous operation. 

Wherever I go, I search for Wi-Fi, even when I visit my sports team’s stadium, because they offer me a fantastic service. Once I’m logged onto the Wi-Fi, I’m provided with options to watch replays, see different camera angles, order some food and beverages to my seat, and of course receive the usual promotions and advertising, all from my mobile device, amazing.

While commercial use of mobile technology is providing businesses with new revenue opportunities and alternative ways of working, Wi-Fi can unleash the potential of just about any organization. Emergency services are equipping their vehicles with Wi-Fi base stations that can be used to communicate with colleagues in hazardous environments and situations. These vehicles can also be physically positioned in a layout that allows them to form a virtual perimeter that can actively track any Wi-Fi sensor within their zone, increasing the safety and visibility of rescuers. These temporary Wi-Fi zones have been used to assist disaster situations such as the Haiti earthquake. Wi-Fi enabled flying drones can even be sent into the sky to hover above areas that require device connectivity.

Years ago I wouldn’t trust sending an email over Wi-Fi for fear of reliability, performance and security. Now I couldn’t live without it, and with some applications, we literally entrust our lives to mobile technology. As Wi-Fi adoption increases within the healthcare sector, sensors such as heart monitors are going wireless, providing more patient freedom and mobility. Now we really do rely on the Wi-Fi.  And if you really want to place your life in the hands of Wi-Fi, some roller coasters use Wi-Fi enabled sensors to control their braking systems…if you didn’t have a fear of rides before, you may now. 

At the end of 2013, there were more mobile devices than people on earth, states SAP, and they require connectivity. Give it to them.

Wi-Fi isn’t exciting technology, it is the enabler of exciting technology. Above are examples of some incredible uses of mobile devices, sensors and controls across all markets, but without an enterprise Wi-Fi platform supporting these mobility initiatives, their potential can never be fully realized. We all know the Wi-Fi can be unreliable, but that’s usually caused by poor design, implementation or inappropriate choice of platform. Whether your organization is investigating replacing you with a Wi-Fi enabled robot or simply letting you bring in your iPad to work, encourage a well planned enterprise WLAN infrastructure so that you don’t have to face the agony of a going a week without Wi-Fi due to performance or reliability issues, which according to Iconic Displays, leaves us grumpier than a week without coffee. 

Please join us for How to Become a Wi-Fi Expert, a special online community event. 

Summary: Learn how IT professionals can become educated about Wi-Fi basics, design, and troubleshooting.

What: A one-day live, interactive event taking place November 19, 2014 from 9AM - 2PM PST (San Francisco time) on Aerohive's community, HiveNation. 

Who: The event will be led by CWNA Study Guide author, David Coleman, and moderated by CWNP'sTom Carpenter. 

How does this work? Starting at 9am PST, every hour we will post a new discussion topic. Feel free to chime in: Ask, discuss, and/or share new discussion topics.

Giveaways: All registrants who participate will receive a free copy of "WLAN Troubleshooting and Design." This booklet, which is excerpted from CWNA: Certified Wireless Network Administrator Official Study Guide (Exam CWNA-106), 4th Edition (published in September), reviews common WLAN problems and explains how you can avoid or correct them with thoughtful design. (Please note: You must register to provide us with a mailing address where we can send your giveaway.)

*******************************************  HOW TO PARTICIPATE  *********************************************

1) Register here ahead of time.

2) Log into HiveNation where the event will take place: 

If you aren't already a community member, you will need join HiveNation in order to participate in this event. 

3) Follow the “How to Become a Wi-Fi Expert" category to stay up-to-date on conversations as they happen. 

4) Want to ask your own question or start a discussion topic? Create a post:

5) For optimum visibility, tag your post in the "How to Become a Wi-Fi Expert" category:

6) See you November 19, 2014 from 9AM - 2PM PST (San Francisco time)!

