The Cisco #MFD12 Slide That Overloaded My Brain

There it is. It’s just another marketing slide in the grand scheme, yet it kinda spun my mind out. Why? Let’s just explore WHY, shall we?

There is a LOT under the hood

All of the Mobility Field Day 12 videos are here, by the way. Watch them. They are worth watching for a number of reasons. But back to that one slide… As I watched the Cisco presentation being made, this introduction to their latest APs hit me like a big ol’ wave washing up hard against the rocks of my enormous cranium. You got your ACCESS radios (This is an ACCESS POINT after all), you got your AI/ML SCANNING radio, you got your 802.15.4 IoT radio, and you got GPS. But wait- there’s more! Whatever “CONTAINER HOSTING” amounts to in this context, you got that, too. And Ultra Wideband. And a couple of 10 Gig Ethernet ports.

Shazam.

Back in the day, an access point was a simple bridge betwixt 802.3 and 802.11. How very far we’ve come. And that’s where the internal tension for me, as a WLAN professional of a certain vintage, started as I tried to process it all.

What if I don’t need or want it all?

I sincerely applaud Cisco wireless product managers for what they are packing these days, alongside with Wi-Fi 7. As a technologist, I can’t help but get all aflutter over that rich feature set shown on the slide. But there are many voices in my head, and the realists and cynics in that group get their say, too.

What if I just want simple client access? And maybe some spectrum health mojo? I have to buy all the other stuff, I would imagine… or is it all licensed separately? But I still gotta buy the whole hardware platter just to get the specific enchiladas I want, yes?

And let us not forget that we’ve got many, many years doing “old” Cisco wireless on WLCs… Cisco isn’t exactly shy about making sure their customers get plenty of bugs on occasion as they play Code Roulette. All those AP features gotta equal more bug opportunities, no?

License, license, license… (This was a chorus of lunatics, kinda chanting like something out of a Pink Floyd song.)

OK- shut up , you voices.

Will it all fit in a single glass of pain?

Again, I have been a looooong time Cisco WLAN customer, back before LWAPP, CAPWAP, give a dog a bone became fashionable. I watched Aironet APs become AireOS APs after Cisco bought their way into lightweightedness, and then feared for the worst when they also bought my beloved cloud networking company. I’ve watched WLSE become WCS and then that become Prime Infrastructure on the management side, and have often marveled at Cisco’s ability to both increase costs from one management platform to another while also bloating it up with stuff I don’t need, want, or trust. (I speak for me and me only here, if you like PI and Spaces and DNAC, etc- more power to ya).

So I can’t help but wonder how all of this feature goodness gets effectively managed as it gets bigger in scope. I have no doubt that Cisco has a good answer to that, but we just didn’t get there in the allotted time at MFD12. Maybe for current Cisco wireless customers, it’s already all known. I admit my ruminations on the topic come from a place of ignorance, as I capped my Cisco WLAN journey at the 8540s and opted not to press on with 9800s, DNAC, etc. (I remain a Meraki branch customer and cannot speak highly enough about that. And yes, I still fear that Cisco will somehow take Meraki down an unpleasant path even a dozen years after the acquisition.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if standards were like… standard?

Ever buy a Mist AP and connect that to a Ubiquiti switch? Someone has… and it worked. And so did the Aruba switch connected to the Extreme router. And the Extreme switch connected to a Fortinet firewall. On the wired side of networking life, you can get away with all sorts of inter-vendor connectivity stuff. Ethernet is Ethernet, routing is routing, blah blah blah. I remember when Cisco’s LWAPP morphed into standard CAPWAP and naively thinking “woo, woo. Now it gets interesting. This new standard is gonna let me put Vendor A access points on vendor B’s controllers if I want because STANDARD.” Then my dad came in the room and told me the truth about the Easter Bunny and wireless “standards”.

So let’s say I’m not a Cisco wireless customer. But I watch the MFD12 videos and I get all fuzzy about wanting in on that weapons-grade feature goodness. It’s not like I can just get an AP and plug it into my existing system. The WLAN industry is built on vendor-lock and hyper-proprietary business models and architectures (no slight intended to those freedom fighters in the OpenWiFi trenches). Which means… as cool as those new Cisco APs are, your choices are to switch vendors to use them or to admire them from afar. That’s just the WLAN world we live in.

For me, even though I won’t be buying those new APs (unless one of them finds it’s way into my Meraki branches, but then I have no idea if I get all the features), I can honestly say that I was blown away by that slide.

