Deploy Mist with Ease using Wireless Design Tools

I've got Ekahau Pro opened up right now, and first thing we always have to do is add a map. And I'm going to cheat a little bit. I'm actually going to use a DWG CAD file.

Normally, I actually like to use a flat image file and draw the walls manually. But for the purpose of a demo, nobody wants to watch me draw walls for like an hour. And so on this particular CAD file, the first thing I like to do is go up to change the layout.

So I'm going to go up here and go to the layout view and change it to just the model view, which kind of gets rid of all the extra stuff. You don't have to do it on every CAD file, but on this one, that's a good idea. And then I'm just going to go through and tell Ekahau what all the different layers of the CAD file are made of.

So for example, the doors will be solid wood doors. The elevator shaft will be an elevator shaft. The exterior walls will be brick. You don't have to do exterior walls, but I still like to. I think it makes things look nice. Stairways we'll make cinderblock.

The interior walls we'll make a 3 dB drywall. And then the windows will be a thick 3 dB window. So then I'll hit the import button, Ekahau will automatically go through and draw in all the walls for me, which is really nice.

There is one critical step that I missed here though, you see. I didn't go do any real world testing in this environment. I just put in a bunch of values and we're going to base our design off that.

In the real world, you'd want to go on site, you'd want to measure these walls and find out how many dB of loss there are in each one. Because at this point, it's just kind of educated guessing, right? So what I'm doing now is I'm really quickly just going through and drawing in an area. And so this is going to tell Ekahau where we want the Wi-Fi design to be.

And so I basically just marked off the building. So now Ekahau knows basically just where the building is essentially. And it'll also keep Ekahau from showing signal strength outside of that area.

So it just kind of cleans things up a little bit. So then I guess the next thing that we need to do is to start adding APs. So, one thing I'm going to do really quick, actually, is I have a list of all the access points that we have available for this site right here.

So I've got this mixture of APs. Typically, when you do a network design, you're probably going to pick like a kind of a consistent AP model, and you're just going to use AP43s everywhere or AP32s everywhere. We're doing something a little abnormal though.

We're going to use a mixture here of different APs. And that's because that's just kind of what we have available to do our demo today. So let's do some AP43s first.

So I'm going to go up here to the access point button and I'm going to do this drop down. And we could just type in MIST and that's going to list all of the MIST access points that are in Ekahau, which is every single one. Or we could type in, you know, like for example, AP43 and that will bring up anything that has AP43 in the name.

And so there's the MIST AP43 there. So I'm just going to place three of these. Let's kind of put them in this kind of central area here. So there we go. There's three MIST APs. And then one thing I like to do is I like to design in 5 gigahertz.

And so I'm going to switch over to just the 5 gigahertz coverage. And once I've got a couple of access points placed, I also like to switch the visualization from signal strength to secondary signal strength. Basically, this shows where there is coverage from two or more access points.

So yeah, so we've got our AP43s. Let's now place, we've got two AP41s. Like I said earlier, you're typically not going to mix and match like this, but we're going to.

What I want to do is go to the access points. We got the AP41 already selected there. Let's put one here and then we'll put one here. So then we have an AP32E. I've actually never used one of these before. So let's go, let's look for all the MIST APs.

And there's our 32E. And it looks like this one by default has an Excel Tech directional antenna attached. We're going to use it in a totally stupid way.

You would never use a directional antenna in a tiny room like this. So just, it's all wrong. It's all wrong, but that's not what we're, that's not what we're doing today.

We're not like worried about, about, you know, making this design correct. We're just showing kind of some integration features there. Cool. So that's the 32E. We also have a 33E here. So I got to hit the access points button and then go to the, let's do MIST again.

And then we're going to do, what was that? The 33. So this, this one is cool because this is the, so this is the AP32, except it has the virtual Bluetooth low energy antenna array built in. That's like the big, that's the difference between the 32 and the 33. Then we come to the AP12. We have an AP12 we can place here. And what I love about this is that this is a, this is a wall-mounted hospitality AP.

