The sensors capture and analyze packet-level data at the remote site itself rather than backhauling traffic to a central monitoring point. This architecture provides application-level performance metrics and protocol analysis without consuming WAN bandwidth for monitoring purposes.
“There’s a lot of different enterprises that are coming to us saying they’re trying to evaluate whether they’re going to go to private 5G or Wi-Fi 7,” Broughton explained.
Healthcare organizations represent a key vertical wrestling with this decision. Hospital environments require reliable coverage through RF-shielded patient rooms, making signal propagation a critical factor.
Rick Fulwiler, senior director of product management at Netscout, described how the platform measures user experience across different wireless standards. “It’s all about looking at experience and how that experience is affecting employees of the hospital, the applications that they’re using in those environments,” Fulwiler told Network World.
The Wi-Fi 7 standard expands across multiple frequency bands and increases channel capacity compared to earlier versions. These changes create new variables that affect application performance. The sensors track performance on a per-application basis, enabling IT teams to validate whether Wi-Fi 7 deployments deliver the expected improvements.
Organizations can use the data during pilot deployments to make infrastructure decisions. The platform shows which applications perform better on Wi-Fi 7 versus Wi-Fi 6 in specific physical locations before committing to a full rollout.