Cisco Questions After Mobility Field Day 12

I found my self transported back to Field Days gone by when Cisco started their presentation at Mobility Field Day 12. They dug right in talking about access points and under-the-hood technology and the whizzybangy that is Wi-Fi 7. This was nice… I expected to be hit hard with the now-normalized AI Hype-apalooza that has become almost every vendor’s lead in the mobile space. What Cisco showed off in their Wi-Fi 7 AP offerings was impressive indeed:

As I digested the specs and the various technologies inside these APs (you HAVE to watch the recorded session, there’s just so much here), I found myself thinking damn, I can see why these things are getting so expensive, and the new APs here might actually justify their hefty list prices. Those list prices will likely be in the $2,500 -$3,000 range- and yes, that is per unit. But volume discounts, blah blah blah. My point being that I was impressed by the new models.

The latest models have the the smarts to be Meraki cloud-managed, or to go find a 9800 WLC and be old-school thin APs (that is soooooo yesterday to me, but I get that a lot of networks are still living there). The hardware is impressive. What it can do is also impressive. But as frequently happens, I felt tension building in my brainpan as the excellent Cisco reps regaled us with Wi-Fi 7 knowledge and topics like Ultra Wideband (UWB) and super-duper Ultra Reliable Wireless Backhaul (URWB) . Couple all of that with glimpses of what’s going on with the Meraki and Cisco business units combining, and questions took root in my head. But there was no way to get out all my ruminations during the MFD12 time allotted. So… here it all is for you to ponder along with me.

• What about the low end?
  These APs are obviously Cadillacs. They came to play, and are dressed to impress. But what happens at the other end of the product line? Cisco and Meraki are combined now on the data sheets, which still seems a bit weird. I have sites that don’t need half of what these new APs offer with their many technologies onboard… will I still be able to order modest, cost-conscious APs from the MR line, or will the Meraki stuff be displaced by high-end models?
  
• Licensing
  I have a long history as both a Cisco and Meraki customer, so I have a real-world frame of reference on this. topic. Meraki licensing has always been rather simple. Cisco’s licensing has always been a convoluted and frequently-changing Mongolian clusterfork. (I have sat in a room where Cisco reps stopped presenting to me and started bickering amongst themselves over what licenses and bundles were needed for various features, and they never quite agreed after a half-hour of sparring- which makes perfect sense for this wacked-out paradigm).
  
  So it goes under the Cisco sun. Smart licensing has long been the punchline to a very unfunny joke at the customer’s expense, regardless of which blue-suit guy tries to pass it off as INNOVATION. So where does licensing shake out to use all of the cool things these APs are capable of? I have to imagine it’ll stay interesting on the controller-based side. But will the famous Cisco licensing lunacy find it’s way to the Meraki dashboard? (Please, God- no.) I guess we’ll see in time.
  
• How Messy, Bessie?
  The Meraki dashboard has always been pretty clean, and in my esteem quite effective. Systems like DNAC and Prime Infrastructure have always struck me as quite the opposite. Like somehow being overwhelmed with visual bloat and features you never use are equated to value because the trend is just to get more and more complicated over time. The same basic question applies here as with licensing- will the Cisco-side trend for hyper-complexity in the UI find it’s way to the Meraki dashboard either in general or to take advantage of multi-technology features from the new Cisco APs? Or will the dashboard stay clear of endless footnotes and things that most of us could give two figs about?
  
• UWB, huh?
  I found the UWB presentation to be fascinating, as I am well familiar with the basics of the technology but somehow didn’t realize how far it had come for tracking and location stuff. I’ve also not heard any other vendor mention using it in their APs. BLE seems to be the default in this direction, but UWB is fascinating. I have much to read on this, including what the additional radio technology does to PoE requirements on the various AP models.
  
• URWB, huh?
  It’s ool to see this application being brought into the new APs instead of needing stand-alone models that do URWB. But is there enough use to warrant making it something you have to pay for at the development level when you buy one of the new APs if you don’t use URWB? How nichey is URWB in the grand scheme? I understand it’s use cases in manufacturing and such, but am curious how that is quantified against the overall WLAN landscape. I’m throwing no dirt here, just showing my ignorance and declaring an area where I need to learn more about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Cisco at Mobility Field Day 12. It was informative, educational, and fairly unpretentious. That’s refreshing among the tidal wave of AI-oriented marketing that is the current trend when vendors start talking.

