Once again I find myself motivated to write by one of Joel Rollins’
excellent blog posts. His column “Staying Wired” and its ProAV perspective
on wired vs. wireless technologies resonated with me, and reinforced my
belief that regardless of the channel we work in we’ve all got the same
challenges.

Wireless has in many ways been a panacea to AV. I can think back to projects
five or more years ago where I stood in the middle of a site survey thinking
“Damn, I wish there was a wireless solution for this!” Sure enough, many of
those solutions exist today.

But as the old engineering maxim goes, Every Solution Has Two Problems. And
in the case of wireless, whether it’s AV, control or Internet, sometimes
there may be three or more problems.
For every project where wireless was a godsend, I can think of two or more
where problems arose. One friend of mine, who runs a high end integrator in
Toronto, and despite being a very tech savvy guy routinely curses Wi-Fi and
once admitted to me “I swear, Wi-Fi is like voodoo. Sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn’t, and there’s no measurable or repeatable reason why!”

When it comes to fixing those jobsite problems sometimes integrators’
technical nature can hinder rather than help; causing them to overthink
problems. With most issues in AV projects the simplest and most direct
solution is often best.
My favourite example of this is a retrofit project that we did at my old
employer. It wasn’t a massive system, only about $30K total, but there were
over a dozen wireless music zones. While finishing the project we learned
that the system was interfering with the client’s Uniden cordless phone
handsets. An entire day was spent liaising with our vendor’s technical
support, who had never seen that issue, and were completely perplexed.

The solution? One of our techs ran to Costco, bought a new set of three
cordless phones from a different brand and gave them to the client as a
gift.

Total cost: $169, plus tax and mileage. On a $30K project that’s as cost
effective as it gets.

I suppose if there’s a point to this blog post it’s that integrators should
still depend on wires, use wireless where it’s useful, and keep it simple
when troubleshooting.