Arista Numbed My Brain at Mobility Field Day 8 (and not in a good way)

I hesitated a bit about writing this blog, in the spirit of “if you can’t say something nice…”. And we all know that when someone says “no offense, but…” the rest of the statement is likely going to offend. But I’ll take my chances here, and start off by saying I really DON’T want to offend, and the following opinion is just that- my opinion. As for the individual gents from Arista who presented at Mobility Field Day 8, you won’t find nicer folks. Jatin Parekh, Kumar Narayanan, Nadeem Akhtar, Pramod Badjate, and Sriram Venkiteswaran are obviously extremely intelligent and also passionate in their presentations. They collectively bring great credit to the House of Arista.

Now on to my frustration (did I mention that I am well aware that this is just MY OWN opinion?). Funny things happen to the time-space continuum when you are involved with a technical presentation. As a presenter, there often isn’t enough time to say and show everything you’d like to. As a consumer of the content on the other side of the table, time sometimes flies by because you are so engrossed in what’s being presented, and hours feel like minutes that you don’t want to end. Other times minutes feel like someone stretched each one by a factor of 10X as you try to not drift off to your happy place to escape the presentation that can’t end soon enough. Unfortunately, I was really struggling to stay locked on to Arista on this go round.

What happened for me here?

I’m fortunate in that I’m a many-time Field Day delegate who gets to occasionally hang out with the very women and men who define and shape the networking industry. That is truly a gift. The other side of that privilege is that sometimes a given vendor’s latest presentation can sound and feel a lot like the last one, if you have done a number of Field Days. That is not the vendor’s fault, but it is where I found myself on this outing.

Even though many of the words and topics were different than my last go round hearing Arista present at a wireless or mobility Field Day event, the vibe was the same. To me, it felt a mile wide and an inch deep for the most part. There was waaaaaaaay too much about Cognitive Everything and just not enough on the topic of wireless. I’m probably guilty of assuming I’d hear mostly about wireless-specific topics, but by the time we finally got there I was fairly done in. I found myself thinking the following random thoughts:

• Arista bought Mojo, and Mojo was AirTight before that
• I have yet to meet anyone who ran AirTight or Mojo wireless, and still have yet to meet an actual Arista wireless user (Arista data center networking is a whole different story)
• Often, Arista refers to a giant wireless environment in India as did Mojo, but that’s hard to get energized about given the previous bullet
• Arista isn’t the only Mobility Field Day vendor to do the “Let’s introduce the whole freakin portfolio and all of our marketspeak, and if you’re still awake at the end we’ll touch on a little bit of wireless” approach, but I was primed for differentiators. Like what is truly compelling about the mobility side of the Arista house these days?
• Can I use Arista wireless if I don’t have Arista switches and don’t want to do VXLAN? If so, how?
• Too much dashboard talk is smothering, I tellya
• Come on…. where’s the radio stuff? Where’s 6E?
• Where are your real-life WLAN-specific success stories?

You get the point- I personally didn’t get much out of it. As people we’re all wired differently, and I’m guessing some of my fellow delegates maybe have a different take on the MFD8 Arista presentations. But for me, I just could not get into it. Yet I know that Arista HAS to be doing cool wireless stuff where the rubber meets the road- where real wireless devices connect to the network and no one gives two figs about Cognitive Whatever.

I very much want to see Arista back at future Field Days whether I’m a delegate or watching at home, but I’d also like to see them shake up their formula a bit. Put more Mobility in your Mobility Field Day presentations, says I.

Reading this, I feel a bit like a jerk having written it. So be it- I mean it constructively and I stand behind it.

The Thing About Ventev

Having just participated in Mobility Field Day 8, I got to spend some quality time with Ventev– during which I had an epiphany of sorts. We’ll get to that in a moment.

I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in many of the Field Day events through the years. They know me out there in Silly Valley where vendors and Field Day delegates come together and discuss industry trends, new products, what works and what sucks, and so on.

Being a veteran Field Day-er, I understand the routine. Vendors present what they want the world to know, delegates ask questions and make comments to dig deeper or provide criticism (some constructive, some because often the vendors can be decoupled from the reality of what end users actually need). How effective a Field Day is depends on (in my opinion) how effective the vendors are at following the guidance given to them for their presentations by Field Day management, and the quality of the delegate’s questions and comments. There are human beings involved on both sides of the table, and sometimes one side or the other just makes a given presentation laborious. Maybe boring content is offered a mile wide and an inch deep, or perhaps a given delegate just cannot shut up as they enjoy the sound of their own voice as they redesign the vendor’s product for them in real time. Again, the human factor.

