As others have noticed, this is a pretty tough nut to crack. Due to some odd
quirk of human nature, many students will put quite a bit of effort into
complaining to their friends or on forums, but can't be bothered to actually
tell anyone who can make a difference. Here's the collection of approaches we
use:
- Good predictive modelling, followed up by a site survey. Not much you can
do if you have gaps in your coverage or capacity. This plus a good knowledge
of where your clients clump up should give you a much stronger starting point.
- Know your wireless management platform, and which metrics correlate with
user visible problems. For example, high levels of channel utilization, or a
heavy noise floor point to problem areas you can attack.
- Synthetic transactions are like your favorite user, the one who can give
you tons of objective metrics on both what went right and wrong. We've had
good luck with 7signal, though they're far from cheap. We have a handful in
key locations, and they keep running enough tests that we've even been able to
clearly identify several instances of systemic flakiness that only affect a
certain percentage of clients.
I've also heard good things about Epitiro Streetwise, though we haven't really
looked into them, and NetBeez is also dipping their toes into the wireless
side as well.
- We threw up a wireless complaints form, and then did a big publicity push
(digital signage, posters on move-in day, have our Service Desk push it, etc).
The extra bits of guidance compared to an email (prompt the user with
specific questions, some pull down lists for exact location) have helped bump
up the quality of the average complaint, with a good deal more of them
containing actionable complaints rather than "you guys suck!"
- We use Cloudpath, which gives us several advantages. First it provides
users with a self-service onboarding mechanism via an unencrypted
walled-garden SSID. This eliminates a lot of the service calls right off the bat.
Second, we also recommend re-running Cloudpath as a first troubleshooting
step, both to users directly and for our service desk. It is capable of
checking for a lot of common issues (wrong date/time, wireless switch
disabled, certain missing patches, etc) and automatically fixing some of the
simpler ones. Again, even more service calls either eliminated, or at least
closed out in one relatively simple step.
And thirdly, as Cloudpath runs, it takes a fairly detailed inventory of the
client system - operating system, patch level, wireless chipset, driver
version, etc. This quickly gives you a detailed view of what your user base
looks like, including all of your BYOD devices This can then inform decisions
like matching your advanced feature support to your client capabilities, or
where to invest support staff training.
Okay, so that whole list ended up being even longer than I originally
intended. I guess if there's a summary, it's that unlike a wired connection,
wireless is an intermittent, temperamental, complicated mess that you really
do have to attack with a holistic measure-plan-improve cycle.
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that
Manager of Network Operations | is simple, elegant, and wrong.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute | - HL Mencken
On 4/2/2015 4:09 PM, Alexander, David wrote:
I’d like to know what other schools are doing to proactively troubleshoot
wireless issues on your campus.
Our network team does a great job of troubleshooting end user wireless
connectivity issues when a customer calls the Service Desk to report an issue,
but end users don’t like to call our Service Desk to report issues. Because
of this, end users assume our network sucks or they try their own workarounds
(eg. using cellular data, etc.).
What level of success do you have with customers contacting your Service Desk
about connectivity issues? Do you do anything to proactively find out if
customers are having connectivity issues?
It seems like a lot of the issues are on the client side (eg. updating Surface
Pro drivers, applying a Mac fix, etc.). What approaches are you using to
communicate about device specific issues?
I’d appreciate any feedback you have on how you are approaching this issue on
your campus to improve end user experience with your wireless network.
Thanks,
Dave
********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE
Constituent Group discussion list can be found at
http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
**********
Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group
discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
