I had an opportunity to see what kind of insight 7signal's Sapphire delivers. In an office hotel lobby, the system had gathered data on the performance of the open guest WLAN, disturbed by nearly 50(!) other WLANs belonging to the tenant companies.

The case study clearly showed how many problems can exist in a network that the service provider and the IT Staff of the office hotel's owner thought was "working quite OK". Things like this effectively prevent use of wireless networks in anything more demanding than checking some e-mails or surfing the Web during a boring meeting.

In a real world changes happen all the time and WLANs tend to consist of a variety of network products. Hence it is very good to have a vendor-independent Wireless Quality monitoring system. On the other hand, only centralized monitoring and analysis can guarantee that the real expertise will be available when the WQA system reveals problems.

WLAN must work as reliably as wired network or we never get rid of the cables. Now we are a step closer to that goal. 7signal's Sapphire is really worth a closer look.