What’s Bothering Me About Nile After Mobility Field Day 12

I have no beef with AI- except when it’s overhyped. I have no issue with cloud-managed networking- I’ve been using it for years, with multiple vendors. Let’s get those points out of the way before I lay out a couple-few concerns rattling around in my brain after attending Mobility Field Day 12 and hearing what Nile had to say.

Now before Drew Lentz launches into an orgasmic rant about how delightfully wonderful it is that Networking as a Service (NaaS) seems to be trying to gain traction with the likes of Nile, Meter, and Ramen, let me say that I’m not outright panning the concept on principle at all. A lot of what Nile presented was fascinating, and I will likely do another blog just on the technical side of their presentation. But for now, this is just about how I see potential issues with NaaS (as Nile presented it- I have yet to really see a Meter or Ramen presentation) in some scenarios.

TCO Pitches Are An End-Around to the C-Suite

I’m approaching 30 years in the networking space, and have worn almost every hat imaginable along the way. I’ve been in many, many “lower your TCO!” meetings. and most of them were targeted canned pitches aimed at getting the bean-counters’ attention while not really examining the realities of the environment in play. It’s no secret that those who control the budget in many ways control the network regardless of their own savviness on the finer points of IT operations. I’ve also seen the results of a few independent audits that sought to determine whether outsourcing IT support that I was part of would save money, but it was proven that our in-house team was a significant value in each case.

Would that apply to all settings and IT teams? Of course not. But it certainly applies to many, where good managers have hired good technical people and solid choices in solutions have been made. We are not all interchangeable out here on the network playa. YOUR TCO story is different than MY TCO story. The overall quality of your skill pool is different than my own. Count on it. But Nile seems to be going for the whole-hog, no exceptions, WE WILL SAVE YOU MONEY tactic.

What’s that old saying? If it sounds too good to be true… I have no doubt Nile is a reasonable fit for SOME environments. I also have no doubt that it’s not a great fit for OTHER environments.

Surrender Your Network Operations to AI and a Nile Partner?

I think this is what is really bugging me when I contemplate Nile in my own sphere of operations. I’m all for AI making analysis better and identifying problems. I’m not keen on having to consult a partner who might have to run it by Nile when I want to change something in the network. Or for waiting for the finger-pointing to settle out between me, the Nile partner, and Nile when tricky issues come up.

And about that partner thing…

Part of the Nile pitch is that “your IT staff gets freed up to do other projects”… like maybe being unemployed or sending resumes to Nile partners when that staff are no longer needed because a large swath of the operation has been outsourced. Maybe shrinking the headcount is the right thing for a given enterprise- especially if they have the wrong heads in the overall count. But what about responsiveness and effectiveness when it comes to buying into the partner-as-your-network-team approach? I heard at #MFD12 that your networking success as a Nile customer is ultimately between you and your new BFF Nile Partner… I’ve done the limited outsourcing thing at times, and it’s been a mixed bag for results. It has been nice to have additional labor doing the grunt work of networking, but too often something that is supposed to be “turn-key” ends up needing frequent local in-house expertise or parallel monitoring to solve issues fast. When phones are out or cameras in sensitive spots are down, being in the partner’s queue while important systems being out are disrupting business continuity is not fun. So we occasionally end up doing what we also pay others to do because we have to- out of expedience and crisis avoidance. There’s some TCO for ya, Bunky…

But if our C-suite has “freed us up to work on other projects” and we’ve moved to a model where the partner is the crisis resolver, then we better have a damn solid partner or our TCO actually goes up while we lose money waiting for them to figure out our issues. We have no control over their skillsets, work ethics, or understanding of what makes each one of our environments unique. We have no insight into what their relationship with Nile REALLY is like. We’re talking grand-scale LEAP OF FAITH stuff here. (Leap away, Drew- you magnificent bastard.)

It’s Not Either/Or

I did find the Nile approach to be quite interesting and even compelling in spots. I can easily see them being a potential fit for my branch locations scattered around the US and in Europe. (But even as I type those words I realize that doing that would require me to find partners in multiple states and countries- as opposed to me just configuring everything in the Meraki dashboard and having the network components drop-shipped to someone on the far end that can follow directions on hooking it up.) I can see the potential appeal of Nile where I don’t have an established, effective network team- like in my branch offices where my topology needs and network sophistication tend to be pretty simple on balance. But for “the big network” where new requirements might pop up weekly, with the unimaginable-to-some mix of client devices I have in play, and where response is usually measured in minutes or hours, I have a really hard time contemplating placing the fate of tens of thousands of clients in the hands of a partner. I also cannot imagine needing to negotiate a desired config change in my environment with a partner or even Nile. God forbid the AI overlord doesn’t agree with my request.