So, since this is a, so since this is a wall-mounted access point, by default in Ekahau, it'll be, it'll basically be on the wall like this. So one other thing that we need to do with the AP12 is that by default in Ekahau, it's going to be about eight feet off the ground. And what's eight feet in meters, eight feet in meters is yeah, about 2.5 meters.

So one thing that we do want to do is let's bring that down to a reasonable height. These are typically a couple of feet off the ground. And so what I'll do is we'll just change that to two feet. And now it's, now it's closer to the ground. And then we also have an arrow on it that we can use to change its direction. So, let me hide the channel radios and channels really quick. So those are kind of out of the way. So if we place this AP on this wall, we're going to want to point it away from the wall. So it's now pointed over this way.

And you can see the coverage pattern from that access point actually changed a little bit when I did that. So now let's bring back our radios and channels. So now we have verified that the AP12 is down towards the floor, how it should be.

It's mounted on the wall and it's pointed in the right direction. And then the next thing I like to do in Ekahau, from a Wi-Fi planning perspective, is go to network issues. Basically, this shows us if we're failing any of our requirements.

I've got the default requirement set in here. It's just the Ekahau best practices, which are very similar to kind of MIST best practices. And so we can see we're failing signal strength.

We had to look at all X or my access points, not just the selected one. So, the red areas were failing signal strength. That's fine. We know that we're going to fail those here because we've only placed a few APs here. The pink areas are where we are failing channel interference. And so there's too many APs sharing a channel.

Every single AP is on 36 right now. So, one thing you can do in Ekahau that I really like is you can go to the automatic channel planner and you can tell it which channels are in and out of scope. And so let's say we don't have Uni2e available.

We can't use that band for whatever reason. We can hit Create Plan and Ekahau will do a channel plan for us automatically. So Jussi, is there anything else that we need to show in Ekahau before we import this design into MIST? This looks like a pretty great, pretty not what you should do in a real world type of plan.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. We're missing coverage. We're missing APs. We've mixed AP types. We've done all kinds of things. Additionally, in our demo environment, we only have this one BT11. So I got rid of all the extras, but you get the idea for the approximation of how to design for Bluetooth.

By the way, there's a whole Bluetooth deployment guide on our website. It's a great PDF, several pages long, very detailed. Go check that out if you're doing any kind of location deployment with Mist. That'll help you do this design.

Cool, so now, let's talk about Bluetooth planning just a little bit. So I'm actually going to switch back, let's just go to an empty visualization, so we're not looking at signal strength or anything like that. Let's say that in this environment, we wanted to do Bluetooth wayfinding.

So, maybe you're going to run, I don't know where my phone is, oh, here it is. Maybe you're going to run an application on the user's smartphones that you developed within this SDK so that you can do like, kind of blue dot navigation inside this building. So, to achieve that use case, one thing that we would want to do is we would want to put APs up and down the hallways so that we have those Bluetooth radios in the hallways.

So, what should I do, Jussi? Should I place AP43s up and down the hallways, like a bunch of them? Please don't, please don't. I won't. I won't.

I'm sure that most of the people watching this have heard that placing APs in the hallways is bad because it's not where the client devices are. All the APs can hear each other, so you have co-channel interference. But the problem is, to get the wayfinding use case, we have to have virtual Bluetooth low energy arrays in the hallways.

What do we do, Jussi? How do we resolve this problem between Bluetooth design and Wi-Fi design? What is the answer? That's a good question. How about there's a tiny looking arrow next to the AP icon there, you know? Oh, that right there. That tiny arrow. Oh, hang on. Oh, hey, check it out. There's a Mist thing in here.

What's this? Uh like bacon. So the answer to the problem is that we also offer the Mist BT11. And so it looks like an AP, it has Ethernet ports like an AP, it even smells like an access point.

So the BT11 is not an access point. It takes PoE in and does connect to your network via Ethernet because it needs to send some data up to the cloud to do its location stuff. But it does not have an 802.11 radio on board.

So, what you can do with the BT11 is, for example, for wayfinding use case, you want to place these at least every 50 feet up and down the hallway. So, here's what I typically do. I got a little bit ahead of myself here.

