We all know that Wi-Fi is a fantastic way to connect employees and customers to the network without tying them down to a specific location. What you may not know is how to capture location data and put it to use for your business. This is typically called locationing.

More than just a hot trend, locationing is a powerful way to leverage your existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to capture context, spot trends, and generate value for your customers and your company.

Aruba provides several tools to help you take advantage of location data. One of these tools is the Aruba Analytics and Location Engine (ALE). I recently wrote a post for the Aruba Airheads community that explores why you may want to employ locationing in your Wi-Fi networks and then digs into what ALE is and how it works:

https://blogs.arubanetworks.com/industries/locationing-for-fun-and-profit-part-1-wi-fi-analytics/

Now that you’ve read that blog, you know how impactful Wi-Fi analytics can be for your business. By freeing data that already exists in your Wi-Fi network, you can make powerful business decisions based on the real-time location of customers and employees.

As valuable as these insights are, Wi-Fi analytics do have some inherent limitations. When discussing locationing, two of the key metrics are latency and precision. Based on the way that mobile devices and mobile operating systems use Wi-Fi, the best precision we can get using Wi-Fi only is about 5 meters to 10 meters and the best latency is in the range of 15 seconds to 2 minutes. This is more than adequate for providing business intelligence but falls short of the requirements for micro-locationing.

As you might have guessed, I wrote a second piece that digs into micro-locationing, Aruba Beacons, and Aruba Meridian:

https://blogs.arubanetworks.com/solutions/locationing-for-fun-and-profit-part-2-micro-locationing/

I’ve got a couple more articles in the queue over on the Aruba blog, and am working on a 6-part series all about cybersecurity infrastructure technologies for the SolarWinds blog – so keep an eye out!