More to come on Nile from me.

And Drew knows I love him.

Something Old, Something New- A Geezer Looks at Mobility Field Day 12

I’m a delegate for Mobility Field Day 12, and am writing this a week ahead of the event. There are two vendors presenting, but both have an interesting connection. As I contemplate just the companies as I think I know them, I’m struck by the notion of Legacy versus New Approach. Read nothing into that- Legacy isn’t always bad and New Approach sometimes isn’t great. I’m certainly looking forward to what Cisco and Nile each have to say at MFD12. but pre-presentation contemplation is inevitable. Here’s where my head is at right this second.

Something Old in this case is Cisco. They have been in the wireless (and therefor mobility) game since way back in the day when they bought Aironet and this thing was new and sexy:

That was right about when dirt was invented. Cisco would go on to produce new access points for every 802.11 standard as they rolled out, and they made the jump to “lightweight” and controller-based WLAN with the acquisition of Airespace in 2005. Then in 2012, Cisco bought Meraki to get cloudy when all the cool kids realized cloud was the shizzle. Now today, we see see Cisco is set to End of Everything their once-flagship WLC controllers and the AireOS-based products while they also try to shoehorn their current generation Cisco-side wireless products into the Meraki framework. There’s a lot going on, and has been with wireless at Cisco for many, many years. While trying to leverage the Meraki Magic for full-stack cloud-management, they are also still trying to get revenue from the controller crowd where they can while perpetually coming up with new and innovative ways to license the holy bajeezuz out of everything and anything. I’m looking forward to what is new and exciting from Cisco.

Then there’s Nile. Something New in my narrative, Nile is pretty fresh to the network industry scene and is trying to push Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) as The Next Big Thing. It’s interesting to me, being a network geezer, that the Nile product web pages are far more about saving you TCO costs with NaaS than they are about product specifications. I *think* that you are supposed to be buying “don’t sweat it, we’ll bring in the right stuff and you don’t need to worry about what that stuff is” and eliminating the need to scrutinize data sheets and find the right models for yourself. If you dig, you’ll get to the models in play, but they aren’t the lead story. And Nile appears to not just be wireless but maybe full-stack with “service blocks”. I’ll know more when I hear their presentations, but I can maybe see why this model is threatening to network architects and engineers if that’s the angle.

Now here’s the interesting part- if you look at the Who’s Who at Nile, you’ll find many People of Title that used to be at Cisco. I have sat through several Cisco “lower your cost of TCO!” meetings through the years, where those looking to lower my TCO never bothered to ask what my TCO actually was- the whole premise was built on canned assumptions that made for nice marketing but generally fell apart in spots pretty quick when examined through the lens of reality. Is the drumbeat of “Lower your TCO!” by Nile just being played by ex-Cisco players who were fond of the same marketing strategy at the Big C? Or is Nile truly onto something new and valid? I suppose white box hardware might help with lower costs, but now I’m speculating. The Nile presentation should be interesting, and even maybe provocative.

Did I mention that I’m a geezer? Almost thirty years in the industry makes you think about things maybe a bit differently than the vendors would like, but us geezers have our own frames of reference and we’re stuck with them.

Quality Access Point Mounts From WiFi-mount.com

When it comes to accessories that sperate excellent WLAN deployments from lesser ones, access point specialty mounts are at the top of the list. I have learned of a new vendor in the space of late, and I’m glad I did. The company may be based in Europe, but they also do business here in the US. (Look for the toggle in the upper right of the web page to see dollars versus euros pricing as you browse the various mounts available from Wi-Fimount.com.)

I was recently contacted by a rep from CODE MASCHINE GmbH- the Hamburg, Germany company behind the Wi-Fi-mount brand. A few weeks later, I have samples in hand for evaluation here at Wirednot HQ. Though I have a variety of wireless and LAN hardware making up my home office and test network environments, I opted to use Mist AP41 and AP43 models to get a sense of the Wi-Fi Mount offerings’ usability.

In play specifically:

• Industrial light ceiling bracket
• Horizontal wall mount bracket
• Combined mount for AP and patch antenna

The first two are installed and doing their thing, the third one has been a victim of my getting COVID and not feeling like doing much. But it will go into service in my barn at some point, where as the other two are each in a different garage at my humble compound that serves as my real-world lab.

First impressions after unboxing the mounting brackets? Well-made. Good fit and finish. Sturdy. Easily paintable. Lighter than some I have handled in similar form-factors, but no less robust. The three I have are just a few from the bigger product line, so it’s worth perusing the company’s web pages.