So let's delete this middle one. What I always do to plan these is I'll place it like at the ends of the hallways. I'll place BT11s at any junctions, things like that.

And then I'll use the scaling tool to check and see, okay, how far is it between these two APs? In this case, it's 88 feet. And so we need to place one every 50 feet or so. But I know that I need another one here in the center.

And so, we'll do another one here in the center as well. So, now we are supporting wayfinding in the hallway with BT11s, but we're not putting 802.11 radios in the hallways. And so, we're not messing up our Wi-Fi.

So, the BT11 allows us to achieve the best of both worlds. We get Wi-Fi planning, we get Bluetooth planning all in one there. So what I was going to say, it's also a lot cheaper to purchase the BT11s and it's cheaper to cable as well.

They can live with AF power and you can actually power one out of a Mist AP. So you can daisy chain one out of a Mist AP. Or if you have 80 power on a switch, you can actually daisy chain four of those BT11s together.

So it's, yeah, in a lot of ways, a very convenient and wallet friendly choice. One mistake that I made that to watch out for is when I went back in here, one thing that I've done a few times, notice how this one, we have a direction arrow off of it. This one we don't. I've made this mistake a few times when I'm actually doing these designs. Just easy to do. I accidentally placed a generic BLE beacon there.

And so, we want to make sure that the Mist BT11 is there. So, I'm actually going to, you know, we need to get rid of that. So, I'll hit the delete key, I guess. There we go. And then, yeah, just make sure that you have the BT11 selected. And if you have a circle around it like that, you're good to go.

So, since this is a wall-mounted access point, so by default in Ekahau, it'll basically be on the wall like this. So, one other thing that we need to do with the AP12 is that by default in Ekahau, it's going to be about eight feet off the ground. And what's eight feet in meters? Eight feet in meters is, yeah, about 2.5 meters.

So, one thing that we do want to do is let's bring that down to a reasonable height. These are typically a couple of feet off the ground. And so what I'll do is we'll just change that to two feet. And now it's closer to the ground. And then, we also have an arrow on it that we can use to change its direction. So, let me hide the channel radios and channels really quick.

So those are kind of out of the way. So if we place this AP on this wall, we're going to want to point it away from the wall. So it's now pointed over this way. And you can see the coverage pattern from that access point actually changed a little bit when I did that. So now let's bring back our radios and channels. So now we have verified that the AP12 is down towards the floor, how it should be.

It's mounted on the wall, and it's pointed in the right direction. One other thing to note is that notice that our Mist access points, like our AP43s and our AP41s here, they have the Mist vBLE array on them. And that's basically an array of directional antennas that are tied to Bluetooth on the access point.

So it's actually really important that the access point is oriented properly on the ceiling. You see how the LED is offset from the center a little bit? That indicates the direction that the access point is pointed on the ceiling. So you can use that little arrow there to say how the access points are oriented on the ceiling to make sure that everything's going to work properly for Bluetooth location.

So, you get that little arrow there by default. One thing I like to do is I like to just point them all towards project north. Whatever the north way is in the project, what is up on the map, I just like to orient them all the same way.

That makes things a lot easier. Although, you might have some cases where like, the T-grid is 15 degrees rotated or something like that. So, there might be some cases where you need to go in there and rotate them around a little bit.

So, let me show how to do that really quick. Let's just say that in this room right here, the T-grid is 45 degrees rotated for some reason, for aesthetic reasons or something like that. You can grab this arrow, and you can point it 45 degrees in a different direction.

And now both Ekahau and when we import this into the Mist cloud, they understand that that AP is rotated a few degrees. So this is not exact science either, is it? I mean, if you're off by a degree or so, that's totally fine. So you don't need to go all laser pointers and $10,000 compasses and whatever would be necessary.

No, no. So this is like, I think even on the Mist UI, it's like five degree increments is how you orient those. Yeah. So, when I say like 45 degrees, like I'm pointing it that way-ish, right? Now, if you had it pointed this way when it actually was supposed to be pointing this way. Yeah. Now we have a problem that is going to be majorly problematic for location services because of those directional antennas.

