In order to perform a successful and complete wireless site survey, the following items and/or services should be made available where applicable.
■ In-building surveys will require blueprints, CAD drawings, or if those
are not available, fire escape drawings of the facility.These should detail the location of office spaces, cubicles, and equipment to scale.
■ Point-to-point surveys will require topographical maps of the area to
include all the facilities involved in the survey.
■ Provide a dedicated escort, if required, to allow full access to the facilities
being surveyed.
■ Provide facility identification or badges, if necessary for full access. ■ Provide any facility guidelines or restrictions concerning equipment
mounting.
■ If the facility is a union facility, please provide a declaration of operating
equipment limitations, if any.
■ If the facility has been designated a historical site, please provide any
limitations or specifications for modifying the interior or exterior of the building.
■ Be prepared to provide an Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) representative where regulations prohibit non- OSHA certified personnel from access or installation.
■ Be prepared to provide qualified personnel to access facility rooftops for
the duration of any point-to-point survey.
If you do not fill out the pre-site survey form yourself and plan on giving the pre-site survey form to a customer or client, as is the case with larger organiza- tions where Information Systems performs requests for other departments or divisions, do not be surprised if many of the more technical questions go unan- swered. Remember, your customer is not likely to know what Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP), rate shifting, or even what LAN or WAN is, so it will be diffi- cult for them to know if they have it or need it.You will need to be prepared to explain to the customer, in layman’s terms, what some of the various technical questions are asking for.You will be in a much better position to survey and pro- duce a survey report if you already have these questions answered.
It is not uncommon for a client to request 11Mbps coverage in all areas in the questionnaire, but after your survey, they find out how many APs are required to provide that coverage and your customer then decides that 5.5 or 2 Mbps is sufficient for several of the areas. If you do not follow-up the questionnaire with a meeting or phone call to discuss the answers you received, you may find your- self spending additional time to resurvey your coverage areas for the lower speeds. By asking why your customer needs 11 Mbps coverage everywhere, for example, you can ensure that you will survey an area only once.
Depending on your local laws and regulations, you may have other inquiries that you will want to add to this questionnaire. In the United States, such things as safety requirements and regulations may impede or hinder your site survey, so you should be aware of these regulations and plan accordingly. OSHA will some- times require you, through the business, to complete paperwork verifying your understanding and compliance of specific or unique work safety requirements in a given area. An example would be, surveys performed in a biohazard or chemical manufacturing area, requiring body suits and/or masks.
During your installation, fire codes for office, manufacturing, healthcare, and other facilities will need to be adhered to. Prior to your survey, you will need to
find out if the facility contains firewalls. No, we are not talking about the firewalls used in your business to keep out Internet intruders, we are talking about firewalls used in building construction. In building construction, a firewall keeps a fire from spreading from one building or part of a building to another. Firewalls are used to divide overall structures into allowable areas permitted by building code. Building codes vary by locality and country. Firewalls can be difficult to spot if you are not looking for them, thus we have added them to the list of questions to be answered prior to performing the survey. Because firewalls typically extend to the roof of most buildings, it is important to determine during the survey, if you will need to penetrate a firewall for any reason. During the survey, it is unlikely you will have need to penetrate the firewall, but you may discover this need for your implemen- tation. In the event that you must penetrate a firewall, procedures exist in your locality for this. In the U.S., most of these procedures must be compliant with the National Electric Code (NEC).You can usually obtain copies of the NEC from local electrical suppliers. In my locality, penetration of a firewall requires a special fire-stop caulking to be applied around the penetration point and an inspection of the work by local fire authorities afterwards.
In addition to firewalls, another typical fire code related question commonly encountered is whether plenum cable is required for this facility.Plenum cable is cable that is coated with a fire-retardant coating (usually Teflon) so that in case of a fire, it does not give off toxic gasses and smoke as it burns.Twisted-pair and coaxial cable are made in plenum versions. In building construction, the plenum is the space that is used for air circulation in heating and air conditioning systems, typically between the structural ceiling and the suspended ceiling or under a raised floor.The plenum space is typically used to house the communication cables for the building’s computer and telephone network(s).This impacts your installation and design only if you must have either your antenna cabling or your data cabling running through plenum areas of a facility to get to your APs and/or bridges, and the facility requires plenum cabling. Knowledge of plenum cabling requirements in your facility prior to the survey will help you determine how you may have to cable your wireless gear for your design and implementation.
You do not want to cause undue strife by performing certain functions during the site survey that union personnel are required to perform, such as run- ning a man-lift to get to the ceiling of a facility.The questionnaire will help you determine what coordination with other parties, if any, will be necessary to com- plete the survey.
Another preparation to consider is the need for permits to work in and on historical sites. Due to the nature of these sites, you must use extreme care to
ensure that you make little or no changes to the facility or site.You should con- sider the differences required in surveying these sites as opposed to installing. Permission from one or more authorities may be needed to allow the installation, and even the survey, to occur.
Based on the preliminary information obtained from your questionnaire, you should be able to form one or more rough designs that may accomplish the desired coverage.You will use these rough designs to test during your site survey. The last section of your questionnaire contains some very important requests.The first of these is the request to have blueprints, CAD drawings, or fire escape drawings of the facility and any obstacles, such as offices, cubicles, and equipment, to be diagramed to scale.This is important for your preparation because without it you cannot create any rough designs for anticipated coverage.To do this while surveying takes a significant amount of time and will force you to start your testing with no predetermined designs to guide you through the creative aspect of the survey.
The other extremely important request in the last section of the question- naire pertains to escorts, badges, Ids, and in general, access to facilities or areas needed to survey or areas you must go through to get to the survey areas. I know there is nothing more frustrating than to wait 20 or 30 minutes to start surveying a particular area because the security guard doesn’t know who you are and will not let you into an area or facility, especially when you have just toted 50 pounds of gear up three flights of stairs (no elevator). Do this for several areas or facilities and you may have blown several hours just to get into the place. Even if the person with whom you deal with is aware that you are going to be surveying, verify this ahead of time by speaking to the manager or security company in charge of the actual areas you intend on visiting. If an escort is needed, confirm that they are actually at the location prior to going to the site.They may have called in sick, or an emergency is preventing them from being there, in which case the area or facility may not have someone else to escort you. In the case of badges and IDs, this is usually a little easier provided that your company doesn’t require “special” badges to get you into certain areas. If this is the case, you should request the appropriate badge(s) as far ahead of time as possible and con- firm that the badge is ready before you go to the area or facility requiring it.
One more thought on preparation: Understand that surveys are typically less intrusive than the actual implementations of a wireless system. As you prepare to survey, always keep in mind what it will take to actually take to install your system and how this will affect production of services or goods in the particular environment. Is the business a 24/7 shop? Does the business have a weekly or
monthly business cycle that is critical? When and where can you install the wire- less system so that it will have minimal impact on the business? These are but a few of the keys to the success of your implementation.