Please join us for "How to Become a Wi-Fi Expert," an interactive, vendor-neutral online event

Summary: An interactive discussion in which you will learn how IT professionals can become educated about Wi-Fi basics, design, and troubleshooting. If you are already a Wi-Fi expert, you are invited to share your knowledge.

What: A one-day live, interactive event taking place November 19, 2014 from 9AM - 2PM PST (San Francisco time.) 

Format: Content is vendor-neutral and led by CWNA Study Guide author, David Coleman, and moderated by CWNP's Tom Carpenter. Anyone interested in the topic of becoming a Wi-Fi expert is invited, and encouraged, to participate in this discussion.

How does this work?:Starting at 9am PST November 19, we will post new discussion topics. Feel free to chime in: Ask, discuss, and/or share new discussion topics. Have a topic you'd like to see discussed? Please suggest in comments below.

*Giveaways: All registrants who participate will receive a free copy of "WLAN Troubleshooting and Design." This booklet, which is excerpted from CWNA: Certified Wireless Network Administrator Official Study Guide (Exam CWNA-106), 4th Edition (published in September), reviews common WLAN problems and explains how you can avoid or correct them with thoughtful design. (Please note: To receive this giveaway, you must both register AND participate in the online event.)

*We will also be giving away the full CWNA Study Guide book to select individuals. Stay tuned for details on  how to win.

******************************************  HOW TO PARTICIPATE  ********************************************

1) Register here ahead of time.

2) Log into HiveNation where the event will take place: 

If you aren't already a community member, you will need join HiveNation in order to participate in this event. 

3) Follow the “How to Become a Wi-Fi Expert" category to stay up-to-date on conversations as they happen. 

4) Want to ask your own question or start a discussion topic? Create a post:

5) For optimum visibility, tag your post in the "How to Become a Wi-Fi Expert" category:

6) See you November 19, 2014 from 9AM - 2PM PST (San Francisco time)!

Jeff Davis County Schools is a primarily rural school district based in Hazlehurst, Georgia. Faced with aging infrastructure and the requirement to meet online testing and 1:1 state goals, the District began evaluating vendors who could offer robust Wi-Fi with intuitive network management. As more and more devices were added to the network, the existing Aruba solution was becoming more and more difficult to manage and struggled to keep up with the traffic.

Another need was for the District to offer secure network access to students and guests without burdening the IT team. Aerohive's Social Login feature was a lifesaver, allowing the District to offer Wi-Fi to students after school hours and to many residents that would not have access otherwise. As a bonus with Aerohive, the IT team can learn more about network use by analyzing smart tag data.

For more about the deployment, read about all the features the District is using in the full case study here.

In this blog, Jeff highlights Aerohive’s built-in Spectrum Analysis; one of the tools most helpful to even the most puzzling troubleshooting situations, and available today in most of Aerohive's current access points. 

One of the least discussed yet most powerful functions of Aerohive’s HiveManager is the Spectrum Analysis troubleshooting toolkit that is included in the product. As a Pre-Sales Engineer, I constantly tell people that any  tool or process that we can provide that keeps our customer, the network admin, in their seats makes them more productive and useful to their customer, the end user. 

The minute that admin has to leave their desk and walk, drive, or fly to a site, they are singularly focused on this one task. In contrast when working at their desk, they can multitask and handle the myriad of jobs and roles that are thrust upon today’s network administrator.

A great story that illustrates the use of this product (and kept my customer in their chair) happened recently to me while in my home state when I visited a customer to perform a network health check and configuration optimization session. 

While we were exploring their maps looking at the channel and power layout that ACSP (Aerohive Channel Selection Protocol) had implemented for them, an infrequent problem came up. The problem shows itself only when they have their all-hands meetings in their large conference room upstairs. Normally they have no problems in the upstairs office spaces nor during the countless meetings in that location, their largest conference room. They usually have a great network experience, but consistently during their all-hands meetings connectivity problems would occur. 

Naturally the discussion, and how it was presented, took us into a discussion on user density versus AP (Access Point) density. 