One prevailing theme from the vendor side is this: WE THINK THIS FEATURE OR THINGY IS TRULY INNOVATIVE AND SO WE WILL NOW TRY TO CONVINCE YOU DELEGATES AND THE FOLKS AT HOME SO YOU WILL PAY US LOTS OF MONEY FOR THE HARDWARE AND A SHITLOAD OF LICENSES BUT YOU MAY NOT IMMEDIATELY SEE THE VALUE SO WE GOTTA WALK YOU THROUGH IT WHILE WE HOPE YOU DON’T ASK TOO MANY QUESTIONS THAT COULD CUT INTO OUR STORY AND HENCE OUR BOTTOM LINE.

Nothing new here.

Let’s get back to Ventev, shall we? I promised you an epiphany.

So I’m listening to their Mobility Field Day 8 presentations about specialty enclosures, solar powered network “stations” (my word, not theirs) and antennas when a tidal wave of realization came over me. While network equipment vendors work hard to convince you that their often murky magic is worth the constantly elevating costs for what I often feel ought to be largely commoditized by now, Ventev sells fact. Ventev sells tangible reality. Ventev sells physics.

Whether it’s their Venvolt battery packs for survey work and temporary power needs or providing solutions for wireless access points to function out in the middle of Frozen Friggin Nowhere, Ventev doesn’t need to convince anyone of anything. When they talk about specialty antennas, their situational benefits are obvious and the physics of it all is instantaneously provable.

The Ventev narrative isn’t one of trying to out-AI or out-dashboard the other guy. They just make wireless environments better (or in some cases, even POSSIBLE). The Ventev story is end-to-end real, with no hype to sort through. No hyper-granular, squeeze-you-until-it-hurts-then-do-it-again-in-three-years-because-we-got-your-wallet–by-the-nuts-now licensing bullshit to hold your nose and pay for.

That is pretty sweet. And all too rare these days.

I suggest you get to know Ventev. Their presentations from Mobility Field Day 8 and earlier events are all found here.

Aruba Said the Right Words Regarding Dashboards

I wanna be a dashboard ranger
Live a life of guts and danger
I better stop before this song gets stranger…

Ah, dashboards. We got ’em these days, in quantity. We got so many freakin dashboards we need a dashboard to keep track of our dashboards when it comes to networking. But beyond dashboards, we got… AI.

That’s right- we got Artificial Intelligence, baby. And it’s teamed up with Dashboards, Inc. to make sure we have ALL KINDS OF STUFF to worry about. And maybe, if we’re lucky, some time those alerts will actually be actionable…

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m dashboard-jaded. I’ve seen many dashboards from market leaders that cost a fortune (they gotta make money, no fault there), that are fraught with Chicken-Little noise that is so overwhelming and uncorroborated by any other practical metric that they become one more Glass of Pain that gets ignored. Will AI help that? The answer will depend on how that AI is coded- like does the team behind the AI actually GET that endless petty alerts aren’t really a good thing?

Which brings us back to REAL intelligence… and Aruba Networks at Mobility Field Day 6. In particular, the presentation on what Aruba calls AIOPS– their version of system monitoring, root cause analysis, system adjustment, etc. This is something all the major vendors are doing these days, and all make sure that “AI” is sprinkled liberally in the marketing so you know that you are good to go. Unless you’re not, because the AI flags a bunch of stuff you don’t care about that takes you away from real work.

But Robin Jellum at Aruba said something profound in it’s simplicity as he presented on AIOPS… The exact wording escapes me, but Robin alluded to the fact that we all get bombarded with data. There’s no shortage of it in today’s network systems. But turning that data into MEANINGFUL alerts versus just lots of red and yellow dots to get lost in is the challenge, and Aruba recognizes that gratuitous, copious amounts of alerting on transient stuff does no one any good.

As a customer, I don’t want to buy ALERTS by the pound. I want to buy INFORMATION that comes from my data. It’s nice to hear Aruba recognize the difference. Time will tell if AIOPS can deliver.

It’s Time for YOU to Get Wise About CBRS

It stands for Citizens Broadband Radio Service, and has nothing to do with CB radio despite the similarities in the acronym. It’s time for my fellow Wi-Fi types to start paying attention to CBRS for real, and I’ll explain why in a bit.

