3 Ways to Improve Your Employees Wireless Experience
Working wirelessly has rapidly become the norm over the last few years. Where once there were cables everywhere wifi and wireless technology is now ubiquitous.
There are some downsides to the technology though. It can be perceived as slow, with unstable connections and security issues.
Repeat after me
At its simplest form, a wireless network (whether wi-fi or 4G/5G) consists of a signal being transmitted to and from a central location. Even the most powerful transmission signal will have a limited range, and when you approach the out edge of this range your signal will drop.
By using a wireless repeater, the range can be significantly extended. The device sits within the transmission area and receives inbound and outbound signals – and then rebroadcasts them at full strength.
This has the effect of setting the repeater as the center of the transmission area, working in tandem with the original transmission area. Using multiple repeaters is possible to extend the range several times over.
Speed is of the essence
Some of the first commercially available wireless networking equipment ran at 1Mbps, followed soon after by 10Mbps. The novelty of being able to work wirelessly soon wore off when your wired colleagues were downloading data 10 times faster than you could!
Much faster connections are available today, but something to keep in mind is that your network will only run as fast as its slowest component. So, if you have 99 routers, hubs, and cables that run at 1000Mbps tied into a network with a hub that runs at 10Mbps, your employees are not going to have a great time.
Bottlenecks will exist and the frustration will be evident. Make sure that everything runs as fast as it can, and where possible use mobile device management (MDM) software to keep everything under control.
Maximize your bandwidth
For any kind of network, wired or wireless, the speed is also affected by bandwidth usage. If your network supports 1000Mbps and a single device is downloading data at 800Mbps, there is only 200Mbps left available – and if another 50 devices are trying to share that bandwidth, they will work very slowly.
The solution is to ensure that no devices are running software in the background that uses excessive bandwidth, while using a managed network solution that limits the speed that data is transferred.
This doesn’t have to be 24-7, but can be used in a smart manner, so if one device suddenly starts requesting a large amount of bandwidth at once it is limited to allow the rest of the network to continue as normal.
Improving the Wireless Experience
While your IT department may be able to make some of these changes, for true performance increases and the management of system to ensure that bandwidth is available while the usage is corporate based, it may be a good idea to speak to a professional Mobility Lifecycle Management (MLM) company. Most will be able to improve user experience with su