So yeah, don't be like laser, laser precise, but get it pretty close. That is important. It doesn't affect the Wi-Fi location services at all.

It only affects BLE location services. So if you don't do BLE location, if you don't do BLE tags, if you don't do apps on the mobile phone, like tracking apps using the Mist SDK, then you don't actually even need to orient them. But, it's a good standard practice always to orient them.

Yeah. Because in a lot of cases too, we see a lot of Mist customers that they put in Mist APs and then like a year later, they're like, Hey, you know what? We should turn on that location thing and start using that. So, if you can get it right the first time, that's a great idea.

But yeah, you're totally right though. It won't actually hurt the Wi-Fi at all if they're pointed in the wrong direction and it won't hurt Wi-Fi location either because that is based on omnidirectional antennas.

And then, the next thing I like to do in Ekahau, from a Wi-Fi planning perspective, is go to network issues. Basically, this shows us if we're failing any of our requirements. I've got the default requirement set in here. It's just the Ekahau best practices, which are very similar to kind of Mist best practices. And so we can see we're failing signal strength. We had to look at all X or my access points, not just the selected one.

So, the red areas were failing signal strength. That's fine. We know that we're going to fail those here because we've only placed a few APs here. The pink areas are where we are failing channel interference. And so, there's too many APs sharing a channel. So, these are all on channel 36.

Every single AP is on 36 right now. So, one thing you can do in Ekahau that I really like, is you can go to the automatic channel planner, and you can tell it which channels are in and out of scope. And so, let's say we don't have Uni2e available.

We can't use that band for whatever reason. We can hit create plan and Ekahau will do a channel plan for us automatically. Now, question for you, Jussi. Is the channel plan that Ekahau just made here going to be the exact same channel plan that Mist RRM is going to come up with? Absolutely not. So, of course, Ekahau does not know how the Mist RRM algorithm will work. So this is like a good channel plan generated by the Ekahau channelization algorithms.

And Mist is different, and it's also dynamic. So, how the Mist RRM actually works is it looks at the user experience of the wireless users all the time. And then, you know, of course, if there's sudden changes, DFS things, sudden, you know, massive interference problems on the channel, it will dodge channels left and right to kind of adjust immediately.

But it also does the RRM on the background. It monitors the user experience of every wireless device and tries to kind of, what would happen if I lowered the power? What would happen if I, you know, increased the power of an AP? What would happen if I tried a different channel? It does this kind of reinforcement learning all the time. It tries different things to, you know, improve the experience of the client devices, even if there's no obvious problems.

So this is a key difference from like Mist RRM compared to other RRMs. So, typical RRM system is like APs listening to other APs and going, hmm, I can see that AP, now I can't see it anymore. Let me up the transmit power.

What Mist is doing is this is how the client experience is. Can I make it still better by, you know, fine-tuning and things like that? So, I really enjoy that approach and, you know, seeing nothing but massively good results with it. Same here.

So here's how I kind of see the relationship between channel planner in Ekahau and Mist RRM. What I see the channel planner in Ekahau doing is verifying, do we have enough frequency space available for all of our APs to be able to share channels without any co-channel interference, right? From a planning perspective, that's very, very useful. We're just making sure, is there going to be enough space? Then when you hand this over to, when you hand this over to Mist and let Mist RRM start doing its thing, what you have done by validating, basically making sure that there's enough frequency spaces, you're giving RRM a good environment to work with.

You're giving RRM a good design to work with, right? Exactly. And I like the way you kind of excluded some of the channels from the plan. And of course you would do the same in Mist then. And this does not come automatically. So, whatever you disable in Ekahau is not reflected in Mist. You also need to put that in the Mist RRM settings separately as well.

You know, last week we were at the customer site and we were doing this, what you said should always be done like a pre-validation survey or this kind of pre-check. We were surveying the existing network with Ekahau. We were also using NetAlly G2 at the same time.

