Planning Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth networks on tablet or smartphone

Benoit Fleury, iBwave VP and Product Line Management, talks with us about the new Mobile version of their powerful product for wireless network designing.

Howdy Benoit, let’s start by talking about your company, which is not very well known to the public.

iBwave was born 13 years ago in Montreal, Canada, to satisfy a precise need: System Integrators that deals with planning wireless systems more and more complex without a software tool to help them. The company has grown a lot since then and now it aims to a broader target which include Telco and higher-profile companies. iBwave crafts softwares to design wireless networks of any kind: Wi-Fi, 3G, LTE, Bluetooth. Our software supports and wireless architecture and is vendor independent.

So do you support a few vendors or have you got a wider vision?

Our software includes a complete archive of every product of all vendors on the market. We have a complete inventory with detailed specs of every single device, cable or tool for network projecting. You can design 2D or 3D networks with our software and -in the planning phase- you can place devices in the space and directly see in real time what the expected coverage will be according to specs.
Those who work with a single vendor can obviously choose to use only the vendor’s devices, while those who rely on multiple vendors can combine technologies in the same project too.

Quite interesting. Does the software offer only a coverage estimate or also a way to evaluate the signal’s quality?

With iBwave’s software you can evaluate non just the signal’s quality but also the actual throughput that will be available in any corner of the building.

Do you sell your software to big mobile operators too?

Yes, there are many Telco among our 700 clients and our software is nowadays considered a standard in wireless network designing. We also provide a database with data specs of the products which aren’t on the market yet, which is reserved to those, joining vendors, are designing a wireless solution that is going to be implemented within a few months.
If the vendor accepts, we can provide it to who plans a building so that he can put into consideration products which are still in development phase.

What are the news that you will announce at MWC?

There are a lot of news concerning out product line. Our historical product is iBwave Design which can be installed in Windows and offers all the more advanced features. Now we have a product called iBwave Mobile, which is developed on the Android platform and can be used by technicians for, say, automated device placement. It supports Small Cell and Wi-Fi technologies and is available in Note version, for on-the-field measures, and Planner version, to design networks directly on-site while placing devices on maps and see the possible outcomes.
Lastly, we have introduced a third, very important product called Unity which allows to manage projects for a large team composed of several people working together. Unity is available also in SaaS version with the Unity Team release, aimed to smaller working teams. Mobile products are available as a monthly subscription too, with prices around a thousands Euro per year, making them affordable to smaller installators as well.