I’m writing this from my hotel room at the Wireless LAN Professionals Conference (WLPC) 2020, which is about to begin. Last night as I was chatting with some of the other attendees I started thinking about the product improvements we’ve done at MetaGeek that came directly from ideas at WLPC 2019.

Showing the 4-Way Handshake in Eye P.A. is a result of a presentation by Eddie Forero that showed each step of the process of a client probing, associating and then establishing encryption keys via the 4-way handshake. At the time, Eye P.A. ignored the 4-way handshake packets, providing no insight into any of the issues that can cause a client to not establish a connection, such as wrong password. Now, Eye P.A. highlights the 4-way handshake packets as shown below.

Eye P.A. showing 4-way handshake

Perry from Aerohive gave a presentation on Seamless and Secure Roaming that gave an overview of 802.11 k, v, and r amendments and how they enable faster, secure roaming. Now inSSIDer displays “BSS Transition” capabilities for all access points that support 802.11k, as well as highlighting when clients ask for a neighbor report (802.11r).

These two examples are very specific changes that we made in response to presentations. The biggest change to MetaGeek products though, didn’t come from a single presentation, it was more of an overarching theme at WLPC 2019 of the need for more “Client First” troubleshooting and analysis, rather than from the infrastructure (access point and controller) side. This theme led directly to the creation of inSSIDer 5, which is the first Real-Time Packet Analytics tool that allows you to quickly drill down to any client, locate it, analyze its traffic, and save a pcap for deeper analysis in your favorite packet analyzer – hopefully Eye P.A. 🙂

Given all of the MetaGeek product improvements that resulted from last year’s conference I can’t wait to start this year’s Wireless LAN Professionals Conference!