Important CCIE Update

Cisco CCIE Training Update

This is a special notification for NC-Expert’s CCIE Candidates.

We have learned from Cisco that it expects to refresh its entire portfolio in February 2020.

We strongly urge all CCIE Candidates to prepare to complete their studies and sit their respective lab exams by the end of 2019, latest.

We understand that there will be limited opportunity for Candidates to sit lab exams in the early weeks of 2020, however these seats will be severely limited.

For candidates anticipating completing their studies, please contact us at your earliest convenience so we can conclude our part in your training.

NC-Expert cannot be held liable if Candidates choose to delay completion of their training because, at this time, Cisco has provided no information about its continued instructor-led offerings.

As a result, NC-Expert cannot confirm that it will be able to continue to offer Cisco’s own instructor-led CCIE training after February 2020.

The post Important CCIE Update appeared first on NC Expert.

NC-Expert Blog

Wi-Fi Myth Series - Myth #16: The Controller Knows Best

By Rie Morgan • October 7, 2026
A beautiful dashboard doesn't necessarily mean a beautiful network. There is something wonderfully reassuring about a wireless LAN controller dashboard: everything is neatly organized; access points are green; clients are connected; channel assignments look sensible; the controller reports that Radio Resource Management (RRM) is optimizing the environment; and the health score is sitting comfortably in the high nineties.... life is good. Uhmm... except that users are complaining about dropped calls, sluggish applications, and mysterious connectivity problems. But the dashboard says everything is fine! Welcome to Wi-Fi Myth #16: The Controller Knows Best. Modern wireless controllers are remarkably sophisticated. They collect enormous amounts of information, automate complex decisions, and provide visibility that engineers could only dream of a couple of decades ago. But there's an important distinction between collecting information and understanding what's actually happening in the RF environment... and that's where things get interesting.

Wi-Fi Myth Series - Myth #15: You Can Always Troubleshoot Wi-Fi Without a Packet Capture

By Rie Morgan • September 30, 2026
Modern Wi-Fi systems give us an impressive amount of information. Dashboards show signal strength, channel utilization, retry rates, client health scores, roaming events, application performance, access point statistics, and enough colorful graphs to make almost any troubleshooting session feel reassuringly scientific. And all of that information is useful. I’ll freely admit that most Wi-Fi problems can be investigated without immediately reaching for a packet analyzer. But “most” and “always” are very different words. There comes a point when a Wi-Fi engineer has to stop asking what the dashboard thinks happened, and start looking at what actually happened over the air. This is where packet captures enter the discussion. A packet capture is not required for every Wi-Fi problem. If an AP has lost power, you probably don’t need Wireshark to confirm your suspicions, but when the problem involves association, authentication, roaming, retries, retransmissions, connectivity, intermittent performance, or strange client behavior, packet analysis can turn speculation into evidence . Sometimes, you simply need to see the conversation, and what really happened, to resolve the issue.

Wi-Fi Myth Series - Myth #14: One Speed Test Tells You Everything

By Rie Morgan • September 16, 2026
We’ve all seen it happen: someone reports that the Wi-Fi is slow. A speed test is launched. The little needle races across the screen and, a few seconds later, an impressive number appears. “See? 600 Mbps. The Wi-Fi is fine.” Case closed. Except, of course, it isn’t. A speed test can be useful. It can tell you something about the performance experienced by a device at a particular location, at a particular moment, using a particular test server and network path. What it cannot do is provide a complete diagnosis of Wi-Fi health. That distinction matters because throughput is only one part of the user experience.