IPTel: Wi-fi doesn't have to be unreliable

With director Mark McSherry.

What networking brands and related services do you specialise in?

At IPTel Solutions, we work primarily with Cisco and Aruba. We’re heavily focussed on wireless LANs and AAA networks, offering Cisco ISE and Aruba Clearpass. We also design the underlying LAN and associated technologies – RTLS, for example.

When did your company first get involved in this area?

The company originally started in IP telephony, but wireless has been such a consistently strong growth market that we moved our focus to wireless LANs, and we’ve been working with WLANs for about eight or nine years.

What credentials does your business have in networking?

We’re both Cisco Premier and Aruba Gold partners. Our staff range from Cisco CCNA certified (or Aruba equivalent) up to Cisco CCIE. We have three CCIEs – LAN Switching, R&S and CCIE Wireless. We are also ISO9001 certified.

Who are your distributors?

We work with Ingram Micro and Dicker Data.

What is the most interesting new development in networking?

I think the new Cisco 4800 series, with its built-in Hyperlocation/BLE receive radio is up there. We should see accuracy levels of around 1–2m with this AP, which will enable really interesting applications like wayfinding. SDN and Cisco DNA are also interesting.

Can you tell us about a deployment that you have done recently?

We’ve been undertaking some very large deployments of late; one required 1500 APs to be physically installed and configured. I think the real impact projects are when we fix a WLAN with lots of drop-outs – that’s a complex problem that we solve, with a real benefit for end users.

What is driving customers’ networking projects?

Reliable wi-fi is major driver for us. Wi-fi doesn’t have to be unreliable – it can be designed and deployed to be very reliable. Other drivers include the desire to integrate multiple services – voice, video, BYOD, RTLS, Biomed ... the list is growing!

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