Good heads up on the test. I suspected that it would be similar to the partner qualification tests that have been around for several years. I work in a Cisco shop so will most likely be taking the exam. I don't think that the CWNA has anything to worry about in the long run.

When I took my telecommunications courses many years ago, we were taught about fading. I think that you can call it distortion of a signal through a medium (in the case of wireless air). There is a nice wiki article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fading

Informative article. Thanks.

Good one.

I agree with Kevin . If you know the technology well , it becomes very easy to learn the vendor specific things and that's where CWNP certs help a lot.

cisco leads the way

http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk

Fading means degradation in the signal due to space.

"Multipath fading" term is used sometimes together in wireless communications.

Of course It is Cisco hardware centric! That is the point of CISCO certifications... what good is the CWNA CWSP for working on Cisco gear if you do not understand the difference between their Wireless Lan Solution Engine (WLSE) and their Wireless Control System (WCS)... BTW, the first is their autonomous AP solution manager and the later is their lightweight AP solution (LWAP) managment system. Just as an added note... the CCNA, CCNP, CCDA, CCDP all cover "basic" wireless technology now. I know first hand... I teach it. As a parting comment I'll simply say I work with all the wireless technology, I personally engineered and setup several wireless ISP networks. My own network runs a Cisco 2106 Wireless Lan Controller (WLC) and several LW1130APs for a complete wireless mobility solution including handheld ip phone technology, In-band Network Admission Control (NAC) Intrusion Prevention Sensors (IPS) and a complete integrated monitoring solution (Cisco MARS). I feel it needs to be stated clearly that wireless networks "NEED" to go beyond simply being wireless! Is there any other vendor that offers a complete fully integrated solution such as this?

kind regards, jk

I have had to take the Cisco Adv Wireless exams previously for my employer (for discount purposes primarily). I will tell you that I was really disappointed. It was full of mistakes (typos and really awful questions). Their online curriculum (40 hours of it if I remember right) only covered about 50% of the actual exam questions. It provided little to no value in my profession and OTJ tasks. In short, if you don't need this for partner discounts, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

I'm pleased to hear that they took a new approach and (hopefully) learned from their mistakes. It sounds like it. They have an actual book to study from now. What a concept!

Like I'm sure many of you, I have several of Cisco's certifications and I do value them greatly for their OTJ and educational value. As far as wireless, CWNP has had some of the biggest impact to my job and academic background on the 802.11 standard. Vendor details change from year-to-year and is simply maintenance. Anything focused on the standard itself allows you to deal with any vendor's product and is something you'll ALWAYS have with you.

To reinforce, I highly endorse Kevin's comments about the value of the CWNA and CWSP and of course the CWNE. You can leverage these certifications for vendor neutral certifications like Aruba, Cisco and others. In fact, I commend Aruba for requiring CWNP's certifications in order to obtain their vendor-specific advanced certifications. That says to me that they want you to understand the basics of RF and the 802.11 protocol in order to tap into their implementation of it.

Hmmmm, perhaps something other vendors might want to consider...