The survey tool industry finds itself at an inflection point. Gone are the days of Ekahau's monopoly on stable, fully-featured Wi-Fi survey tools. We are starting to see healthy competition with each vendor coming up with differentiators from the rest. One of these new kids on the surveying block is Sidos Systems. Their product consists of a Sidos Cloud online tool and the Sidos Wave, the physical capturing device. They let me take the product on a test drive and I have a LOT of thoughts.
Ground Rules
I surveyed about two whole floors of high-density office space with medium user congestion on-site. Many offices/rows I intentionally skipped to see how the device estimates coverage now and later with the AI portions of the too. I have a few years experience with mostly Ekahau Site Survey, but not the newer AI Pro flavor. I have only tried the planner portion of Hamina and not their survey tool. Occasionally, I survey for my own interests, but no longer survey day-in, day-out like my consultant days.
The real test for this is something like what Mark Houtz presented on at WLPC here. It seems like the dev team is responsive and easily corrected the cloud hiccups in that video. I'm not willing to knock Sidos for capacity testing yet considering the long history of glitches and stability problems I've experienced or heard with other tools. (Use your imagination)
Likes
My favorite attribute of the Sidos ecosystem is how easy it is to use. All I did was add floorplans to a new project, scale and align them, download the iPhone app and then scan the QR code to survey. Just plug the device in with the USB C cable and that's it. No log ins, no loading licenses, no selecting channels etc. The phone navigation is also easy by "moving the map" though I required a little guidance to figure that out.
Furthermore, the Wave is much lighter than I expected. It's 483g or 1 lb 1 oz to be exact. By comparison, the Sidekick 2 weighs 1080 g (2.4 lbs) and the Oscium Nomad weighs 415 grams (0.92 lbs). It's also oddly more inconspicuous than I thought given the different shape. I surveyed the whole area without getting stopped which is....better than normal for me.
I also like how the data gathering itself feels engineer friendly. The wave device feels responsive. You can actually isolate to the data points taken along your walking path for all APs or per-AP. Sidos Cloud shows the "hexagon" view by default so there is not guessing whether the pretty green area is real or extrapolation from a too distant data point. This recent post from their CEO and Founder, Mika Hakala, shows they're committed to stress testing the Sidos Wave's collection ability.
One last attribute I noticed during the survey is that APs on adjacent floors that I had not surveyed yet were already sorted into "unassigned APs" instead of being dumped on the current floorplan.
Challenges
Some Cloud UI features could be more user-friendly. For example, add exclusion areas uses a light gray color and thin lines that make it really hard to see. When adding floorplans, there are two arrows and a number field that I presume is the ceiling height, but a "hover over" tooltip would make this inarguable. Aside from that, the Cloud UI was easy to use during my tests.
More importantly, I think the Sidos Wave is the newest of the three tools I'm comparing today. That said, there is not complete feature parity with its competitors. This feature parity includes three key items: customized reporting templates, a packet capture tool, and a spectrum analyzer tool. These are all items that add value for the MSP segment when performing surveys for customers. At this time, it's not 100% clear what's on the roadmap vs not intended for this products use case. All I can say is that Ekahau offers all those things for more money and Hamina offers customized reporting with a soon-to-be added spectrum analyzer at a similar price point.
Cost Drill Down
As of today, a 1-year subscription including use of the Cloud software, Wave hardware, and up to three Cloud users costs 2988USD. Let's compare that with it's two main competitors: Ekahau AI Pro with the Sidekick 2 and Hamina Planner with the Oscium Nomad/Onsite App. All prices are in Freedom Dollars 💸🦅🇺🇸 (USD) in December 2024.
Vendor | 1-Year Subscription Cost | Survey Tool Cost | Users Included |
Sidos | 2988 | Included with Cloud | 3 |
Ekahau* | ~3000-8000 | ~4000-7000 | 1 |
Hamina | 1560 | 1710 | 1 |
*Apparently, Ekahau does not publish their product prices. These prices are to the best of my recollection from 2+ years ago and some internet sleuthing with secondhand vendors. 3000USD is the lower end for the survey only license whereas 8000USD is the higher end for AI Pro +Connect Subscription with Spectrum Analyzer, Packet Capture etc. I am suspecting the price can be up to 8k, but possibly less depending on your agreement with Ekahau. Likewise with the Sidekick 2, these are rough ranges for used and new devices so 4000USD on the low end and 7000 USD on the high end. Hamina price is for Planner, not Planner Plus. Sidos has no limitations on the number of people that can use the Wave tool for surveying; the license is for the cloud viewing tool.
My speculation is that Sidos is better for a team of engineers surveying for their own company as opposed to an MSP situation. If the engineers report to the same location, there's an opportunity to reduce cost. When I was an MSP, logistically shipping APs was enough of a nuisance; a lot of engineers would go down kicking and screaming before sharing the survey tools too. For example, I've had one day's notice for validations on-site (usually high priority troubleshooting) before. Imagine I have to trust another person to overnight a box or even worse, go drive somewhere far away from the customer site to get the survey device.
Future Product Direction?
Recently, they've hinted at some new tools with Sidos AI as well as direction to add applications to the Wave device. As much as I'm tired of hearing about AI, I'm genuinely enthused with one particular part of Sidos AI. At the Wi-Co D.C. event recently, they showed off the ability for the AI to create precise wall attenuation measurements from collected survey data. If you have ever tried to estimate attenuations yourself, you then know how tedious and chaotic gathering RF measurement can be. As for the apps, there isn't a lot of detail on what these entail yet. My fantasy world idea is running a battery of tests against common applications that experience issues such as video calling.
I like the vision of making surveying an easy task that anyone can do and the hardware matches the use case. A consultant could ship this device to a customer having problems, they could walk the building haphazardly and you can likely get good enough results for your purposes.
However, this goes squarely against the perception that surveying isn't just "walking and clicking". This device, given the ease of use and hardware potential, has the most interesting potential of the survey products I've seen so far. Getting there with the current perception of tools may be an uphill battle especially with the feature parity against other survey tools.
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