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.

We Shouldn’t Need Wyebot, But We Do

Just a taste of the Wyebot UI

Wireless network systems are expensive- like insanely expensive- and they are only one part of a given enterprise network environment. You can spend top dollar on market-leading WLAN hardware, switches, RADIUS servers, DNS and DHCP systems, Active Directory resources, security stuff and more You can have veteran IT craftspeople design, install and configure it all- and still have problems that are not only hard to solve but also hard to even start looking at when an end user tells you they aren’t happy. It is what it is, and many of the built-in tools that SHOULD help don’t do a particularly good job when you most need them.

Enter Wyebot.

I’ve been dipping toes in the Wyebot waters for a few years now, and was happy to see the Massachusetts-based company presenting at Mobility Field Day 8. Through the years I have been less than impressed after testing other 3rd party sensors and monitoring overlays (excluding 7signal, whose methodology I find to be quite effective), as false alarms are the norm and the systems frequently become just another high-cost glass of pain to ignore shortly after implementation.

I’ve personally found Wyebot to work well in effectively characterizing the WLAN space it operates in, exposing all of the WLAN-oriented details a wireless admin needs to know about. What’s there? How are the SSIDs configured? Where is contention and the potential for trouble? Which Wi-Fi networks are deviating from best practices? That’s the easy stuff. It also does highly-reliable synthetic testing that you define (one area where other sensors just don’t get it right) to help tell when any of the non-WLAN parts of the network are misbehaving in ways that frequently tarnish the WLAN’s reputation. I like the information delivered from the monitoring of spectrum, client behavior, and testing of upstream network resources. I find Wyebot to be a force multiplier in that it watches and ACCURATELY reports on what I care about when my pricey wireless system can’t natively get it done.

All network problems feel wireless to wireless users.

I particularly like that Wyebot not only has a robust packet capture capability for problem analysis, but you can also import wireless pcap files taken outside elsewhere using Wireshark on a laptop (just one example) and display that capture through the graphical Wyebot UI for Wyebot’s analysis of that capture. I also like that I can do wireless backhaul from the Wyebot sensors if needed.

The company is generous with free trials, and has some interesting case studies that show how organizations are using the solution.

Have a look at the Mobility Field Day 8 presentations by Wyebot. Also, see my past blogs about Wyebot here,

Well-designed and maintained wireless networks ought to not need outside tools to help keep them running well. Unfortunately, WLAN professionals know that we live in a very imperfect world. Unfortunately, not all of those outside tools are particularly effective, but I personally like what I get out of Wyebot.

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.

Fortinet Leads With Security at Forti-Field Day

You are the reason
I’ve been FortiWaiting for so long
Some FortiThing holds the key
And I’m FortiWasted
And I can’t FortiFind my way home

(Apologies to Steve Winwood there.) Having watched Fortinet do their thing at Mobility Field Day 6 as a delegate at the event, I was struck by a handful of realizations:

1. Fortinet faithfully gets their message of security-at-every-level out with each presentation. On this point they are remarkably consistent and articulate.
2. They have a product line that is expansive beyond what I tend to think I know of the company- from hardware, software, monitoring, and performance measurement, they are generally on par with anyone else in the game.
3. The company continues to buck the trend of licensing the living shit out of EVERYTHING, like their competitors tend to do. In this regard, Fortinet has not flushed their customer empathy chip down the toilet as others have, and their execs aren’t out writing BS-blogs explaining to customers how being gouged with endless micro-subscriptions is somehow innovative.
4. They overplay the Forti-prefix to the point of FortiDistracting from the FortiMessage. I personally FortiStruggle to FortiFocus during the FortiPresentations. That may just be me, but I’m guessing it’s not, for whatever that is FortiWorth… (hmmm… reminds me of a George Straight song- Does FortiWorth Ever Cross Your Mind?)

Where Fortinet can be FortiFrigginExhausting in their FortiSpeak, I cannot say the same about their security messaging- the company does a solid job of weaving their security priorities through the product narrative without overplaying it. You’ll see the focus on security in all their MFD6 presentations. Given the daily spate of network breeches in the media these days, you’d be a FortiChump not to listen.

