Ekahau Sidekick

Ekahau, the global leader in Wi-Fi network design solutions, today announced the launch and general availability of its new Ekahau Sidekick™ site survey device. Ekahau Sidekick™ is a comprehensive wireless design device that allows for faster measurement of wireless networks and provides best-in-class Wi-Fi spectrum analysis.

Wi-Fi is mission-critical to businesses of all sizes as over 55%¹ of Internet traffic is generated over Wi-Fi today and site surveys are at the core of a successful network design.  A site survey walk-through is required to validate any enterprise Wi-Fi network to ensure sufficient coverage and performance and minimal interference. As an all-in-one measurement device, Ekahau Sidekick™ dramatically streamlines the site survey process by replacing and outperforming the previously-used USB hubs providing greater reliability, accuracy and convenience. It also makes the site survey process faster with state-of-the-art radios, meaning it takes significantly less time for the wireless engineer to measure the wireless at the site.

“Ekahau Sidekick™ was built with one goal in mind and that was to make measuring high-quality Wi-Fi networks faster, more precise and above all, easier. After two years of development with invaluable input from the Wi-Fi community and a ton of fine-tuning, we feel we’ve accomplished it. Sidekick will revolutionize site surveys and fundamentally change the way businesses design and manage their wireless networks,” said Jussi Kiviniemi, Senior Vice President at Ekahau.

What type of customers will benefit from using Ekahau Sidekick™?

• System integrators who design and maintain networks for their customers
• Enterprise network engineers across all business types who typically maintain and expand their existing wireless networks

Ekahau Sidekick™ is a battery-powered device that provides over eight hours of Wi-Fi site survey time. Ekahau Sidekick™ is shipped with messenger-style carrying strap and enables multiple ways of carrying it for convenience and ease of use.

The Ekahau Sidekick™ device is connected to a laptop or tablet running Ekahau Site Survey & Planner, Ekahau’s flagship Wi-Fi design software. The measurement data of the wireless local area network (WLAN) collected during a site survey includes Wi-Fi signal strength, noise, co-channel interference, network configuration information, and comprehensive spectrum analysis. The measurement data is then visualized as real-time graphs and heat maps of Wi-Fi network coverage and performance.

“Users, devices, and applications perform exponentially better on properly designed and maintained Wi-Fi networks, saving businesses time and money in the new era of the digital platform.” said Olga Yashkova, Program Manager, Frost and Sullivan. “Ekahau is the global leader in providing customer value for wireless design, and Ekahau Sidekick™ now further extends Ekahau’s portfolio and value-proposition to businesses and system integrators alike. We believe this could be a game-changer”.

Ekahau Sidekick™ houses two enterprise-grade 802.11ac adapters previously only seen in enterprise Wi-Fi access points. It also includes an ultra-high-resolution spectrum analyzer capable of up to 20 sweeps per second on both 2.4 and 5GHz bands – simultaneously. This makes the spectrum analyzer 4- 10 times faster than other Wi-Fi spectrum analyzers out in the market.

“The demands on Wi-Fi networks are increasing as it is becoming the de-facto carrier for a range of IoT applications, cellular data offloading and Wi-Fi calling. These mission-critical workloads will push the boundaries for Wi-Fi networks, and thus they must be designed and deployed with increased precision. Ekahau Sidekick™ is the pioneering new standard for measuring and validating wireless networks,” said Mika Hakala, CEO of Ekahau.

The Ekahau Sidekick™ hardware is available for order today from Ekahau and its global partner network. Ekahau Sidekick™ works with the Ekahau Site Survey (ESS) software application.

About Ekahau
Ekahau is the global market leader in smart wireless network design and planning. More than 15,000 customers, including over 100 Fortune 500 companies, run their business networks with Ekahau’s Wi-Fi planning and measurement solutions. Our proprietary software and hardware solutions design and manage superior wireless networks by minimizing network deployment time and ensuring sufficient wireless coverage across all industries, project sizes, building infrastructures and levels of complexity. We are recognized for delivering the easiest-to-use, most reliable solutions for Wi-Fi planning, site surveys, troubleshooting and optimization. Whether a corporate office, hotel, hospital or university – if the Wi-Fi works, it has likely been built using Ekahau’s Wi-Fi Design Solutions.

Ekahau is headquartered in Reston, VA. www.ekahau.com