What to demand from your wireless vendor
Specify wireless as numbers the vendor must prove on your floor, with your vehicles, in production conditions, and put them in the specification where they bind.
One page on Letter or A4. Print it, laminate it, and share it, unaltered with its footer. The card condenses one page on this site, which carry the full reasoning.
OT Wireless field card
What to demand from your wireless vendor
If the vendor shows you the average, you are buying the average, so demand the worst case, proven on your floor.
Put these in the specification
- Worst-case roam time, measured on the production client under production security.
- The maximum gap, not the mean, held against the vehicle's shortest loss-of-comms timer.
- A DFS plan: which channels are DFS and why, and every radar event in the logs.
- A written channel and power plan, and a rule for when automatic changes may run.
- Firmware and configuration changes tested, with roll-back, only in agreed windows.
- QoS marking preserved end to end, in both directions, proven by capture.
- A map of SSIDs, VLANs, and channels that shows which traffic shares airtime.
- A survey along every vehicle path, racks full and empty, with metal moving.
- Acceptance with production vehicles at top speed, full fleet, plant running.
- Logs from the network, the vehicle, and the fleet manager on one clock.
Numbers that frame the conversation
- DFS: listen 60 s before use, leave within 10 s of radar, stay off at least 30 min.
- At 2.0 m/s, one AMR's rated maximum, every second of outage is 2 m traveled.
- Latency can grow with clients on a channel while the average barely moves.
About this page
Built from 9 sources: 3 standards bodies and labs, 1 regulator or government source, 1 protocol owner or alliance, 1 research paper or thesis and 3 vendor documents. Researched and drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed and approved by Ben Rutter on . How pages are made
- First published
- Last updated
Change history (1)
- First published
Cite this page
Plain
Ben Rutter. "What to demand from your wireless vendor." OT Wireless, published October 6, 2026, updated October 5, 2026. https://otwireless.com/cards/wireless-vendor-demands/
APA 7
Rutter, B. (2026, October 6). What to demand from your wireless vendor. OT Wireless. https://otwireless.com/cards/wireless-vendor-demands/
BibTeX
@misc{rutter2026wirelessvendordemands,
author = {Rutter, Ben},
title = {{What to demand from your wireless vendor}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://otwireless.com/cards/wireless-vendor-demands/}},
organization = {OT Wireless},
}