Here’s my custom-wrapped AP43 on the Industrial light ceiling bracket. (Don’t judge my technique, everything here at my place is “temporary” with frequent moves, adds, and changes.)

Installation of the bracket itself and the AP on the bracket is quick and slick, Daddy-o.

The horizontal wall mount bracket was set up fast to make the point, but it also proved itself with little effort. The installation screw/bolt holes are well-configured for flexibility, and its very easy to work with the AP and the uplink cable with the bracket as it opens nicely for access after it’s mounted. I can picture any number of use cases for this bracket as I use it here among the disorder of my test environment

I’ve learned through the years that AP orientation is important even when using “built-in omni antennas”. Some access points are far more omni than others, and getting the APs off of the wall with the right bracket can make a big difference in WLAN cell performance, especially where the environment isn’t particularly densely covered.

It’s always nice to have another supplier to choose from, and I’m pleased with what I see in this product line. It’s also interesting to read where the parent organization sees it’s place in the Wi-Fi world:

netMeter- A New Network Analyzer Hits the Market

That little blue cube-looking thing may be modest in appearance, but it is pretty robust for network performance testing. It comes from a Korean company called NEXTLab, and the product name is netMeter. (Also see the Korean product page here.) I’ve been kicking tires on the netMeter in pr-release here at Wirednot HQ deep in the heartland, and have found it to be well-designed, easy to master. and pretty useful for common wired network analysis tasks.

Comes in Two Flavors

I’ve been testing the 1 Gig model, which is pretty small- like two Raspberry Pi’s stacked on top of each other kinda small. There is also a 10 Gig model available UTP-interfaced model- like so:

Features and Functionality

The short answer to “What does it do?” is it connects to the LAN then on out to the Internet, where you control it via a web page that looks like this (at the time of writing) on a laptop:

The netMeter UI also plays well on mobile devices:

From there, anyone involved with networking can grasp the navigation options. I didn’t have cause to exercise the IPTV testing. I’m also freely admitting that I was not familiar with TWAMP after 27+ years in networking, but I did run through pretty much the rest of it repeatedly. In NEXTLab’s own words:

Whether you need to ensure that your network connection complies with Service Level Agreements (SLA) or need to collect all measured data, netMeter is a precision network measurement device designed to support you throughout your network tasks.

That is a pretty fair description of how I would quantify the tester as well. It has a nice history function of past tests that is easily viewed, and I did suggest that it would be nice to schedule tests at specific times or intervals. The company seems receptive to feedback so we’ll see where that goes over time.

Pricing Model

Remember that it’s early in the platform’s rollout, but the early pricing on the website shows some innovative thinking on the part of NEXTLab beyond the base cost of $299 per individual 1 Gig tester:

Impressions

Whether the envisioned use is for a tester that you can take with you as roam from environment to environment in your support duties or as a long-term in-place tester (like put one in every branch site), I found the netMeter to “feel” professional and consistent in it’s performance. The UI is effective and complete, yet easy to use. As mentioned above, some interval-based testing or test scheduling would add value, but at this price point the lack of those features isn’t a show-stopper.

The netMeter is generally a WAN/high-level network tester and does it’s job very well. It would be a nice compliment to a more granular LAN-oriented portable tool like the Netool.io which gets down into the nitty-gritty of individual switches, VLANs and switches and such.

I’m assuming that purchase price gets you some sort of hardware warranty on the netMeter, but I did not discuss that with NEXTLab specifically.

More Information

Public release is scheduled for July 1 of this year. NEXTLab can be reached here for more information.

See a video review from Network Advisor here.

NetAlly Does it Again- LinkRunner Gets a Boost

There are network tools, and then there are the must-haves that distinguish themselves above the rest of the pack. Those that greatly reduce time spent and the fog that comes with network troubleshooting stand out. Then there are the rare unicorns that instantly demystify the situation with minimal learning curve. To me, that is the rarified air that NetAlly tools tend to play in with their network analyzers- and the LinkRunner handheld testers are absolutely included. NetAlly has just announced updates to the LinkRunner product line that modernize the platform’s features while also adding a slew of new capabilities.