And G2 actually caught, it has a pretty good interference detection mechanism as well. So, we used both its interference detection and then fine-tuned it by going to look at the Ekahau site Xpecam. But what we found was like this very narrow band interference that happened in different places and it occupied random channels between 157 and 165.

These spikes, like high utilization spikes, they ended up being lights, just normal ceiling lights, but that had motion detectors in them. So the motion detector was working on different frequencies, depending on the light, between 157, 161 and 165. So that wasn't obvious, like these channels we have to disable.

All right, so I'm going to go to file and go to save. All right, so here we go. I'm going to save off this .esx file. So, Ekahau will save that really quick. And oh, there's one thing that we forgot to do, Jussi. We need to tell, we need to set up this project file so that Ekahau can link the simulated access points to the real access points that we have in our demo environment.

And so, to do that, yeah, go ahead. So, what you're saying is if you already know the MAC addresses of the APs, you can already put them in Ekahau and it will automatically then correlate those in MIST, the real-world APs versus the simulated APs. And this is totally an optional step, right? So you don't need to do this.

MIST has like a really, really good wizard that takes you through the association between predicted or simulated APs and the real-world APs in the MIST system. But if you already know the MAC addresses, why not put them in Ekahau? And then it's just absolutely 100% ready to go. Just drag and drop the Ekahau file in MIST and boom, it's there.

So, while you do that, I'm just going to say that when this is imported to MIST, the MIST system will receive essentially every essential thing that's in the Ekahau file. The maps, the scale, the AP types, the AP locations, the directionality of the BLE arrays, the height of the APs, it takes all the essential things. And since 99% of our customers, probably not a scientific number, I just made it up, use RRM, we do not take the channel information in.

So, there we go. I've got all of the MAC addresses all plugged in. There's probably a way smarter way to do that than copy and paste it like I did, but I just did it the easy way because it's only nine APs. So, now let's switch over to the MIST dashboard really quick here. So here's our MIST dashboard. We've got a site named Nakatomi Plaza here.

And so, I'm going to import a floorplan. Now, normally you're going to go to Add Floorplan. This is where you add an image. But, since we're using an Ekahau project file, we're going to use the Import Floorplans button here. So, we'll go click on that. And then I need to bring in that .esx file here.

So, let me go grab that. Where did I save it? Let me save it to the desktop really quick. Cool. So, here we go. Let's drag and drop our Nakatomi Plaza .esx file right here, and then we'll hit import and then we wait for just a moment while it uploads to the cloud. All right.

So, one out of one floorplan imported, nine out of nine APs matched. Now, if you need to manually match these APs, you absolutely can. So, you can hit the match APs button in there, and you can just do that manually in Mist.

Nothing wrong with that. But we did it by just importing these MAC addresses. And by the way, you see that MAC address, those MAC addresses, did you just get it from the access points list right here? That's where you got that.

Yeah. You can of course get them from the bottom of the APs or I don't know if they are in there. I think when you probably put in the claim code in the Mist system, you don't need to physically have the APs.

Just put the claim code in the Mist system, and I believe that already in a way lights them up enough in the Mist dashboard so you can actually get access to the MAC addresses and all that. I don't know. Nice. I haven't tried it, but I'm assuming that's how it goes.

Okay. So now that we've got the .esx file imported, Ekahau had the locations and everything already, had the map scaled. And so, a bunch of the work was already done on the Ekahau side of things. And so, now you can see that all of our APs are placed where we put them in the Ekahau project file. We can see that there's even a bunch of clients floating around here.

So, here's all the clients and we've got a bunch of Bluetooth devices and even some tracked assets like Sergeant Al Powell here and FBI Agent Johnson are here, and you can see them moving around a little bit. So, we're automatically getting this data in right away. If we go to set up floor plan, there's a couple of things that I want to point out here.

Notice that the direction of our AP12 is correct. And so that little dot right there, that shows the direction that it's facing. Typically, if you had done this without Ekahau, you would drag and drop the APs in this view.

You know, you could just move them around by dragging and dropping them kind of like this. And then we would have had to go through and point them all by rotating this little dot. That work is already done.

