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Check Out These Great Free Wi-Fi Training Resources

By Scott McDermott, Blog Contributor

Would you believe that free training abounds for Wi-Fi? There are a lot of resources available online for merely the exchange of bandwidth and time. These are a few of my favorite resources and I use them frequently.

Unknown.pngThe Wireless LAN Professionals Conference (WLPC) is a yearly conference for WLAN pros with conferences in several regions. I attend the US event every February. There is also one in Europe during October and one in Latin America during August that is in Spanish. If you have the opportunity to go, this is a great way to meet other WLAN pros and have some great conversations along with learning a lot from the presentations. However, one of the best things about this conference is that all the sessions are recorded and viewable for free, even if you didn't go. Myself, I watch all the sessions from the European conference online and even though I've been fortunate to make all the US WLPC events so far, I sometimes watch sessions again. There's a lot of great Wi-Fi learning to be had!

The videos are found at the WLPC Video Library and cover a wide range of wireless topics. You'll find practical topics like Securing your WLAN By Thinking Like A Hacker and fun, yet educational topics like The Science of Bad-Fi. There are highly technical deep dive sessions like these from Aruba's own Chuck Lukaszewski, Under the Hood with MU-MIMO and the complex Next Gen Wi-Fi Preview covering what 802.11ax is doing. There are even sessions on soft skills and thinking about your career, such as Integrity and the WLAN Professional and this session what it means to be a Mobility Architect.

I realize that's a lot of videos, but it's just a sampling of the over 200 videos already online that are presentations given by WLAN professionals for WLAN professionals; your peers sharing with you. The SNR on these sessions is excellent and I'm sure that if you browse through the library you will find plenty more sessions that are valuable. Another great thing about all these videos is that you can download them for offline viewing. No Wi-Fi required, as it were.

Perhaps you don't have the time to go through all the videos or perhaps you just want to consume them more efficiently. One of the ways I find that helps me watch them more quickly is to download them and use the VLC player to watch them at an accelerated speed. I recommend starting at 1.25x normal speed and you can adjust from there based on what works for you. This saves time, but make sure you still comprehend the ideas being shared!

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Ekahau has been hosting Wi-Fi design webinars for quite a while now. Once a month they have a recorded webinar with a guest presenter who covers a topic in wireless network design. For example, in Gigabit Wi-Fi: Not So Fast, they discuss the design factors impacting real world performance and the need for multi-gig Ethernet. You can find the list of upcoming and recent webinar sessions at the Ekahau website.

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Certified Wireless Network Professional is a vendor-neutral wireless certification organization that is well respected in the industry. They run monthly training webinars on all topics related to Wi-Fi and sometimes cover topics related to certification. All their past webinars and a few other useful recordings are posted on their YouTube page. One great thing about YouTube is that it has accelerated playback features built in, at least when you aren't on a mobile device. One session I found particularly helpful was learning about Using ZeroShell in the Lab. It's a great tool for experimenting with authentication infrastructure, check it out!

These are my favorites. I try not to miss these if I can help it and I will watch the video later if I must. You don't have to spend a lot of time to learn a lot about Wi-Fi. An hour here and an hour there and you'll suddenly realize you are turning into a Wi-Fi expert. If you know of great Wi-Fi resources I didn't cover, please leave a comment. We'd all love to hear about it!