Making construction information system works requires wireless. Well you can try it without wireless and you will not get far. To get wireless to work there is a lot of details you need to work on. Like how do you divide up the wireless Internet connection between the different users and their devices.

Let’s go through this example. I’ll be using my home business network as an example. I have a 150 mbps Comcast business connection. I have 7 WiFI access points in three different buildings all tied together into a wireless controller. Why a WiFi controller? Because that is how I get the performance data from each of the wireless access points and can see the wireless connections to each device.

Before that is an open source router, pfSense. On pfSense you can run traffic shaping.

Traffic shaping is a bandwidth management technique used on computer networks which delays some or all datagrams to bring them into compliance with a desired traffic profile.[1][2] Traffic shaping is used to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, or increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds. It is often confused with traffic policing, the distinct but related practice of packet dropping and packet marking.[3]

When I first turned off traffic shaping the test to see how well things work is how well did my son’s xbox games play. He was beating his friends playing a range of games, because my son now had a dedicated bandwidth so he was not dropping packets if the network was being hit by other high traffic loads.

Most consumer solutions WiFi will maximize speeds for a given user to allow speedtest numbers to be as high as possible. When I run a speed test I’ll get numbers below the 150 mbps limit as the traffic shaping software manages how much connection any one device can get and makes sure there is capacity in reserve for higher priority uses like VOIP or video calls.

This is just one example of the other stuff to discuss to make wireless work in construction.