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.

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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  !

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NC-Expert Blog

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!

Wi-Fi Myth Series - Myth #12: Auto Channel Selection ALWAYS Knows Best

By Rie Morgan • August 28, 2026
Automatic Channel Selection sounds like one of those features we should simply be able to trust: the APs monitor the RF environment, the Controller gathers data, an Algorithm considers interference, utilization, neighboring APs, channel availability, and other metrics, then Radio Resource Management (RRM) does its “thing” and selects the best channels. Wonderful! One less problem for the wireless engineer to worry about... except RF rarely cooperates with anything quite that neatly! Modern RRM systems are remarkably capable, and automatic channel selection can dramatically simplify the management of large wireless environments, but an algorithm can only make decisions based on the information it collects, the parameters it has been given, and the objectives it has been designed to optimize. That makes automation a powerful engineering tool. It does not make it the engineer.