The Problem
One of the busiest U.S. airports provides free Wi-Fi to hundreds of thousands of travelers and flight crews every month. Passengers turn to the Wi-Fi to download entertainment and communicate with friends and family while waiting to board their plane. Deplaning flight crews also tap into the free Wi-Fi to check schedule changes and work alerts.
“Our aim isn’t necessarily to have the fastest Wi-Fi; we want to deliver a network that’s always up and accessible,” says a senior staff engineer for the airport. “That’s no easy feat because there are many sources of network interference throughout the airport, including businesses and lounges we can’t control.”
“We have no legal or contractual authority to tell the airport’s tenants how to use their networks,” adds the engineer. “Some choose to work with us to help mitigate the interference, but when they don’t, we have to problem-solve.”
To quickly identify the source of connectivity issues, the airport’s IT team relies on 30 7SIGNAL sensors to validate the network throughout the concourse as well as the corporate network, which broadcasts the same APs disseminating the free Wi-Fi.
“The 7SIGNAL sensors are fixed and connected to our wired network. They can test the airport’s free network through different back-end pathways, including the wireless network, which runs over a separate ISP,” says a wireless network engineer for the airport. “With the Wi-Fi and network sensors, we look at and compare every element affecting connectivity.”
The Wi-Fi is ‘Broken’
The airport’s IT team says its primary concern with its free Wi-Fi is validating the service. If the DNS stops working, the team wants to know immediately. While the airport’s senior staff engineer always wants confirmation that the wireless APs are online and the controllers are healthy, he is most concerned with confirming users are successfully accessing Wi-Fi. For example, the signal might be strong, and passengers might connect and receive an IP address, but if DNS cannot resolve websites, users will perceive the Wi-Fi is broken.
“We move a lot of data to and from our ISP. We’re pushing 1.2 petabytes and have 10,000 clients on the Wi-Fi,” says the senior staff engineer. “Our numbers are like a university, but our clients change every hour unlike a college with repeating, individual clients.”
“We had other challenges,” adds the wireless network engineer. “Our Wi-Fi was terribly slow.”
There were times when devices would connect to the network and then suddenly lose their link to the AP. Another time, there was a connectivity issue at a single airline’s gates: as flight crews deplaned, they couldn’t connect to the airport Wi-Fi. “We struggled to figure out what was going on with this area,” recalls the senior staff engineer.
A Single Technology That Works Like 30 Technicians
Most connectivity issues at the airport get chalked up to Wi-Fi. But 7SIGNAL’s sensors have proven these issues often have nothing to do with Wi-Fi. With the 7SIGNAL sensors, the engineers can quickly probe what a user perceives as a Wi-Fi problem—and, in this case, they used that visibility to trace a passenger-facing outage back to a single misbehaving radio in a single access point, out of 1,200 across the airport.