Rather than just give the feature list (which we’ll do in a bit here), let me boil down THE VALUE of the LinkRunner AT in practical terms.:

• In skilled hands, the LinkRunner AT quickly answers a wide range of “OK, what’s going on here?” questions as they pertain to minimally Layer 1, Layer 2, and Layer 3 so an engineer can rule problems in or out as they troubleshoot- up to 10 Gbps.
• When used by a lesser-skilled troubleshooter, detailed results can be saved to LinkLive so off-site experienced eyes can see what’s going on.
• Problems with cabling, speed and duplex, POE, and other lower-layer concerns are REPEATABLY identified with a proven set of tests that remove guesswork and allow for all techs and engineers to approach problems uniformly. There should be zero mystery when troubleshooting networks, but it takes the right tools to achieve that.
• The LinkRunner AT offerings include the AT 3000 and AT 4000- with the latter also providing advanced network insights that include packet capture, highly-detailed network discovery and topology mapping, iPerf capabilities, and automated problem detection.
• As with the latest AirCheck and EtherScope models, the LinkRunner ATs have access to a wide range of optional applications through the easy-access app store, so you can customize the tester far beyond it’s out-of-box feature set.
• The devices can be remotely controlled over the network.

Add in decent battery life and the option to add a wireless adapter, and this list is the quick and dirty of what makes me a believer. I have been kicking the tires on the AT 4000 and am finding the ability to reliably test PoE up to 90W to be extremely welcome on modern switches, and I have fast gotten hooked on just clicking a couple of icons to have impressive amounts of information presented that tell the story of the network under test.

By the way, If you haven’t used LinkLive yet with NetAlly’s tools, you are depriving yourself of a free, powerful repository and device management resource.

Feature sets are best and most completely described in Net Ally’s own words. So here are the product links:

AT 4000
AT 3000

Needless to say, I continue to be a fan of NetAlly’s tools. They tend be very well thought-out, moderately rugged, fairly priced, and very well supported. I’ve been fortunate to not only use NetAlly’s products on the job, but also to have talked with product managers at the likes of Mobility Field Day and WLPC, and they are passionate about what their products can do for the network professional community.

And now… some screenshots from the LinkRunner AT 4000 at Wirednot HQ for your eyes and brain to get excited about!

The Not Fun “Juniper Has Been Acquired By HPE” Blog

Before we talk about Juniper (and Mist, specifically), let me take you way back in time to another acquisition.

I wrote that article back in 2012 after several great years of enjoying Meraki as a pioneering cloud-managed network vendor at the same time I was dealing with endless bugs in Cisco’s wireless controllers and APs. The cultures of the two companies seemed so different- Cisco tends to be cavalier (in my opinion) about bugs especially in their WLAN related code sets, and customers are very much an extension of the QA process whether they want to be or not. Code roulette is a fact of life, and disruptive frequent remedial code upgrades and engineering builds were also a fact of life back then. By contrast, Meraki generally worked well, and when trouble rarely hit, support was extremely responsive.

Since the acquisition, Cisco gave Meraki an extremely long leash to seemingly operate mostly independently (at least from the customer perspective). They are only just now getting around to consolidating business units, switches and access points and pushing even legacy management towards the cloud dashboard. It needs to be noted that the Cisco Catalyst/Aironet and Meraki lines and customer bases were far enough apart in function and philosophy that there was room for both to remain generally unsullied by each other for more than a decade.

Now on to HPE purchasing Juniper.

Unlike the Cisco/Meraki experiment that let customers on both sides breathe easy for so many years, it’s not gonna be that warm and fuzzy with this one. For me, HPE and Juniper more specifically equals Aruba and Mist- and that facet of this acquisition makes me uncomfortable. I have no idea how it’s going to turn out where the rubber meets the road- but I do know that as a Mist customer I did not choose Aruba as a vendor (nor did Aruba customers choose Mist and I respect that). Everyday, customers are choosing Aruba versus Mist and visa versa for their own reasons and requirements.

It’s highly likely that either Mist or Aruba will dominate at the end of the sausage making and there will be pain for many of us on the leftover pile. For anyone to have a vendor you didn’t choose forced down your throat is not a tasty thought regardless of which side of this you are on as a current customer. We all have no choice but to wait this out, but from the customer side let me share some of what sucks in the meantime.

We the customers were never asked.

I’m getting a bit fried on seeing one talking head after another pontificating about how this acquisition somehow creates “greater choice” for customers. That implies we want “greater choice” which will actually be LESS choice in the end. Just shut up already on that- we’re not that stupid out here in the networking wilds. We selected what we selected after RFPs and product trials and “greater choice” in the future is just empty BS in this discussion. A clever marketing phrase brings no comfort while we all wait to see how badly our cheese will both be genetically altered AND moved once it all plays out. Don’t believe me, Mist and Aruba execs? Survey your customers. Other than internal evangelists (and zealots) who are thumping their chests about which company is better and will “win” in the end, there aren’t a lot of people that I’ve spoken to that are particularly energized about this whole thing.