It became quickly apparent that the deployment of the AP in that room and the others in the surrounding area provided sufficient coverage for their infrequent high end user density so we moved our investigation to other avenues. We enabled Aerohive’s WIPS (Wireless Intrusion Prevention System) and monitored the environment for sources of 802.11 interference such as rogue APs and, more importantly, ad-hoc rogues (more of this topic in a future blog.) That quickly became apparent as strike two.

My next step was to turn on our spectrum analysis toolto look for non-802.11 interference. This quickly showed us the problem. 

A meeting was happening in that room during our investigation between their office at headquarters (where we were) and one of their satellite offices on the east coast. Being a technology company, they utilize numerous high-end gadgets in their office and one of those was a wireless HDMI kit that allowed an untethered user the ability to display on the large mounted displays in the room without having to attach to an anchored HDMI cable.  

Unfortunately this “wireless HDMI” used proprietary protocols and a broad swath of the 5 Ghz U-NII 3 spectrum. This solution was interfering with the Aerohive access points in the area on their 5 Ghz radios. To verify this was the problem we turned off the wireless HDMI solution after the meeting and showed that the source of interference went away. We were able to then move the access points surrounding the room to a different U-NII band and channel and thereby avoid the interference in the future.

Q) Now a critical reader is going to ask, shouldn’t Aerohive’s ACSP and interference detection algorithms have detected and resolved this issue automatically? Let me add some Aerohive science content to answer these questions. 

A)ACSP is configured, out of the box, to select the optimal channel and power for a given set of access points or hive, when it is run. Due to the fact that changing channel in the middle of a data stream would be highly disruptive though, ACSP is only configured to run on boot up out of the box. Customers can easily, and it is recommended to, configure ACSP to run at a specific range of times and only when below a threshold of connected users.

Unfortunately many customers do not implement this (and this was one of the many topics that we were discussing before this problem came up.) Further investigation showed that Aerohive’s HiveManager did indeed have alarms showing that we detected the interference but, due to the fact that this display system was usually kept off and only used for remote meetings, these alarms would clear themselves once the interference source, the wireless HDMI, was turned off. 

Another interesting addendum to this story is that users in smaller meetings were not affected because they were naturally roaming over to the 2.4 Ghz radio on the access points and thereby avoiding the interference caused by the wireless HDMI when it was on. The problem only became apparent when the user density required the use of both radios in our access points to service the load. Then the segment of the population on the 5 Ghz radios experienced problems and the 2.4 Ghz radios became overcrowded and unusable as well. 

I am happy to report that the latest all-hands meeting went great for this company and they have continued their remote Aerohive roll out.

Aerohive’s ability to troubleshoot problems remotely and provide a tool kit that keeps a network admin from having to walk, drive, or fly to a location to debug and understand a problem were a huge part of the success of that particular deal.  It’s a wonderful experience to see a customer discover a tool in their toolkit that they already have and watch their productivity soar.

In my recent discussions with customers, the phrase “software defined radio” has come up. As software increasingly takes over the functions of our electronic devices, it is natural to wonder how deeply we might depend on software to add future functionality. For example, can we use it to add new Wi-Fi physical layers without new hardware?

But I am getting ahead of myself. In the beginning, our regulatory edifice for radio waves was built at the same time as early analog broadcast technology. Regulations were concerned with reserving frequency bands for exclusive use, and getting permission to use a certain frequency generally also came with the right to exclude others. How you used the band was tied to what you were doing. A radio station license didn’t have to state how the radio was being used because if you had a license for an AM radio station, well, what else would you be doing other than AM radio broadcasting?

With increasing computing power, the link between “what I do with my radio spectrum” and “how I do it” does not have to be fixed. Software can change how a radio works. Maybe you change the waveform or modulation, the frequency, or even the protocol. In the extreme case, a generic radio antenna can be used to receive AM radio, Wi-Fi, and protocols yet to be invented, simply by loading new software to interpret the new waveforms (This was previously called a “software defined radio,” but is now often called a “cognitive radio” in recognition of its extraordinary flexibility.) A famous contemporary application of the use of flexible radio programming is the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, which is using newly-modified radios to revive an old satellite that is still in orbit. (Yes, I’m a space geek. You’re not surprised, are you?)