So, Ekahau did that for us automatically. We even have the heights of all these correct. And so, if we go look at the height of our BLE array here, it's set to 2.4 meters, which is what we had it set to in Ekahau.

So, all the work is done basically from a placement perspective on the map. I mean, the location tracking event has started the second you just drag and drop the Ekahau file. There's no additional calibration necessary, required, or even possible for this.

So, it is truly a drag and drop, drag from Ekahau, drop to Mist, off to the races kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. Location just starts working right out of the box and, you know, probably give it a couple of hours for things to kind of settle down and for machine learning to kick in and automatically calibrate. But yeah, no manual calibration, nothing like that. It just works, which I think is pretty magical.

Yeah, we just integrated with your MIST dashboard. It's a nice feature where you could upload your floorplan and the APs, the MIST APs into the MIST dashboard and it's super easy, super simple to do. And this is what I wanted to show you today.

Cool. Look forward to seeing it. Quickly, how can we create a new project? So, here I have my iBwave Wi-Fi for PC. I want to just start a new project, call it, let's say, Demo MIST, create a new project. I'll have my design plan, which is where my diagram will be, and then my floor plan. So by default, I have floor one.

Let me just load the floor plan quickly, maybe have a CAD drawing. If I go load a CAD, a DWG here, super simple to import a CAD drawing in iBwave. You have like an importer and to clean your CAD drawing, let's say, if you have a lot of stuff, you just need to click on any layer you want to remove and then you start checking them.

You click on this one. I had to click on the logo here. Each time you click, it's highlighting the layer, and then it's super simple to clean your CAD. And then once it's clean, then the same way you select the layer you want to import, and then you assign the material. Then you see the different materials. Let's say this is concrete, then the interior wall, let's say this is plaster, drywall, light, for example.

And then, maybe I can add the doors, so, I click on the door and I select a door, wood. And you see, I could also select the height, bottom height and top height. So, maybe a door is probably eight and not nine. And then I can convert that. All other layers would be converted into image. So, quickly if I import a CAD here, this would be my floor plan and you would see that the walls are imported.

For example, this concrete, if I double click on it, I'd see the property of the concrete which has different loss values based on the frequency. The higher the frequency, the higher the loss value. So, the only thing I need is just to scale it.

Take a ruler and put here probably 150 feet. If I have the building in Google Earth, I could scale it from Google Earth and import the KML, the same line here. It will scale it based on Google Earth measurement and put the GPS coordinate of the building.

So here, for like 30 seconds, I have a 3D model of my floor. That's all you need to create a floor plan. Quite a bit of materials in there as well. Nice. Yeah, we have a big database that you could customize. You could adjust the loss values.

You could create new materials. You could calibrate the material loss by just your passive, maybe AP on stick survey. And then this is what you get in 3D. So, that's the building we modeled from the CAD drawing. And you saw how quick it was, how simple, easy. It's just you select the layers, you assign the walls, and you start designing.

So, we have the drawing tools here in case you don't have a CAD, maybe you have PDF or an image, and then you could draw walls or a horizontal surface. Here I might need a horizontal surface because I need a separation between the floors, right? I need like a ground floor. So, I just draw something quickly here to define the surface I want my prediction to be calculated on.

And this surface will actually be taken in consideration for the loss between the floors. So, if I select concrete heavy, it's going to be a lot of loss. If I select something lighter, and then I could right-click and say, okay, this is my prediction area.

Now, if I want to do, like multiple floors, I could just duplicate that floor and have floor two, three, four, and then I have the entire building design. So, for example, I want to duplicate that one and create floor two, and then, now, I have a two-story building. And this is done in like, what, two minutes.

Here's my building. And, you see, I have separation between the floors. And I could see that in wireframe. Okay. So that's modeling a building, super easy, super simple.

Now, what you need to do is place APs, right? Let's place those bad boys. Do you have Mist APs in your database? Yeah, that's exactly what we have. So you have the part tab here. I'm just going to fix it here. You have different parts. We don't only have APs.

