iBwave Unity Reviews

I am using iBwave Wi-Fi for a project where we are designing on campus. It is used for large venue designs such as a university campus, and my work involves optimizing and validating the designs for accuracy before site surveys.

Using iBwave Wi-Fi, I am able to provide more accurate results for the team before conducting site surveys.

The most valuable features of iBwave Wi-Fi include the critical three dimensional modeling capabilities, which are necessary for tasks like locating access points, determining their height, and cable routing.

iBwave Wi-Fi could be improved by adding a plot for overall improvement, allowing us to see where we are failing in design parameters, similar to features in Ekahau.

I have been working with iBwave Wi-Fi for the last five years.

Reliability and stability are rated around 8.5 out of ten.

I rate the scalability of iBwave Wi-Fi at nine out of ten.

Customer service is excellent, deserving a ten out of ten. Each time I contact support, they assign specific activities and stay in touch until issues are resolved.

Positive

I am using both iBwave Wi-Fi and Ekahau. iBwave's three dimensional modeling capability is a critical feature that Ekahau lacks.

The setup process for iBwave Wi-Fi is a bit complex and requires careful attention, whereas Ekahau's setup is simpler.

Both iBwave Wi-Fi and Ekahau are costly tools. They're considered high in cost because the license needs to be renewed yearly.

iBwave Wi-Fi can be recommended to other users, as it is useful for any company size and there's no restriction on its use.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

iBwave Wi-Fi is excellent. My primary use case for the solution are predictive RF heatmaps that include all bands of cellular and Wi-Fi.

iBwave Wi-Fi has improved our sales by allowing customers to see predictive heatmaps for proposed projects.

What I find the most valuable about iBwave Wi-Fi is the solution's superior modeling and capability compared to other tools like Ekahau. 

The cost of the solution could be improved. It's extraordinarily expensive. 

I have been working with iBwave Wi-Fi for 10 years.

The stability is fine. It works great.

The solution has a lot of room for scalability. So, I can go from a single room up to a couple million square feet. It meets my scalability needs. 

iBwave Wi-Fi's tech support is great. They pick up their phones. I have no complaints. 

Positive

No I did not previously use a different solution. This is the solution I was trained on and I've been using it since.

Deployment does not take long at all. iBwave Wi-Fi is ready to go as soon as the license is activated.  

The deployment was done in-house without help from an integrator.

I can't really come up with exact numbers on ROI, but we have used the tool to bring in new customers and to do a lot of projects for those customers.

iBwave Wi-Fi costs $40,000 for the full license and everything else for the first-time purchase. There's license renewals but for the full design license, there's three modules. So to make it a complete design tool, you need all three. I can't remember what the renewal costs exactly; it's around five grand a year.

On a scale of one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best, I would give this tool a 10 because it is feature-rich. 

Since I started using this tool, I've looked at Ekahau and AirMagnet. Those are good tools for WiFi but they do not offer the level of modeling detail that iBwave Wi-Fi has.

The advice I would give to others looking into implementing this product is this: to be able to use it fully, you will need to understand LTE and cellular, not just WiFi. However, if you have a little bit of CAD background, you will be able to pick the tool up quickly.

I used iBwave Wi-Fi for indoor public and private sites.

Compared to other tools, iBwave Wi-Fi provides 95% accuracy and generates heatmaps. We can design the backhaul in iBwave Wi-Fi, whereas we cannot design the backhaul in other tools.

It would be good if we could involve a visual while designing the backhaul.

I have been using iBwave Wi-Fi for two weeks.

iBwave Wi-Fi is a stable solution.

Two people in our organization are using iBwave Wi-Fi.

The technical support team took a lot of time to resolve my issue.

Positive

iBwave Wi-Fi is an expensive solution, but it is worth the cost.

Our company decided to use iBwave Wi-Fi rather than something else because we have upcoming sites. I would recommend iBwave Wi-Fi to other users.

Overall, I rate iBwave Wi-Fi a nine out of ten.

iBwave Wi-Fi is very good if you want to do more advanced things like building a mobile tower or a stadium. The solution's 3D imaging is amazing. I prefer to use iBwave Wi-Fi for a stadium or a train station because it gives you a 3D insight into what you can do.

iBwave Wi-Fi doesn't have a distributor feed platform. When I go into the market to sell a product, I need support from the manufacturer. If you take iBwave Wi-Fi and distribute it, the manufacturer does not provide leads or marketing tools.

I have been using iBwave Wi-Fi for five to six years.

The solution's initial setup is complex unless you take the design cost and know your software well. You should be very familiar with the interface before you even use it. You won't be able to do it if you're a new user. You have to be trained in it.

The solution's pricing is cheap.

iBwave Wi-Fi has monopolized the big telco market. iBwave Wi-Fi dominated the big carriers like Telstra and BT because they use iBwave Wi-Fi to design cell towers. They're more concentrated on radio waves rather than Wi-Fi waves. So, the big telcos prefer iBwave Wi-Fi for their overall telecom infrastructure design.