A Quick Look Back to 2105

The CBRS thing been simmering for at least a half-dozen years. Let me quickly take you back to 2015, where I sat in on a related session at Wireless Network Field Day 8, by Dave Wright. Back then, Dave worked for Ruckus Wireless, now he’s the Director of Regulatory Affairs & Network Standards at CommScope, and President of the CBRS Alliance. Dave’s a fantastic gent, if you ever get the chance to talk with him. But even though that 2015 presentation could not have been delivered by anyone better, it still felt kinda faraway and foreign to the ears of a room full of Wi-Fi folks.

Almost There- 2019

But 2015 gave way to the future, and Dave’s vision very much would come to fruition. Sticking with Field Day, I was fortunate enough to go to Mobility Field Day 4 in 2019. This time the presenting vendor on the topic was startup Celona (new company, but staffed with some deep wireless experience and familiar names to us in the WLAN industry). At the time Celona presented, CBRS had long since advanced from being a twinkle in the eye of folks like Dave Wright, but still wasn’t quite ready for market as a production option for Private LTE and other applications. (What other applications? There’s a good paragraph on that in this Network World article.)

Early 2020- The FCC Opens the Floodgates for CBRS

Just a few weeks ago (it’s mid-February as I write this), the FCC delivered the news that everyone with a stake in CBRS, Private LTE, and in-building cellular was waiting for: the 3.5 GHz spectrum was officially available for sharing for these applications. Here’s a good article on that, along with the FCC’s own reference pages on 3.5 GHz.

Now things are moving… and we get to why we as Wi-Fi folks need to start paying attention.

Our Turf is Soon to Be Trampled On

I find the marketing blather that has 5G making Wi-Fi extinct, or that has Wi-Fi 6 making cellular irrelevant, to be pretty asinine. But then again…marketers. Whatever. It’s pretty clear that several trains have left the station, and they all will impact our environments and possibly/hopefully our employment, skills, and project opportunities.

Wi-Fi 6 is a given- it’s what comes next for us WLAN doers. 5G has new relevance given that a small cell will need to bolted up to every street light, cactus, bus stop and homeless person to get the coverage and performance that the mobile industry is promising out of Millimeter-wave 5G systems. Bringing 5G (or even 4G) inside of modern RF-unfriendly buildings gets us back to discussions of CBRS and private LTE. And so does the notion of industrial settings where maybe LTE-style wireless makes more sense than Wi-Fi for wireless connectivity, for a number of reasons.

We need to not only understand the changing wireless landscape, but also to embrace it and try to stake our claims in it.

Get Educated

There are no shortage of general-information articles out there for CBRS, private-LTE, etc. here’s a great one from Corning (I just spoke with them on this topic, but that will be it’s own blog). And there is certainly a lot of marketing floofypoo to be stepped around.

But if you want more formalized learning, check out this offering from CommScope. I have not taken it yet, but have heard good things from esteemed colleagues who have. Coursera also has a CBRS offering, and I have every reason to believe that CBRS will eventually manifest itself through CWNP’s excellent training materials in some form or fashion.

So… why care about CBRS? It’s here, for real, for starters. It’s being deployed. Someone needs to design it’s coverage, and tools like iBwave are already being used by many of us to do Wi-Fi. Why not get a piece of the new pie? If we don’t, someone else will. People are gonna luuuuuuv their Wi-Fi 6, yet are still going to demand rock-sold in-building cellular after spending fat coin on those $1K+ mobile devices and as more devices become “wireless” in every possible definition of the word.

This is the new world, my friends. Digital transformation, blah blah blah. There’s no escaping it.

160 MHz Wide Channels: Just the Tip of an Iceberg of WLAN Industry Dysfunction

What lies ahead in this blog isn’t so much a rant, as it is an analysis. That sounds classier, and implies critical thought rather than just someone bitching about things. With that in mind, I give you the following image, stolen from Matthew Seymour (on Twitter at @realmattseymour) and sourced from this year’s Aruba Atmosphere conference in Europe:

The topic of the slide is 802.11ax, but that is tangential to the points I want to make here. Read that first caveat- this requires the use of 160MHz channels, which is generally not possible or just not a good idea – wow.

I’m not sure who actually presented this session, but I’m assuming it is a trusted voice from a trusted company- Aruba folks generally know their stuff (as evidenced by their growing customer base and industry longevity). When I saw this come across Twitter, something in my mind clicked and this simple thought bubbled up:

Why does the WLAN industry do this idiotic shit to itself?