We have cables, antenna, fiber optic hardware, network equipment like switch routers, stuff like that. Also, any type of miscellaneous like power racks and different infrastructure. So, for a signal source, for example, we have access point and then you can select the OEM.

And then if I go to Mist, here in my database, I only have four. And I think the model I have are AP43. We have 61 also. And we will be adding all of those, right? Yes, we will be adding more. Yeah, this is just the demo database. So, you see the pattern.

You have the AP properties. You could define 2.4 and 5 GHz. What kind of power, what channel. You see, also, properties of the AP. What was the gain of the antenna and so on. So, I place an AP.

Maybe I could place, I don't know, four APs or five. Something like this. And then what I could do is just see the antenna contour. You see antenna contour here under the prediction. Just go and right-click on it. Go on the property.

Select the ray tracing, which is our algorithm that is taking all the reflection, refraction. So it's not just direct path. It's all the path. So the ray tracing is the most accurate algorithm. And then I'm targeting next 65 for 2.4. Next 65 for 5 GHz. And now I activate my pattern for 2.4. And now we see that I have a lot of coverage.

It's because I'm transmitting really high. If I want to adjust the power, just select all parts like this one. Select all components like this one. Go to the properties and then source and then reduce my power. Let's say I'm just transmitting 10. And now I have lower power.

Now you see that I don't have the same coverage. Now I could move by AP. And same thing if I want to do 5 GHz. Let's say usually 5 GHz you transmit like 14 dBm. And now I go to prediction and check the 2.4 and check the 5 GHz. And now this is my coverage for 5 GHz.

And I could see just with here without running any heat map that I have this area and this area. Two areas here that will not get Next 65. So I need to move the AP around. I selected all the AP. Okay, so this is how to place APs. Super simple.

And then you could run like the channel assignment, so you want different channels, one here by default is 136, go to channel assignment, I want 1611 and then I want whatever, Uni1, Uni2 and then Uni3 maybe and ISM, and then, I run, it's gonna reassign the channels, now I have like different channels and then I could run the signal strength for example. Very cool.

And what's cool is that it will run it on this floor and the floor above. So I will see the signal going up even if I have no AP on the upper floor. So here if I see signal strength, this is signal strength for 2.4, I could add the legend and our prediction and I see my coverage, I can have a compliance, if I go to my output map, double click on it, I go to the compliance tab and add, okay, I'm looking for negative 65 and I'm targeting maybe 90% of the floor and then it's telling me I'm passing that, I'm actually at like 95%.

And the color of the heat map, this is the default rainbow color, red, purple means really hot, mean good coverage, yellow, orange mean okay coverage and then green means it start being cold and then blue, it's really cold, so no coverage. So, that's the purpose of a heat map, right, but if you don't like this color, you could just adjust it and then you have different color adjustments here, you could have templates, you could adjust what's the maximum value, minimum value and then you change the colors, whatever you want, you could put everything green and then everything else black or whatever you want.

So, that's basically the coverage and you see here on floor 2, I see the APs, the signal reflected from the floor and also the backlog of the AP that's going up, so that's the coverage I'm getting on floor 2 without even having any AP. And it could go up floor 3, 4, 5, whatever. That's pretty simple actually, I thought it would have been more complicated, but this looks actually pretty simple. That's all what you have to do, and then if you have like a switch, you just place a switch and then you select, I don't know, any switch.

Juniper would be a really good choice for a switch. Yeah, of course, you place your 24 port switch, you have, I don't know, equipment room somewhere here and then you have, you also have like a cable route, you define, let's say, what is your cable tray, something like this, right, or maybe you have like conduit and you could actually assign them. This is a generic cable route, but it could be defined as a cable tray.

So, in your bill of material, you could actually see how much cable tray I need to buy or how much conduit I need to buy and then you could go to our quick connect tool and then select the switch, select the APs, this one, and then select the generic cable. Let's say CAT-6 and then I could select this and this and select my cable tray, hit apply, it will connect them. Now, I go to the other ones, I need this and this cable tray, and it will remember my last selection of the cable, apply, and now I have my system connected, and I could see that in 3D, right, so I could impress my customer and say, oh, here's your building.

