Testing Wi-Fi Location and Tracking Solutions

I am surprised at the number of WLAN professionals I’ve met who have not played with the location and tracking capabilities now available in many WLAN system products, and also present in a number of third-party but still Wi-Fi-based products as well. Fewer still have applied the technology, which can address needs in retail, manufacturing, distribution and logistics, healthcare, and many more. And, while Wi-Fi isn’t the only wireless technology that can be used for in-building location and tracking work, it’s certainly one of the most convenient: enterprise-class Wi-Fi systems will eventually achieve essentially 100% penetration in almost every commercial and government facility and organization on the planet, and adding location and tracking to these is relatively easy and very cost-effective. No client modifications are required – just additional software and sometimes hardware in the form of an appliance or server, and that’s about it.

To be fair, a few nagging questions have persisted for many years: just how easy are these products to use? What can they really do? And, perhaps most importantly, how accurate are they? In-building radio propagation is notoriously complex and problematic, and location and tracking services in general require accuracy down to just a few square meters. Reliability is very, very important, especially in mission-critical settings like healthcare facilities, assisted-living environments, and many more.

So I recently commandeered part of Network World’s offices in Framingham, MA (thank you again, very patient and helpful staff of Network World!), stringing cables, putting up APs, and installing a variety of hardware and software to test three different Wi-Fi location and tracking solutions: Aerohive’s native services, part of their HiveManager suite; Ekahau’s RTLS, one of the most popular location and tracking solutions today, and AirDefense’s (part of Motorola Solutions) Proximity and Analytics, an add-on function to their Wi-Fi assurance solution. I’ll let you read the full report, but suffice it to say here that each of these products performed admirably. There’s a good deal of difference in application and functional emphasis between them, but each achieved excellent accuracy and all were easy to use. Installation, well, not as much – as I note in the article, there’s no shame in calling tech support to resolve problems in getting the capability up and running, but once it is, it’s great. Even my editor at Network World, Neal Weinberg, was impressed with the real-time tracking capabilities of the AirDefense offering, and he’s not easily, well, impressed.

I hope you enjoy this brief look at a very important technology. I would have liked to try more of these for this article, but each represented a significant amount of work, and it really wasn’t my goal here to produce a product selection guide. I’m happy just with a little consciousness-raising, but I do hope to report on more of these in the future – I’ve used perhaps ten products in this field so far, and I’m aware of about thirty. So, as they say, next time…