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Ekahau Mobile Survey Delivers Promising WiFi Survey Tool to Android Phones and Tablets
by Andrew Garcia
Android Widget
I could set Android to show the Mobile Survey Widget on the home screen, showing detected signal strength, data rate and connected AP for actively surveyed networks. I could also start and stop background monitoring from the widget.
AP Tab
The passive survey results in all detected WiFi networks, while an active scan also uses information about the connected network to make guesses as to which networks are potential rogues.
Test Tab
Active survey results are compared against a baseline template organized toward the particular network's design objectives. Users can see by the color code if one criteria fails to meet the baseline.
Profiles
Mobile Survey comes with five default Requirement Profiles, which are used to define the baselines.
Profile Criteria
Each Requirement Profile is user-editable, allowing WiFi administrators to better detect violations as defined in network or application policy.
Ping Utility
Users can set Mobile Survey to ping the default gateway or another manually defined host to ensure connectivity to the network during a scan.
Details Page
I could access the details page by swiping up from the bottom of the Test screen. Details shows relevant information about networks, addresses and signal strength.
Map
Although Mobile Survey includes a floor map viewer, this feature only works with survey plans and floorplans exported from Ekahau's pricier Site Survey software for PCs.
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Ekahau Mobile Survey delivers a nice mix of WiFi stumbling tools and performance measurement to Android-based smartphones and tablets, supporting many Android devices running Android OS 2.1 or higher. Mobile Survey ($299) is sold through the Ekahau Web store, rather than the Android Market, so the device to be used with Mobile Survey must support non-Market application sources. The software performs both active and passive WiFi scans with the ability to measure detected network performance against multicriteria templates tailored for specific network use cases. Unfortunately, Mobile Survey is hampered because most Android smartphones don't support 5 GHz 802.11n and only have a single transmit/receive chain, even though the software claims to be able to handle the higher frequency band and better antenna configurations. To read the full review, check out "Ekahau Mobile Survey for Android Troubleshoots WiFi Networks". Or if you have experience with Ekahau Mobile Survey, share your thoughts at http://labs.eweek.com.