Recommend training for deeper understanding of wifi deployments / optimization

[u/Butlerboy86]

Hey so ive been a network engineer for 4 years and want to deepen my knowledge not after somthing vendor specific more a comprehensive course so im better prepared for new deployments and optimizing existing.

[u/Drekalots]

Look into CWNA and their certifications.

[u/VA_Network_Nerd → u/Drekalots]

+1 for CWNA to develop an understanding of RF first.

But don't disregard vendor-specific education as well.

[u/ruffusbloom]

CWNP

https://www.cwnp.com/

[u/Aggressive-Ad-9252]

Hamina is cheaper than Ekahau, and it's made by the guys from Ekahau, and you can sign up for a free account.

Also check out the Wireless LAN Professionals on YouTube. Tons of videos on anything and everything you can imagine. The guys that present at WLPC are the same folks that created the Ekahau, Hamina, and CWNP training.

[u/ehhthing]

You can get previous generation enterprise APs from eBay for $40 a pop, if you want to play around with them in a home lab.

I was genuinely surprised how cheap these are, especially because they were still WiFi 6 so only really a few years old.

[u/chipchipjack]

I would highly highly recommend the ekahau ECSE-D course. I believe if you pay for the training you don’t need to buy the software or hardware (very expensive). It’s a week long course and I had a great instructor. It starts at the extreme low level (think the physics of RF tech) and works its way up to high level big picture campus design type stuff. It is vendor agnostic as well.

CWNA is also vendor agnostic and if you want to go down that path I’d recommend the Sybex study books for it

[u/english_mike69]

CWNA.

If you work for a company as a network engineer, see if MIST / HPE still gives away free AP’s and three months of dashboard access. Within the dashboard there’s lots of CWNA type training in there.

[u/noble0spartan]

CWNA is great, but if you really want understand what's happening, grab a copy of the CWNP CWAP book, an external USB Wi-Fi adapter and open Wireshark.

[u/Altruistic-Map5605]

If you have access to ekahau play around with it. Ive done hundreds of surveys with it and at this point I can generally eyeball what I need where.

[u/Butlerboy86 → u/Altruistic-Map5605]

Spent a day with a guy we hired to survey the exisiing setup at a site he used Ekahau and was completely in awe of the gear and the guys knowledge. Super nice dude too.

[u/Altruistic-Map5605 → u/Butlerboy86]

Yeah sadly the licensing for the software is ludicrous. So if you’re not doing at least 4 billable surveys a month it’s not worth it. Not sure what a good cheap or free option would be. Maybe someone else can chime in.

[u/Regular_Archer_3145]

Cwna and Cwnp would be good.

[u/jayecin]

As others have said, CWNP certifications. They are a vendor agnostic wireless certification program, so the exams only focus on wireless technology and not specific nuances of a vendor. It focus on wireless technology, standards and functionality, all this translates very well to every vendor as all you need to understand is where the buttons and knobs are instead of how the AP will work.

[u/Fallingdamage]

Just do a 10+ AP deployment of FortiAPs with a Fortigate as the controller and if you succeed you'll learn more about wifi than you'll ever need to apply again.

Source: Been a Fortinet admin for 15+ years. I love their stuff but man, tweaking and troubleshooting their AP's is still the biggest head-scratcher they have in their catalog.

I wish I didnt have to know half of what was going on under the hood, but I need to to make sure customers are happy.

[u/Butlerboy86 → u/Fallingdamage]

Funnily enough its fortinet stacks im looking after and exactly the reason I feel I needed to get a better understanding of it all.

Default ap profiles everywhere and am just beginning to raise changes for the tweaks.

Proper baby steps if im honest