There are some unusual challenges involved in Wi-Fi BreakFix maintenance which makes this a great market for resellers wanting white-label partners.
The exponential increase in the use of wireless connectivity for business-critical services across all vertical sectors means that the availability and performance of the wireless network is a top priority for most clients. However, the nature of Wi-Fi deployments means that the access points are mounted at high level, often in locations that require specialist access equipment. This makes the effective support of WiFi solutions a challenging proposition for distributors and resellers requiring specialist partners for white-labelled managed services offerings.
How challenging? Let me share a few stories from our engineers.
A retail client required a faulty access point replacing. On arrival, the Access Points was nowhere to be seen, yet it was clearly showing up on the network. Using his AirMagnet RF Survey equipment the engineer managed to pinpoint its location which had been built into a plasterboard wall after the store had been refurbished!
On another occasion our engineer was called out to an intermittent fault on a wireless access point at high level in a warehouse environment. Once he got the scissor lift setup and got up to the access point he found a bird’s nest, with recently hatched chicks inside on top of the Access Points, out of sight and 35 feet in the air! Rather than disturbing the fledglings the client agreed to leave the repair until the chicks had flown the nest…
Sites with limited access can also be a challenge. One of our engineers was sent to a prison to do a maintenance call where we are under instruction by our client only to complete the work that had been agreed in advance. On this occasion our engineer was asked to do additional works and had to decline, at which point he was asked to wait in a room on the prison wing and was locked in the room for three hours before being freed!
But there is a serious side to this and that is that in many sites, especially those in retail, hospitality and public sectors, it’s very hard to get to the network equipment. You need to have ladders and lifters, understand the vagaries of old and listed buildings, and have the necessary security clearances and training certifications, especially for sites with sensitive security aspects such as schools, hospitals and prisons.
One customer of ours is Westminster Abbey (Check the Case study) where we have employed specialists including stone masons and abseilers to assist with installation services. In a building as beautiful and historic as the Abbey we obviously must be very careful about where and how we install infrastructure to avoid any danger of damaging a 1,000-year-old building.
Wi-Fi maintenance and break/fix solutions can be trickier than you might expect in all sorts of ways. Partnering with ISG offers a way for resellers to add a valuable extra service to portfolios without having to invest in the skills, security accreditations and equipment that makes it possible to access challenging buildings, including those where working at height is a challenge or where cabling rather than equipment failure could be the issue. So if you’re interested in offering WiFi services but don’t want to end up stuck in a prison or looking inside walls for access points, do get in touch.
Our Wi-Fi maintenance service currently supports over 30,000 access points across the UK from vendors including Cisco, Meraki, Motorola and Aruba, and is part of the ISG Total Care solution, a full suite of offerings which include:
- 24×7 ISO Accredited Network Operations Centre
- Service Desk (1st, 2nd & 3rd Line)
- Remote Network Management
- Active Network Monitoring
- Audit & Discovery Services
- Hardware Break-Fix Maintenance
- Working at Height WiFi support
Please do not hesitate to contact us to find out more! sales@isg-technology.com
