The Importance of Wireless Network Reports

Since at Hamina we just added 3D capabilities to our reporting feature set, I thought I’d write some thoughts about wireless network reports.

Video: Jerry & Jussi discuss reports in Hamina Wireless Network Planner

Almost every network created by an MSP or systems integrator comes with a report of the design and installation.

Many designs that are made by in-house network engineers include a report of some kind.

Why are reports of your wireless network design important?

• It’s the go-to-documentation for the end customer / budget holder of “what we’re planning to build” or “what we just built”
• Secondly - the report explains in detail the wireless network design for those not directly involved in designing the network, from other engineers all the way to the non-technical stakeholders.
• Third, if you’re an MSP or systems integrator, producing excellent reports is a way to differentiate from the competition.
  
  

Hamina Panner supports 3D reports, allowing the user to freely "dive in" to the wireless network

Network reports should be:

• Comprehensive, from customer requirements to conclusions
• Easy to understand
• Customised for the end customer, and report reader in mind
• Fun to read and explore, as well as convincing and technical enough

The Hamina reporting has a ton of views, and supports Wi-Fi as well as Private4 LTE/5G, ZigBee, BLE -
all in the same report.

Check out an example report generated from Hamina Wireless Planner

Some of the essentials you’d want to include in your network reports / documentation:

Customer requirements

• • To document what was agreed with the customer:
  • Coverage areas
  • Areas excluded (or not required)
  • Minimum signal and data rate requirements
  • Acceptable amount of interference
  • Signal-to-noise ratio levels
  • etc…

Bill of Materials

• • to indicate “this is what we’re suggesting to purchase” or “this is the gear we purchased to deploy the network”.

Bill of materials is fully configurable, and automatically generated in Hamina

• • To see where the access points should be installed
  • Should also show antenna alignment, and key AP properties
  • Important: Needs to be high quality enough to see _exactly_ where the APs should go, and where the antennas should be pointed
    • Overly zoomed-out floor plans, or grainy / pixelated floor plans won’t be acceptable for the customer, let alone the installer

• • Switches and their capabilities (ports, PoE output)
  • Locations of switches
  • IDFs/MDFs

• • … to document whether the network requirements were met or not throughout the site.
  • See also: customer requirements.
    
    

Things that may speed up your reporting efforts:

Consider delivering (also) online reports, not just PDF

• • Customers seem to love examining online reports, because online reports are
    • Easier to “navigate” than paper reports
    • Zoomable
    • Clickable (per-AP coverage, click to see AP details, etc)
    • Less pixelated / grainy
    • Not limited to paper limitations: size, static nature of it, lack of zooming…
    • Immediately generated - no waiting whatsoever generating the document

• • Templates can save a significant amount of time per report
  • Using templates, you can reuse things from your previous reports:
    • Logo
    • Names of all the “pages” (views) of the report
    • Descriptions of each of the pages
    • Selections of what you’d like to include in the report, and what to leave out
  • In Hamina, you can use previously customized reports as templates without any template configurations or even saving the templates
    • Each report you’ve generated appears as a template for you to use

• • Not reporting-related, but often AP names play a role in the report as well.
  • Hamina supports variable, based AP naming: You can automise your AP naming by using variables such as floor number, AP vendor / model, connected switch name, AP number, etc.

• • For example, copy the Bill of Materials or Switching / Cabling report view to Excel to further customize.
    
    

PDF reports, matching your online reports, can be created with the click of a button

Love to talk about reports as much as we do? No? Well luckily Hamina Wireless reports are so dynamic & exciting that you’re guaranteed a job promotion, salary increase & 78.2% more likely to win the lottery. Ok, maybe not any of those things but at least our reports really are dynamic & exciting.