Vendor messaging only adds to the tension.

In typical vapid marketing bullshitspeak, HPE promises “accelerated value” from the acquisition. Juniper makes it sound like their AI was the sexy milkshake that brought HPE to the Juniper yard. Some headlines out there seem to push the point.

But then there’s that Aruba evangelist who frequently posts on X taking potshots at everyone else’s AI while touting Aruba’s own, and has only stepped up his salvos since the purchase was announced.

The “mic drop” is from Neri implying that Aruba Central will subsume Mist’s AI and that somehow Aruba Central’s customer numbers prove it’s the right thing to do (?) Yet in other announcements the Mist exec team will supposedly lead the integrated business unit when all the dust settles- so Juniper’s AI must be better (?) AI, AI. AI… blah blah friggin blah. So did HPE buy Juniper because it has better AI despite the passions of their own insiders? On that topic, I need to say something…

Newsflash: AI is a building block and not THE PRODUCT in network access systems. I’m here to tell you that a vendor’s glossy can spin AI to be the grand solve-all, yet their code can be endlessly problematic, and their reporting and support UIs- you know, the daily important stuff to keeping networks running- can still suck ass. I’m talking about no specific vendor here and multiple vendors at the same time. Babies are being thrown out with the bathwater and customers are suffering from AI overhype while the important but unsexy basics of usability and stability aren’t being prioritized in spots.

Speaking of posts on X- Sam the Man Clements hit this whole mess right on the head here:

Nothing is gonna change- we promise! But it’s not a promise you can can count on…

Then there’s the general industry covering media…

And the pundits…

The rest of the year is gonna suck.

It wouldn’t break my heart if this acquisition is blocked, but I doubt it will be. Which means customers on both sides of the deal get to just wait and see what is to come of it all. Small environments that don’t like the results can fairly easily jump ship and go to Cisco, Extreme, Fortinet, or whoever else is out there as alternatives. Large customers (outside of the government who gets to spend everyone else’s money) don’t have the luxury of simply scrapping thousands of access points (modern APs list for over $2K apiece these days, but that insanity is fodder for another blog) and the rest of their access environments, and so many will absolutely have to take whatever’s coming whether they like it or not. That in itself creates enough anxiety- but piled on top we now get to spend the rest of 2024 hearing meaningless promises of accelerated value and tit-for tat proclamations of which vendor is “better”, along with the business-side analysis that spins the pending deal as wonderful or terrible depending on who is pushing the message.

Fun times.

Not.

OMG! Friggin Wi-Fi 7 is HERE! (Sorta)

Are you ready to get like 46 Gbps over Wi-Fi?

ARE YOU?

Because if you’re not, well, you’re just a big fat loser. You gotta know that Wi-Fi 7 is buckets of wireless awesome that will friggin rewrite the ENTIRE STORY of Wi-Fi as we know it, Jack!

Or not.

Big News from the Wi-Fi Alliance

All that silliness aside, today the Wi-Fi Alliance announced it’s Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7™ program. I also spoke with Kevin Robinson, the Alliance’s CEO, late last week about the news. Kevin is rightfully excited about the promise of Wi-Fi 7, but as a geezer who has been at this kind of juncture a few times before I can’t say that I’m all in. Kevin did share a bit about the benefit of the certification testing process in providing a modicum of “your product needs to support these specific things to wear our Certified 7 logo”, and the Alliance’s members will certainly benefit from the PR generated by the alliance.

But we’ve been here before, no?

Wi-Fi 7 is Interesting. But…

Let’s slow down the hype train for just a bit here. First, realize that “Wi-Fi 7” has no basis in any published IEEE standard, and it is the IEEE that defines the Wi-Fi standards- not the Wi-Fi Alliance. What the Alliance has decided to call Wi-Fi 7 is actually the 802.11be DRAFT standard. It’s not ratified yet. It’s not “here”, even though the Alliance is doing their CERTIFED 7™ thing.

