Now as I love working from home, and being able to crawl out of bed and be at work in 5 minutes, I know of a number of people and businesses that are ready to head back to the offices. Plus there are all the industries that can not work from home.

So it was nice to see at Mobility Field Day 5 a theme between both Cisco and Mist on how to utilise their location services to answer questions for a business to ensure COVID compliancy.
These ranged from fairly basic space density usage, effectively how many people are in a zone to how many people are allowed under COVID guidelines, right through to contract tracing.

So lets take a look at what each vendor was doing to help businesses ensure COVID compliancy and help them return to some sort of normality sooner.

We will start off with Mist (A Juniper Company):

So the big difference between Mist and Cisco is that Mist utilises both WIFI and Bluetooth (utilising their BLE directional antenna array) in order to provide there location services. The technical considerations that Mist see is the difference between using WiFi vs a BLE Badge vs a Mobile App were also discussed.

Mist see 3 key areas to reduce the risk when returning to the campus being:

• Congestion Alerting – Alert if too many people in a zone
• Journey Mapping – Where an infected person when over a period of time
• Proximity Tracing – Who else was in the area of an infected person who might be exposed

Mist also came up with the ability to provide a QR code for users who don’t have the companies APP installed to scan when they enter the building to be able to give them congestion indications of the building in real time.

You can watch the full presentation from Mist below

Cisco:

Cisco’s solution focuses around Cisco DNA Spaces. You might remember Cisco CMX which was there on-premise has now been replaced with DNA Spaces which is a cloud location service.

Cisco sees four areas of using DNA Spaces to help us get back to the Campus:

• Safety & Compliance
• Location Analytics
• Contact-Less Experience
• Operational Efficency

Like Mist Cisco also has a proximity reporting to show where users were and who they were in contact with.

To watch the full presentation by Darryl Sadeen:

There was also a article in the IEEE Spectrum from a company that I have worked with here in Australia called Nexulogy on how they are using wireless location services to enhance what vendors like Cisco and Mist are providing to answer questions to allow companies to return to the campus:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/wireless/want-to-return-to-campus-safely-tap-wifi-network

The common theme between all Mist, Cisco and Nexulogy is by utilising Wireless location technologies it can allow businesses to answer questions which can allow them to get back to the physical work place in a COVID world quicker and safer than without it.