The most complex thing about iBwave Wi-Fi is the design of cell and radio wave towers, which takes someone qualified.

Huge telecom companies like Telstra in Australia and BT in the UK use iBwave Wi-Fi to design complex Wi-Fi infrastructure. They don't need to improve anything.

Overall, I rate iBwave Wi-Fi ten out of ten.

We use this product for the study of indoor coverage for many in-building systems such as shopping malls, hotels, and business centers. This is used for DAS design to improve the cellular coverage for indoor places. With this, we can offer our clients a good solution to improve cellular systems in their locations.

This solution provides us with the ability to obtain an exact equipment list report. This reduces the time needed to calculate the cost of the project.

The most valuable feature is report generation. These include the equipment list, area, and compliance. These reports help to calculate the cost of the project and give us project documentation to present to our client.

The 3D Coverage is a good feature that shows the signal propagation in three dimensions.

There are many things that should be improved in this solution.

For example, I would like to have more functionality to generate and delete walls, along with a good undo button for reversing the operations.

I would like to be able to see two buildings at the same time so that you can create a campus view.

Two years.

I did not use another solution prior to this one.

This is the only solution that I evaluated.

Our primary use case is designing ERRCS (Emergency Responder Radio Communication Systems) and carriers solutions for large facilities.

The stability and feature set of the application are top notch and can't be matched.

The most valuable features are the signal coverage and prediction capabilities.

It would do iBwave well to become more involved with their clients. They need feedback, and I need feedback.

Our primary use case for iBwave is for high-quality heatmap generation. We use these high-quality maps and the database functions for both pre-sales and final deliverables.

Before iBwave, we used a number of tools to collect and report RF data, and also Visio to create some of the visuals. iBwave replaced most/all of the other programs needed.

I find the high-quality heatmap generation, multi-floor, and wire mapping features to be most valuable. We have also started using the mobile app and it is proving to save us time.

Areas of improvement would include more functionality in the mobile app, expanded reporting features, and some shortcut features.

It has proven to be stable.

I am very impressed with the scalability of this solution.

Customer support is very good. Fast and effective.

We did use AirMagnet as our standard but have switched based on iBwave's ease of use and extended toolset.

This initial setup is straightforward. We have seen database location issues during upgrades.

Our deployment was in-house. The skill level in our company is high.

We find the yearly ROI is found in a single project with a size of >1000 APs (Access points).

I advise others to treat the cost as you would any tooling cost and use the monthly option as needed.

We did evaluate AirMagnet and Ekahau.

• Its primary use is building WiFi/DAS designs for customers. 


• Creating 3D modeling to better run propagation analysis.

iBwave has improved the efficiency of bidding on WiFi and DAS projects. The only tool for DAS/WiFi.

The most valuable features are being able to model venues closely to the real world. This helps when running propagation studies to see how signals will work in a real-world environment. Less guessing. 

• More features to speed up the design process


• Macros for part IDs


• Hotkeys for more commands and parts


• It's still a slow process to model venues and even rename components.

It can speed up design of a Wi-Fi network.

It could be improved by improving the speed of the product. 

It crashes often, and is not quite stable. 

Yes, I used tech support. 

I implemented the product. It was straightforward.

I am currently looking for an alternative due to my reluctance with the reliability of this product.

The object database is simply fantastic. It saves a lot of time when creating a new project.

The iBwave WiFi was really useful in terms of time saving for predictions and validation of RF coverages.

A very good instrument to create professional documents for customers and their IT staff.

Surely, one improvement could involve the materials panel in the prediction tool. For example, there are some materials missing in the materials list, like metallic shelves in a warehouse, metallic floors (mezzanine).

In the iBwave software there are some features and one of those is the capability to predict diffusion of the radiofrequency signals.
Propagation in a specific environment is conditioned by several things:
height of the RF Source, type of antenna (transmitter and receiver), obstacles between source and destination.
Obstacles may vary in a warehouse where could exist a stock of wood, or mineral water, or generic food (cartons or cans or bottles). All of this stuff may reflect or absorb the RF signal at certain frequencies so being able to predict the behavior of RF signals within a warehouse could be a very nice stuff. I tried with several different materials already in the system and I've found a good compromise but having it clear and ready to use could be great.

I have been using iBwave for more than one year.

We have never encountered deployment issues.

We have never encountered stability issues; this product looks very stable.

From 1 to 10, I would say customer service is a 10. Pre-sales and post-sales support were great.

I needed their support only two times, not so much to give them a vote, but both times it was A+.

I was using an old version of Ekahau Survey, then I decided to change because of the support level from iBwave.

Initial setup was not complex at all.

An in-house team, our team, implemented it.

For our type of business, I think that the ROI can be considered as one year. It saves time and money with predictions that are very accurate. I tested personally a prediction with real devices after deployment; the results were almost the same.

Pricing and product quality are number one.

I tested Ekahau but in demo mode; full functionality was not available for testing, not even for a few days.

iBwave were the only ones that gave me a fully functional demo (30 days). That's why I decided to buy iBwave WiFi; the only ones to give me a fully functional demo to test all the features.