After over two years in development the much anticipated new version of Ekahau Site Survey & 3D Planner is finally here.

After releasing version 8.0 the Ekahau team set out with one purpose – to create a solution that makes it easy to design Wi-Fi for today’s and tomorrow’s purposes. Should have been quite easy, right?

Well, no. As is turned out the Ekahau development team had to completely re-write the capacity planning and analysis, auto-planner, and channel-planner areas of the software to achieve their goals. However what has been released certainly looks well worth the wait as the features list is awesome.

The release notes are below:

New Features

High Capacity Planner

The easiest yet the most comprehensive Wi-Fi capacity planning tool.

• Easily set capacity requirements with the new requirement area tool straight from the toolbar – All you need to know is how many devices your network would need to support
• If needed, you can always go advanced and define your capacity requirements in very detailed manner through “Area options”
• You may also customize the client details to your liking – or use our pre-made defaults for quick setup
• Fine-tune the Network configuration in Project-menu to enable the planner to accurately calculate management traffic overhead

All New Auto-Planner

Avoids AP overpopulation & hallway placement, disables 2.4 GHz radios, and utilizes dual 5 GHz operation mode when possible.

• Create plans with multiple different types of coverage and capacity area requirements in one go
  • Multiple different coverage requirements also supported
• Seamless integration with the new capacity features
• Ability to plan for dual 5 GHz access points, such as Cisco AP3802i and Aerohive AP250
• Improved accuracy and results on created plans

Channel-Planner 2.0

Vastly improved performance and speed! More options for your channel plan!

• Fully customizable channel planner – You can now disable individual channels such as 120, 124, and 128
• Plan channels for individual floors!
• Channel plans are now calculated much faster!

New & improved capacity visualizations

Both new and reworked capacity visualization for more powerful capacity analysis

• New visualization: Airtime utilization. This visualization shows you in clear and user-friendly manner how fully utilized the channels and radios currently are given your current capacity requirements. Check out the tooltips with both bands enabled and with just one band enabled!
• Improved visualizations: Capacity: Clients per AP & Capacity health: These visualization have been reworked with user-friendliness and clarity in mind, so judging the state of your Wi-Fi capacity is easier than ever before!

Area-specific coverage requirements

Different areas can now each have their own set of coverage requirements, clients, & visualizations

• Increased flexibility to plan for capacity & requirements on area-by-area basis, instead of earlier global settings
• Different areas also show different heatmaps based directly on the assigned coverage requirements – You can now check with a glance if all of your requirements are met!
• Please note: Old global coverage requirements are still used if you don’t use any requirement areas on the map – You can no longer use global capacity settings but instead must assign the clients directly in the areas

Improvements

• Improved UI for increased usability and clarity
• Requirement & exclusion area tools (previously called coverage areas) have gone through a complete usability overhaul – No more weird tiny gaps between areas or weird off-kilter angles!
• Area notes have been removed from note tools and integrated to requirement area tool
• “Requested/Accepted associations” setting has been removed from “Clients per AP” visualization due to it’s opaque and unclear nature
• Support Realtek chip based adapters has been improved
• “Cinder block” has been added to default wall types
• Improved Aruba radio combination logic
• Improved “Smooth” visualizations for several heatmap types: Airtime utilization, Associated APs, Clients per AP, Capacity Health, Channel coverage and many more!

Fixed Issues

• You can no longer auto-plan a building with empty floors, which previously led to errors
• Coverage requirements fields no longer accept invalid values
• Setting too small scale on a map no longer leads to error in auto-planner or channel planner
• Leaving too small coverage area fragments on the map no longer produces errors in auto-planner
• Other miscellaneous bug fixes

New Access Points and Antennas

• Cisco AP1815W, AP2702E + AIR-ANT2524DW-R, and AP3702E + AIR-ANT2544V4M-R
• Aerohive AP550 and Aerohive AH-ACC-1130-ANT-18
• Aruba ANT-3×3-5712
• Hirschmann BAT867-R
• LigoWave NFT 3ac
• Peplink Balance One, Pepwave AP One Rugged, Pepwave AP One In-Wall, Pepwave AP One Enterprise, Pepwave AP One Flex and Pepwave Ap One Ac Mini