That’s just how the WLAN industry goes… a lot of weird nuances. Speaking of weird nuances- the Alliance and it’s members are getting ready to promote the living hell out of 802.11be, and features like:

• 4K QAM
• 320 MHz wide channels
• Multilink MLO
• and more
  
  There’s not a lot of value in me creating yet another technical overview of these features, so let me refer you to Intel’s decent explainer. if you breeze through the Wi-Fi Alliance’s press release and the Intel Wi-Fi 7 tutorial, you might find yourself getting really jazzed about it all. Unfortunately, all is rarely what it seems in the world of Wi-Fi, where being a marketer means you get to live a fast and loose lifestyle often decoupled from reality.

I didn’t ask permission to use the response from the WLAN sage who gave it on X, so I chose to anonymize him or her for this blog. But this person is one of the single loudest and most articulate voices in the WLAN industry. The response reflects the skepticism that many of us feel when it comes to Wi-Fi 7.

With every single new standard, THE MARKETERS go right to the high end of what the standard technically allows under ideal conditions and with theoretical top-end hardware on both the infrastructure AND client sides, and they tend to promote the loftiest of numbers as if they were going to be the norm for everyone just by buying new products.

Newsflash: Wi-Fi 7 will be better, but it will be a fuzzy, hard-to-quantify kind of better. There are too many variables. For example, smartphones will stay at two spatial streams for the foreseeable future, but Wi-Fi 7’s biggest and sexiest numbers are based on the client and access points doing a whopping 16 spatial streams. And those 320 Mhz channels and 4K QAM? Neither will be commonplace. Both are more or less unicorns.

So what will be better about Wi-Fi 7?

MLO might be interesting- if it works. Meaning, if the many, many vendors that are part of the WLAN ecosystem can get it right individually.

More clients using the 6 GHz spectrum will be good thing. That’s an easy one.

Data rates and latency should be improved across the board, and client device battery life should also benefit. How do you reliably measure these beyond saying they will be better? 

You really can’t and have it be meaningful. Especially this early on.

What ISN’T Improving With the Wi-Fi Alliance’s CERTIFED 7™ Program?

Unfortunately, operational zingers that have caused us pain from the WLAN operations side for 20+ years don’t change with the new standard or the Alliance’s certification program. It’s still up to the vendors to define how their client devices roam, for example. There is still no clean delineation between Enterprise and Consumer client capabilities, but that line is palpable on the access point side and so Consumer-grade client devices brought into the Business WLAN can be a colossal pain in the ass.

Put it all together, and there ain’t nothing new under the wireless sun.

Related: I recently talked with David Coleman about the future of Wi-Fi. That’s right- David COLEMAN. I run in those circles, you realize.

Contemplating the 2024 Wireless LAN Pros Conference

With 2024 fast approaching, my thoughts are on the February WirelessLAN Professionals Conference (WLPC, for you hipsters in the crowd). We’re looking at the tenth incarnation of this awesome event, which I can only describe as the singular best tech conference I have ever attended.

What do I like about WLPC? For starters, it’s wireless-focused. Under the heading of “wireless”, it’s mostly about Wi-Fi but with enough variety on other wireless topics to keep it interesting. It’s also a conference BY wireless people and FOR wireless people- with very little vendor influence in the mix. The majority of all presentations are by women and men who make their living DOING wireless, and not by sales folks pitching products. The breadth of the content is amazing, and those who will attend the event vote on submissions sent in by those who have something to say.

Like… me.

This year. I’ll be doing two talks- one on the “rules” of Wi-Fi that sometimes you gotta break in the real world, and one on the topic of changing vendors. Over the years, I’ve done a number of presentations, panel discussions, and even led a couple of deep dives. Each has been a privilege. Then there was this back in 2018:

And that was humbling, to say the least.

WLPC is also a fantastic opportunity for those of us who don’t get to a lot of other events to see old friends and to make new ones. It’s an intense few days, with a great mix of content, hands-on activities (I’m doing the Flipper Zero deep dive this time), and socializing with a profoundly diverse range of people. I treat every one of these events as “this might be my last one” and so try to take nothing for granted.

Maybe next year there won’t be budget for travel on my end… or COVID version 19 could scrap the event… or I could have health issues or schedule conflicts… or my books could take off and make me a millionaire (in which case you can all just kiss my arse, if I forget to say it at the time)… Few things in life are guaranteed, so I place great value and appreciation on every wireless-related thing I get to do whether it be conferences, webinars, articles, or good conversation with people who can make me think. But among all of that, WLPC is uniquely wonderful.

While the wireless industry itself continues to change, and those of us in it evolve (or age out), the reliability of WLPC is comforting, and is easy to look forward to. Hopefully I’ll see you there.

And no- they didn’t pay me to gush, so shut up about that.

Learn more about WirelessLAN Professionals here.