Dear customers, when reporting a WiFi issue please don't forget the 3 W's: "Who", "When", "Where"

Summary: "Dear customers, please help us helping you"

Time and time again, those who support a WiFi network get those reports:

"Hey, we had a complain about the WiFi network. Can you check it out?"


That's an equivalent to taking your car to a mechanic and tell him:


"Hey, sometimes my car makes some funny noises. Can you please solve it?"

Hmmm, where to start?...

At the very least, whoever is going to analyze the problem will spent a lot of time just to identify the real issue, which can even turn out to be not an issue at all, or something that has nothing to do with the WiFi network.

So, first things first

"Who?"
         - Who's been affected by the problem? One person? One department? Everyone that uses that SSID? All SSIDs?


          The vast majority of issues are users authentication. Either bad dot1x passwords or bad pre-shared keys. It's common to have a user complaining while having other users working fine at the same AP, using the same SSID and the same radio interface.

          Sometimes, specially with smarphones, the problem occurs after an system update to the phone.



          There are ways to track users status so we can check if it's an authentication issue or if it's someone doing naughty stuff to our users like a neighbor flooding deauth messages to our users.
"When?"
         - When did it happened? It's at a specific time of day? all day? every day?

         When the problem varies though time usually it can either be the result of interference, like 40 Mhz personal hotspots, bad configured neighbors, motion sensors, wireless video cameras, weather radars.
         Or it can also be abnormal network usage, like a network that was design a few years ago to support up to 15 e-mail and basic web browsing users per AP will struggle to serve 30 to 40 users per AP, running more demanding network usage.

Either identify the source of the interference, which might require a site survey, or, if it's abnormal usage, redesign the network to fulfill the new requirements, which my also require a new site survey not only to check the placement of new APs but also to confirm if the network infrastructure can support the additional equipments (number of switch ports, PoE capacity, cabling)



"Where?"
         - At a specific zone of the building? Throughout the site? At every site or one delegation? Was there any change to the building?

         Again, this can be a problem caused by interference (those motion sensors can be a real pain) but sometimes it can happen because of changes that were done to the building; more or fewer walls, windows that were changed from plain glass to mirrored glass, new mezzanines, much more users in the same spaces. In case of warehouses, it can be cause by changes to the rack orientation or composition. 

Sometimes occurs at places that, according to the plan agreed with the customer, it weren't suppose to have WiFi coverage.
"Hey, we don't have WiFi at this floor/at the stairs/at the elevators!"
"Yes, as you can see from the report, that zone wasn't included in the plan. We need to install more APs if you want to have that area cover. Would you like to install more APs?"

In conclusion, please be aware that as soon as we can pin-point the source of the problem, the faster we will solve it.

So, for instance, if instead of "Hey, we had a complain about the WiFi network. Can you check it out?" we got a "Hey, all the departments are working fine at the 5th floor but the marketing users can't register at the "Marketing" SSID there. However they do work fine at the other floors. Can you check it out? Oh, and by the way, we had a power outage during the weekend" This will ensure that we will quickly start checking for the more probable causes of that problem (vlan miss configuration because the switch configuration wasn't properly saved, AP groups, WLAN-VLAN mappings)