When I say the WLAN industry, I’m including the IEEE, the Wi-Fi Alliance, and the vendors that provide the hardware and the marketing of wireless networking products. Let me state the underlying problem as clearly as I can: the IEEE creates the 802.11 standards, and since 802.11n each standard has had a nonsensical top end- you simply cannot reach the high part of the spec. Evuh. The Wi-Fi Alliance does nothing to bring any sanity to the situation, and WLAN vendors build in configuration options with high-end settings that actually do WLAN operational damage and so let us create operational situations that are…

just not a good idea

Has anyone TOLD the IEEE that no one is really impressed with the promise of high end specs that can’t actually be leveraged? That it’s all a big stupid tease? Got some bait-and-switch going on here… The entire professional WLAN community knows that 160 MHz channels are…

just not a good idea

So why do WLAN vendors present 160 as an option in the UI? Why don’t the Wi-Fi Alliance and the vendor community repaint their messaging with reality-based promises of what each new WLAN technology can do? Wi-Fi 6 will STILL be impressive- but market it as if 160 MHz channels don’t exist- and watch the Sun of Truth rise over the wireless landscape (can I get a witness?).

I’m guessing some of you are thinking “you idiot, the FCC is going to give us more spectrum and then we’ll be rockin’ 160 for sure”. To that I say- pffft. I’ll believe it when I see it- and even then the ability to toggle 160- to even see it in configs- should not be a default.

The argument might also be made that “Maybe people AT HOME can use 160 MHz channels so you should shut up about it already”. Don’t go there, girlfriend. That only amplifies my beef with the Wi-Fi Alliance members who refuse to draw a clean line between Enterprise Grade gear and Wonky Shit That Plays Well at Home But Shouldn’t Be Dragged Into The Enterprise environment.

And that loops us back to the “tip of the iceberg” thing- and a couple more examples of general industry dysfunction. We have cheap printers that come up in default 40 MHz wide channels in 2.4 GHz, which also is…

just not a good idea

And an industry-wide trend where pretty much most 5 GHz gear comes up with 80 MHz channels enabled. Which also happens to be…

just not a good idea

We’re at an odd place where all the players involved are obviously aware of all the things that are

just not a good idea

yet they MARKET bad ideas and then we have to explain to those we support why we can’t really USE those bad ideas which have been marketed to us.

We kinda need our collective wireless head examined. Thus ends my analysis. 

That Which Pisses Us Wireless Folk Off- Vendor Edition

Now there’s a title. And since you’re reading this, you bit on it… Sucka. Now that you’re here, let’s share some observations from the WLAN community over the last few weeks. This is not (totally) a “Lee’s complaining again” blog; it’s more a collection of sentiments from dozens of friends and colleagues from across the Wi-Fi Fruited Plain that stuck with me for one reason or another.

Most of these observations are aimed squarely at our vendors- those who we do business with “above” as we shape their offerings into the systems and services we offer to clients “below”, with us in the middle.

You may not agree with all of these. Perhaps some of your own beefs didn’t make my list. Either way, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section. Now, in no specific order:

