Is Your Network Ready for Office Work Environment

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Is Your Network Ready for Office Work
Environment?-Mark Mullins
www.flukenetworks.com 2006-2017 Fluke
Corporation
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Is Your Network Ready for Office Work Environment?
Todays office environments are changing
drastically in regards to where and how people
work. Gone are the days of segregated work areas
for each employee with siloed spaces featuring
strictly wired connections for a computer and a
phone. Companies today are striving for more
open, harmonious work environments and taking
advantage of new trends such as collaborative
work spaces, BYOD and a combination of
work-from-home policies and office hotelingthe
practice of reserving work space when needed
rather than assigning permanent spaces to
employees. The key to making these new wide open
office designs effectively become the new norm is
technologyprimarily wireless. Imagine the need
to support a plethora of BYOD devices and manage
the exponential demand on the Wi-Fi network while
ensuring that only authorized devices have
access.
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Is Your Network Ready for Office Work Environment?
And amidst these challenges, Wi-Fi is rapidly
evolving from 802.11g and 802.11n to the latest
next-generation 802.11ac gigabit Wi-Fi with
future Wave 2 devices that will require more
cabling, greater throughput and higher-power
PoE. Its no surprise that network managers are
concerned about whether their existing cabling
infrastructure is robust enough to support the
emerging technologies of open office designs and
whether it is designed to ensure the right
coverage and placement for wireless access
points. Lets take look at a few best practices
that can help ease their minds.
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Is Your Network Ready for Office Work Environment?
Validation Troubleshooting
Before connecting up additional devices to the
physical infrastructure, validating the existing
cablings ability to support new devices can help
save time and frustration. In just four
seconds, CableIQ can verify the cablings ability
to support voice, VoIP and gigabit Ethernet. It
is also a powerful troubleshooting tool,
graphically mapping distance to faults,
identifying whats at the end of the cable and
isolating isolate cabling issues from network
problems. And for those aiming for 802.11ac
Wi-Fi as their eventual main source of office
connectivity, its critical to ensure that PoE
can be effectively delivered simultaneously with
data over the same pairs. Proper DC resistance
balance is the key to ensuring that data signals
are not distorted in the presence of power. As
the first field tester capable of measuring DC
resistance unbalance, the DSX-5000
CableAnalyzer is ideal for ensuring that the
difference in resistance between two conductors
is low enough to enable the common mode current
needed to support PoE and maintain proper data
transmission.
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Is Your Network Ready for Office Work Environment?
A Wireless Sanity Check
While the physical infrastructure continues to
be one of the more common areas affecting network
performance, sometimes a check of the air is
neededespecially when BYOD users complain that
they cant connect or stay connected to the
wireless network. With so many users in these
dynamically changing workspace, maintaining
security and only allowing authorized users has
also become more challenging than ever. Network
managers would be wise to have Wi-Fi testing at
their fingertips to detect and locate 802.11
a/b/g/ac devices, check signal strength,
determine interference causes and quickly
identify and locate wireless access
pointswhether authorized or rogue. An AirCheck
Wi-Fi tester offers a one-button AutoTest for
quickly determining pass or fail of the wireless
environment while identifying common signal
strength problems. Aircheck for Windows is a
low-cost software solution that runs on any
Windows 7/8 platform for measuring signal
strength, as well as true end user
performanceincluding actual throughput for
802.11ac devices. To make the process even
easier, AirCheck for Android can put these
testing and troubleshooting capabilities in the
palm of your handhelping you to ensure a true
BYOD-ready environment.
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Is Your Network Ready for Office Work Environment?
Last but Not Least
Ensuring that the physical infrastructure is up
to par and the wireless network is strong and
secure is vital to ensuring successful
collaborative open office environments and
trending BYOD policies. But as usual, behind the
scenes remains one last consideration the
connectivity or network layer for a wireless
access point. After all, whats a wireless access
point worth if its not communicating properly
with its switch? Linkrunner AT is ideal for
verifying connectivity to WAPs and other network
devices at gigabit speeds over copper, validating
a switchs PoE capabilities, and ensuring proper
port and VLAN configurations. While office
environments may be changing, its obvious that
the right tools can go a long way to helping you
can keep up with the trends and ensure continuous
staff productivity.
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