Here's the coverage you're getting inside your building. Now, if I go to just floor one, the one we were focusing on, this is the coverage on floor one, this is where we're going to place the APs, this is where the cable will run and we need to drill a hole here, sorry, but this is necessary, and then you could go inside and then see where is your equipment room and then this is where the switch will be located. And that's the wow effect of iBwave.

So, when you show that to a customer, he will be impressed, right, and we have that in AR so you could show him live in his office with the AR mode, right, it's super cool. And after that, you only need to generate your reports and we have different type of reports, cable routing, it will show you which port is connected to which AP, something like this. It will show you, let's say this is network zero, but you could name it whatever, net zero, you could have different ID, switch one or something and you see it's net zero, port zero, it's connected to AP zero.

Net zero, port one is connected to AP one. It will tell you which floor, which cable ID and the estimated length of the cable. Then you hand that to the installer, you export it into PDF or whatever format, give it to the installer, you know exactly which port to connect to, right, which AP, which port.

And then obviously you have your bill of material, either just a list or with the cost. So, if you have cost, you could add any markup for equipment, construction cost, any engineering, commissioning, I don't know, validation, and you generate the cost report with the bill of material. So, here our CAT-6, estimating we have 756 feet, and this is the RJ-45 connectors, this is the Juniper switch, and then the APs, so six APs.

If I have any cost defined, it will tell me what's the cost, it will calculate the cost per square feet, and you export that to whatever format, you have different formats.

Once you finish your design, depending if you need approval, or you need to wait till it's installed, but once the design is done, you could export that to MIST. So, you go file, export, and you have export to Mist. That's the new feature that we added and then you need just to select a location where you want to drop it.

Let's just put it on my desktop here and call it whatever. Demo Mist, right? And save it. So it will export the two floor plans with the AP information. Now that I have the file exported, I go to the Mist dashboard. So this is my dashboard, and I do have some APs assigned to my dashboard. So, I have three APs here, and I could see they are named AP1, AP2, AP3.

The same naming convention I have here. You see AP1, AP2, AP3, right? And if I click on any of them, I could see the status, if I connect it or not, right? So, and I know from the dashboard what kind of AP, it's AP43, right? It's the one I was using. And so, what I could do is go to location, live view, and then I could add, I'd need to have the site created.

I created the Mist export demo site, and then on the site I need to add the floorplan, right? So, you have either import manually on the Mist dashboard or add the floorplan, add manually or import. So, when you import, you have the option to import an IBWC file. So, if I import that, and here's the demo Mist, right? It's Mist.IBWC. So, you see it's to avoid confusion with the other IBWC, it has the Mist format.

So when I open it and I have the option to include the floor plan that do not have APs and then I import, it will load the two floor plans. You see floor 1, floor 2, and then I could do match the APs. It found already three APs out of the six and it already matched them. So you see here we have the floor plan and we have the APs. So I have 1, 2, and 3 and then I have the other APs that do not match. So if I have more AP, I could do the manual match.

Next, finish, and I have my two floor plan with the heat map loaded with it. So, if I wanted the floor plan to be without the heat map, then I would need to export it without the heat map. So, if I go here, deactivate the heat map, export it like this.

So, the floor plan will look exactly how you exported it. So, any information you want here, any legend, any like see here the cable length, AP channels, any information you want, you export it and it will be visible on the floor plan here. You see I have the channel number, the AP, the cable length.

I also have the heat map. If you want to remove or change anything, you just do it when you export. So, that's basically the integration we did. I think it's really cool. It's helping a lot of mutual customers. I believe Mist customers. So, there is no duplicate of efforts. You don't need to reload the floor plan and put the APs again. And it's super simple, super easy.

And you just saw it. We did it like in what, 20 minute designing? Yeah, from the get-go, from the scratch, but bringing it to Mist was as simple as dragging and dropping or just selecting the file. Essentially, it automatically did everything.

Exactly. Yeah, the import was like what, 30 seconds. You export the file, you import it and then it's done. Nice, nice. Yeah, thank you guys for implementing this together. You're welcome.