2019 in Review

What a Year!

2019 has been a wild ride for NC-Expert! We started the year by becoming a CompTIA ( comptia.org) partner in our own right. Until 2019, we had offered authorized classes through our partners but, in early 2019, we became a direct partner and can now offer these classes using our in-house team of instructors. We were thrilled to be granted this partnership.

Once again, we renewed our sponsorship of the WLA – the Wireless LAN Association – an association for professional wireless engineers. We support its mission of providing an invaluable service in the Wireless Network industry. The WLA’s main goal is to create a set of peer-reviewed standards, backed by some of the biggest names in the industry. In addition, it aims to create, and open, a dialog between the regulators-and-manufacturers of wireless networking equipment and the “boots on the ground” – the engineers who are responsible for making everything work in harmony. In fact, because we believe so strongly in the WLA’s mission that our CEO, Rie Vainstein, accepted an invitation to become CEO of this voluntary organization!

In 2019, we were pleased to present our fledgling Kali Linux Bootcamp and Deep Dive at the WLPC Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and again (by popular demand) in Prague, Czech Republic! We have been overwhelmed by the positive responses received and look forward to offering this course to the general public as we progress into the New Year.

We continue to work with our partner CWNP ( cwnp.com). Through our Instructor Team Lead, Phil Morgan, we were able to help CWNP create its new CWSP course which, since its release in September, we have been pleased to regularly present to our students.

We have spent a good portion of our year working diligently with our partner, Cisco ( cisco.com), to author a portion of its brand-new portfolio. We are extremely excited to see the release date coming closer and look forward to teaching many more students and helping them progress in their chosen careers!

Cisco has plans to renew its entire portfolio in February and has been working with partners, including ourselves, to complete the task within the next month – an exciting time, with many new possibilities for our clients!

We are looking forward to an exciting New Year and expect to create new innovations to help our students achieve their knowledge goals.

===
If you would like to learn more about how NC-Expert can help train you, or your IT team, toward a better future,  contact us TODAY  !

The post 2019 in Review appeared first on NC Expert.

NC-Expert Blog

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.

Wi-Fi Myth Series - Myth #13: Mesh is ALWAYS the Best Solution

By Rie Morgan • September 10, 2026
Mesh Wi-Fi has developed quite the reputation: Need coverage in the far end of the building? Mesh. Can’t get Ethernet to an access point? Mesh. Dead spot upstairs? Mesh. Need Wi-Fi in the warehouse, courtyard, annex, garage, loading dock, or that mysterious conference room where RF signals apparently go to die? Mesh. And there’s a reason for the enthusiasm. Mesh networking can be extremely useful: it can extend connectivity into places where running cable is difficult, expensive, disruptive, or simply impossible. Modern mesh systems can dynamically select paths, recover from connectivity changes, and provide remarkably capable wireless backhaul... but that doesn’t mean mesh is automatically the best architecture. Sometimes the best mesh network is the one you don’t build!