text: Jeff Reedy, President & CEO
  Wi-Fi has moved from being nice to being a must-have in a campus environment. With scores of laptops, tablets, smartphones and gaming consoles filling every dormitory, lecture hall and student union, the Wi-Fi network has reached a mission critical status. Students and faculty depend on Wi-Fi every day to co-ordinate, teach and learn, and they grow increasingly frustrated in the case of network delays or slow throughput. "IT professionals waste time and energy chasing down these issues all over campus. The usual set of WLAN troubleshooting tools may help isolate and fix issues on a particular day, but do nothing to assure, track and proactively monitor the quality of the Wi-Fi experience for students and faculty," says Jeff Reedy, President and CEO, 7signal. This is where 7signal steps in. The company provides a Wi- Fi performance management system that assures Wi-Fi services so that the campus WLAN can meet all the needs of students and teachers.
  Unlike other WLAN monitoring systems that measure performance from the central controller out to the clients, 7signal designed their Sapphire system from the outside-in, with the end-user experience at the center.
  "Our user experience testing simulates real-world Wi-Fi network usage in the form of 24×7 HTTP, FTP, SIP, voice over IP and URL testing,"
  remarks Reedy. Through this continuous testing, 7signal experiences the true performance of the network from end to end, just like a client would, and measures throughput as well as the latency and jitter that cause poor VoIP system call quality.
  We empower network administrators with a proactive set of information and alerts which allow them to get ahead of Wi-Fi performance issues before students and faculty complain