Cognitive radios are still expensive, and indeed, overkill for most applications. In the Wi-Fi industry, we use a very narrow slice of cognitive radio capabilities. As regulations have expanded spectrum, it is possible to update the software that drives Wi-Fi chips to use those new channels. At the end of the day, though, they are still Wi-Fi radios. New software doesn’t change the waveform or protocol. You can have any bit transfer protocol you want, as long as it’s the Wi-Fi you know today.

Does Aerohive use “software defined” radios? Current Wi-Fi chipsets incorporate some SDR/cognitive-type capabilities, but for limited purposes such as making new spectrum available. As an industry, we have not yet been able to come up with a fully software-definable radio that can be reprogrammed on the fly while remaining cost-effective enough for the market that is Wi-Fi. We are still a long way from reprogramming a Wi-Fi chip on the fly.

Tomorrow, November 19, 9am PST, I join CWNP's Tom Carpenter in a lengthy session in which we will discuss – with YOU – how to become a Wi-Fi expert.

Not everyone has Wi-Fi expertise, but a lot of people want, or need, it. Your organization may be rolling out Wi-Fi and you need to learn a new skill. Or perhaps you have your eye on a career change, but your experience is more rooted in network management (the wired kind).

Enter the "How to Become a Wi-Fi Expert" online event.

During a 5-hour span of time, during which you can come and go as you please, and chime in as much as you'd like, we will cover a range of topics aimed at helping you get started learning, or advancing, your Wi-Fi knowledge. Ask, learn, share.

We have some cool giveaways too! 

Everyone who participates – and by participate we mean asks or replies to a thread – gets a free booklet, which is an excerpted chapter (WLAN Troubleshooting and Design) from the latest edition of the CWNAStudyGuide.

Additionally, you will be able to compete to win one of ten copies of the full CWNA Study Guide or win the Grand Prize - a CWNA Premium Self-Study Kit (value $595). 

Contest Rules: The top 10 *most active participants will win a copy of CWNA Study Guide 4th edition. The TOP most active participant wins the GRAND PRIZE prize - the CWNP study kit. (*most active defined as posting, replying and liking)

The operative word to winning anything is "participate." We don't want to just talk about what we think you want to know. Nor do we assume we know everything. We want to hear from YOU -  your questions, your knowledge. All *input is welcome. (*as expected, community guidelines for tone and good sportsmanship apply)

Everything you need to know to participate is spelled out here. As for the event itself and what we will cover, here's what to expect:

• 9 - 10am PST - CWNP and vendor neutral training
• 10am - 11am PST - Other training resources
• 11am - 12pm Hands-on Training
• 12 - 1pm PST– Career opportunities
• 1pm - 2pm PST– Importance of Wi-Fi Design and troubleshooting

Not familiar with us? Let me introduce myself, and Tom Carpenter.

David Coleman is the Global Training Manager for Aerohive Networks, creators of the cooperative control wireless LAN (WLAN) architecture. David is in charge of Aerohive training programs for all partners and customers throughout the globe. In his spare time, David writes white papers and books about enterprise Wi-Fi networking. David is the coauthor of Sybex Publishing's "CWNA Study Guide" - ISBN# 978-1118893708 and "CWSP Study Guide" - ISBN# 0470438916. Follow David on Twitter: @mistermultipath

Tom Carpenter is the author of fifteen books on topics of interest to technical professionals published by McGraw-Hill and Sybex, including Wireless Networking, SQL Server, Windows Administration and VoIP. He is currently the CTO at CWNP and is responsible for setting the direction and managing the content for the certifications available for Wireless LAN professionals.  He also teaches technical and professional development classes. Follow Tom on Twitter: @carpentertom