• Marketing claims. OK, we’re starting out with the obvious. Wi-Fi marketing has always been about hype, far-fetchedness, and creative blather. Nothing new under the sun here. I truly hope that your 10x better Wi-Fi is serving up 500 APs per client that are all streaming 62 Netflix movies each simultaneously from a range of 37 miles away from the AP.
• “Enterprise” switches that don’t stack. Stacking is neither new, nor special. Do your bigger switches stack? Is it not even an option? If not, maybe tone down calling them “enterprise”.
• Big Bucks for power cords. You got major balls as a vendor if you’re pricing garden variety power cables at $20 per.  Shame on you. Same same for PoE injectors, nothing-special antennas, rack mounts and assorted other parts/pieces that can be gotten for pennies on YOUR dollar elsewhere. C’mon…
• No version numbers. By now, we all get “cloud”. And most cloud infrastructure vendors ARE using OS version numbers as a point of reference for their customers. The absence of version numbers becomes more onerous as ever more features get added. Give us the damn version number. Do it. Doooooo it.
•  No CPU/Memory/Interface stats. It doesn’t matter what the “thing” is, or whether it’s cloud-managed or not. EVERY interface needs to show statistics and errors, and every thingy needs to show CPU and memory information. Whatever your argument to the contrary may be, I promise that you are wrong.
• Frequent product name changes. Just stop already.
• The same stinking model numbers used for everything. Why? Maybe someone has a 3 and 5 fetish out in Silly Valley. It’s confusing, it’s weird, and it’s weirdly confusing in it’s weirdness, which leaves me confused.
• The notion that EVERYTHING to do with wireless must be monetized. After a while, we start to feel like pimps as opposed to WLAN admins. I get that vendors need to be creative with new revenue streams, but it can be carried to extremes when applied to the WLAN ecosystem.
• Too many models. It seems like some vendors must be awarding bonuses to HW developers based on how many different versions of stuff they can turn out, but customers are left confused about what to use when and where and why versus the other thing down the page a bit. Variety is good, but massive variety is not.
• Complexity. This might be news to some vendors: the ultimate goals in deploying your systems for both us and the end user are STABILITY and WELL-PERFORMING ACCESS. Somewhere, vendors have lost track of that, and they are delivering BLOATED and HYPER-COMPLICATED FRAMEWORKS that place a cornucopia of buggy features higher on the priority list than wireless that simply works as users expect it to.
• Slow quote/support ticket turnaround. Most times when we ask for pricing or open a case with technical support, it’s because there is a need. As in, we need something. And our assumptions are that our needs will be fielded with some degree of urgency, as we’re all in the business of service at the end of the day. No one likes slow service. No one likes asking over, and over, and over, and over, and over if there are any updates to our need possibly getting addressed.
• Escalation builds/engineering code bugs. At the WLAN professional level, most of us work off the assumption that if we don’t typically do our jobs right the first time, we may not get follow up work and ultimately may be unemployed. That’s kind of how we see the world. I’m guessing that WLAN code developers play by different rules. ‘Nough said.
• Bad, deceitful specs. Integrity is what keeps many of us in the game as professionals. Our word is our bond, as they say. Can you imagine telling someone that you can deliver X, but then when they need X, you can actually only provide a fraction of X- and then expecting that person to not be pissed off? Why are networking specs any different? Enough truth-stretching and hyper-qualified performance claims that you have to call a product manager and sign an NDA to get the truth about.
• Mixed messages. OK, we ALL own this one- not just the vendors. The examples are many- grand platitudes and declarations that might sound elegant and world-changing in our own minds, but then they often fizzle in the light of day. Things like…
  • We need mGig switches for 802.11ac! 
  • We’ll never need more than a Gig uplink for 802.11ac!
  • 2.4 GHz is dead!
  • Boy, there’s a lot of 2.4 GHz-only clients out there!
  • We’re Vendor X, and we’re enterprise-grade!
  • Why do I see Vendor X gear everywhere, mounted wrong and in nonsensical quantities for the situation?
  • That one agency is awesome at interoperability!
  • Why does so much of this stuff NOT interoperate?
  • You must be highly-skilled with $50K worth of licensed WLAN tools or your Wi-Fi will suck!
  • Vendor X sells more Wi-Fi than anyone, most people putting it in are obviously untrained, yet there are lots of happy clients on those networks!
  • Pfft- just put in one AP per classroom. Done!
  • Cloud Wi-Fi is a ripoff!
  • Cloud Wi-Fi saves me soooo much money and headaches!
  • Here’s MY version of “cloud!”
  • Here’s MY version of “cloud!”
  • I freakin hate how buggy this expensive gear is!
  • At least those bugs are numbered on a pretty table!

It goes on and on and on. Always has, always will. Behind the electronics that we bring to life and build systems from are We the People. The humanity involved pervades pretty much everything written here, from all sides and all angles. And I have no doubt that every vendor could write their own blog called “That Which Pisses Us Vendor Folk Off- WLAN Pro Edition”.  Touche on that.

Ah well- there’s still nothing I’d rather be doing for a living.

Dear Marketers- If the Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me

I’ve had good days and bad days
And going half mad days
I try to let go but you’re still on my mind
I’ve lost all the old ways
I’m searching for new plays
Putting it all on the line

Lots of new friends with the same old problems
Open your eyes, you might see
If our lives were that simple
We’d live in the past
If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me

(“If the Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me”- Jimmy Buffet, 1985)

Ah yes… great tune. It came out in my first year serving Uncle Sam in the USAF, and I happened to be right in Jimmy Buffet’s neighborhood on the Gulf Coast at the time. I felt a connection with the song then because I was a long way from home, away for the first time. There was no way I could afford to actually call the people I missed very often, back in the days of pricey toll calls and very little rank on my sleeves to fund those calls.

Now, a hundred years later, the same song plays in my mind every time I get one of these emails:

As I wrote about here in The Wirednot Memo to PR/Marketers, I believe everyone has value. And though I’d never want to be in marketing myself, I also don’t have a lot of tolerance for “my toe in the door come hell or high water” messaging.

If I don’t answer your email, don’t expect a warm reception on the uninvited follow-up call. I’m both busy, and not interested- and I will not give co-worker’s names. If your initial email struck me as something a coworker could benefit from, rest assured that I forwarded it on to them to evaluate.

Otherwise… I’m Incommunicado.

Cheers.