Do You Have A Challenging Wireless Question We Can Answer?
Service Overview
At RF-Works, our engineers and specialists are among the best in the country at Wireless LANs. After decades of work, there is very little in wireless we have not done. We have listed for you some of the service offerings that we do day in and day out. Our experience ensures your satisfaction and ability to deliver every time and all the time. Our obsession is customer service; let us prove that to you.
Design, Deploy, and Certify
A wireless site survey is the first step in the deployment of a Wireless network. It is the most important step to ensure desired operation and compliance with requirements. A site survey is a task-by-task process performed by an experienced engineer studying each facility to understand the RF “behavior”, RF coverage areas, RF interference; ultimately determining the quantity & best placement for access points. Like any other job, you save more time and money by eliminating guesswork and engineering what you’re building. Not conducting a Wireless Site Survey will lead to vast over-spending and underserved unhappy end-users over time.
There is no theory here, what you see is what you get. Our RF survey helps, but our site survey also needs to be performed for future needs like voice, video, imaging, location services, mobility, and more. We will consult with you before we begin the survey and certainly before we begin design. In most cases the only guarantee you have for “wireless done right” and it’s Quality of Service QoS is the proper survey and the proper design by experts. Otherwise put some additional money in your five year budgeting for adding, moving and replacing access points, antennas, cables, etc. Planning and performing proper survey and design will save you a lot of money.
It’s not just a wireless network; it’s a business network. Secured and responsive access to many expensive business applications is one right decision or wrong decision ahead. In healthcare these decisions could have life safety implications, but in every business they have economic consequences. What is the economic value of rapid response time and reliable secure access from anywhere?
Assessment and Consulting
In most cases we are recommended to a company with a wireless network already in place. We are hired to find architectural weaknesses in both the wired and wireless networks. RF-Works has engineers with advanced tools to perform spectrum analysis, measure segmentation effectiveness, gauge security controls and evaluate your entire existing wireless infrastructure and controller settings. As it relates to your “RF environment” we will report on coverage, capacity, overlap, transmit power, channel allocations, and any interfering RF sources such as rogue access points. Experienced engineers will test and retest until we understand remediation and compliance requirements.
A good network assessment actually saves you money. Each network is unique, but certainly we can eliminate bottlenecks, improve security and likely increase your bandwidth. Knowledge gained over time will be applied on your behalf. Although we subscribe to best practices, we have institutional knowledge that is added to everyday. We can’t teach you everything we know.
RF-Works is focused on advancing wireless deployments by following the latest wireless technology development and working with leading partners like Cisco, Aruba, and others you may not have heard of listed on our site. After we do the assessment, we will discuss all your options to optimize and fine-tune. If we modify, we will then certify and offer you on-going rolling certification services. Lastly, we can do all of the survey, design, deployment, certify, monitoring, maintenance and upgrades for a low monthly fee with no upfront costs. See “WaaS” in our Managed Services section.
Modify and Certify
A process similar to Survey, but checking design parameters as built and making power, channel and other adjustments as necessary. This process finalizes the project and makes sure that all of the installed AP’s are working properly and to our standards. Documentation is updated based on the findings during certification. After the installation or during certification we can likely adjust or tune the RF onsite to the design before designating the network RF-Works certified.
In many cases we are recommended to a company with a wireless installation already in place and operating but experiencing erratic behavior. If we didn’t do your original survey and design work, we can assess and build a detailed wireless site survey report on any building environment. RF-Works has engineers with advanced tools to perform spectrum analysis and evaluate your existing wireless infrastructure and controller settings. With Wireless Assessments, all RF information is sampled and gathered to provide engineers with an overall view of the RF environment which includes the coverage areas and capacity per access point, the cellular overlap of neighboring access points, transmit power, channel allocations, interfering RF sources such as rogue access points. Experience, engineering and tools will test and retest until we understand remediation and compliance requirements.
We can easily certify our designs; we also offer rolling certifications because wireless and environments are dynamic, not static. We remediate and repair defective designs. If you have flawed wireless impacting your business, we’ll begin in earnest to solve your issues. Options will be “rip and replace” or as budgets afford, have a new survey and design to add, move, and replace access points, antennas, and cabling over time. Once you live through that, you’ll never forget that planning and performing proper survey and design saves you frustration and a lot of money.
Network and Security
Security threats have never been more relevant than they are today. New adversaries, hackers or even disgruntled employees are on the hunt for valuable information or malicious leverage. We all know, Networks are only as secure as their weakest components. With the hyper-growth in connected devices, BYOD, networks have never been more vulnerable. Network professionals today must strike a balance between technology, budget, user’s convenience, productivity and enterprise security.
RF-Works does a considerable amount of consulting and services related to Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), an industry leading network policy server. ISE brings a wealth of security and policy features to solve the security challenges you face while also mitigating future challenges.
We can solve some of you wireless security concerns simply with best practices. But most of the best practices involve policy surrounding passwords, login, WLC management, Network time protocol, retries and timeouts. If you want to get serious about security and utilize ISE, we’ll assist security for policy, guests, context sharing, device profiling and onboarding to name a few. With an increasing and more diverse threat landscape, after your corporate security policy is designed and enforced, we recommend putting it to the test by having a penetration test performed to identify any remaining vulnerabilities. This way the good hackers find any remaining vulnerabilities you may have before the bad hackers do.
Managed Services (Wireless as a Service)
So many aspects of your wireless network need to be monitored, updated and maintained. This could be annually, bi-annually or even quarterly depending on your specific attributes. The refresh ensures software; firmware, security patches and other updates are researched, applied and available. This can be a tricky process because typically each new release brings additional features and potentially, additional bugs in the software. Consider employing RF-Works engineering expertise to assist with issues thereby freeing up your internal resources. Most times utilizing a specialist or engineer on a daily, monthly or quarterly basis is more cost effective than adding staff or attempting to “figure out things” internally without the expertise to do so effectively.
Our most popular Managed Services is Wireless as a Service (WaaS). Ultimately to have “wireless done right…™” you need experienced staff, specialized training, time, money and ongoing wireless research. The problem for most businesses is that you rarely have even one or two of these let alone all of them. This inevitably causes shortcuts and mistakes leading to outages or at least vulnerabilities. Wireless is the access to all of your IT assets. It’s also too complicated and expensive to risk getting in over your head and that is why we offer WaaS, which applies RF-Works mastery from over 30 years and empowers your success.
RF-Works WaaS can be applied to your specific requirements and environments indoor and outdoor that need managed wireless hardware and software. We can work through any enterprise requirement scope. With WaaS, you will improve wireless for your company. You will increase availability, ensure security, gain productivity, lower capital funding and operational expense. This comes out of our cultural obsession for customer service. We have seen many wireless projects fail in our decades of wireless experience. Interestingly, not any of the ones we surveyed, designed, built and managed.
Trusted Partners
We research, test and stand behind our partners
