Meet Andrew Chu. He is a network engineer for the organization Engineers Without Borders. Volunteers for this group work all over the world setting up resources to build stronger, more sustainable communities. Andrew contacted MetaGeek before a trip to Nepal where he was to set up a large network for a local village. The network would provide Wi-Fi to the hospital and schools in the region. MetaGeek was thrilled to help with such an amazing opportunity. We hooked Andrew up with inSSIDer Office to use for his two months in Nepal, and asked him to share his experiences with us.

As you can see the locals were very interested in how it worked. The goal in using inSSIDer Office, in this case, was to transition the established network to dual band capabilities and expand to 3 new site locations. The ultimate goal was that in the end, inSSIDer could be used by the local community to run the networks themselves. Below is a beautiful panorama of the location where Andrew was located, the towers you can see here are at 900m above sea level.

Andrew used inSSIDer Office extensively during his two months in Nepal from February to April 2015. As Andrew explains, “We used this product at every site for baseline measurements, and then each time we set up a new site. This allowed us to correctly place the positioning of the sites for optimal performance. We also did a fair bit of troubleshooting through the inSSIDer app, as we could see when nodes in the mesh had failed, even if the network itself was still functioning.”

We were excited to hear that inSSIDer Office was able to aid in the process so well. Andrew used it to set up a network of 40 access points with over 1,000 users, with at least 100 users on the network at any given time. The main benefit for Andrew was the usability of our product. While he is a network engineer and he knows his stuff, inSSIDer Office’s unique visual output allowed Andrew to teach the locals to read it themselves. Some of the suggestions that Andrew had, like giving aliases to certain MAC addresses, have already been implemented in the newest version of inSSIDer Office.

To read about Andrew’s successes in the full case study, visit MetaGeek.com.

We love to hear about our customers success stories with inSSIDer Office or any of our products! If you or someone you know would like to participate in another MetaGeek case study, please contact support@metageek.net.