For their bits and pieces, I like this slide that summarizes their various network building FortiBlocks:

FortiStuff

Without even watching any of their presentations, this graphic gives the un-FortiFamiliar a sense of the robustness of their offerings. But there’s a heck of a lot more to the FortiStory, so I do recommend watching the presentations.

Having seen a couple of other vendors present before Fortinet, I realized when the FortiAiOps session unfolded that the notion of “AI Ops” is one of those “all the cool kids are doing it” things that every vendor has to have to compete. That’s not to throw dirt in any way, it’s more of a statement on where the industry is right now- AI has become a fact of life as an important underpinning of various solutions, but is still new enough to be held up to the light as if Zeus himself gave birth to it. I’m glad Fortinet has a hand in the AI card game, too.

We all have our own frames of reference, and to me Fortinet is still somewhat exotic in that I don’t see a lot of their wireless gear in my own corner of the world. I do know colleagues in other areas that use Fortinet, and also truly appreciate several Fortinet employees as just awesome people. With the likes of Wi-Fi 6/6E, AI in the house, and many customers considering how to evolve their WLANs (and frequently being tired of the incumbent vendor) all potentially catalyzing market shifts, perhaps we’ll see more Fortinet in more places in the days to come. They certainly are equipped to compete and do have interesting differentiators, from what I can see.

I Friggin LOVE You, NetAlly LANBERT

His name was LANBERT and he came from the west
To show which cables sucks and which are best
With a push of a button it’s doing it’s stuff
Hopefully for mGig the existing wire is enough…
Oh looky there, this one passes just fine
That LANBERT just saved us money and time

–Ode to LANBERT, by Wendall Pissmont Jr

There’s a new Bert in town… forget about Reynolds*, Bacharach*, and that whiny neurotic muppet from Sesame Street. Them cats is yesterday. NetAlly has recently introduced LANBERT (at Mobility Field Day 6), and if you are in the business of network wiring then you should pay attention.

This was easily one of the more thought provoking sessions of MFD6, says I. Let’s set the stage: you have an installed cable base, and are migrating access points to Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, and at long last we hopefully will see the massive throughputs that WLAN industry marketers have been telling us we should expect for years… like to the point where the old reliable 1 Gig uplink may not cut it. Do you need to replace that cable to get mGig performance?

LANBERT to the rescue! There should be no mystery when it comes to cabling performance capabilities. Many of us grew up knowing the value of cable certification testing, and now the free LANBERT app adds a much needed evolution to the notion.

Working with NetAlly’s Etherscope nXG and and LinkRunner 10G portable analyzers, LANBERT “generates and measures the transmission of line rate Ethernet frames over your network cabling infrastructure, qualifying its ability to support 1G/10G on fiber and 100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G on copper links.” You are proving what an installed UTP or fiber run can really do despite what a certification report might say, without needing a standalone certification tester.

Test that existing cable for mGig before the new AP goes in, and don’t assume that “old” runs can’t support the new speeds.

I’ve long beaten the drum that the physical layer is critical to good networking. I’ve always viewed each part of a structured wiring system as it’s own component, worthy of note when it comes time for labeling, troubleshooting, and yes- performance testing. I’ve seen old cable work surprisingly well, and new cable disappoint for a number of reasons. There is simply no reason to guess how UTP and fiber will perform FOR REAL, with LANBERT. It’s the shizzle, baby!

View this fascinating Field Day presentation here.

*Yes, I know these dudes are actually named Burt and not Bert. Shut up.

VenVolt 2- Power to the (Survey) People

Hello wireless friends,

My name is VenVolt 2. I’m soon to be sent by the excellent folks at Ventev to assist you with your wireless site surveys in those situations where you need to power an access point. If you caught Mobility Field Day 6, then you saw Ventev Product Line Manager Chris Jufer introduce me… it’s a little daunting being shown off, but I can handle it. I was born for this role- some of you probably know my dad, VenVolt 1:

VenVolt 1

The Old Man still has his own magic, and quite the following. But we all know the drill… everything changes. If you get lucky, the change is for the better- and that’s where I come in. Here’s my profile pic, in case you missed it:

VenVolt 2

I’m sleek, I’m sexy, and I got the juice. Ventev learned a lot from my pappy, and I’m proud to be his follow-on in the product line. V1 uses Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, but I’m LiPo, baby! V1 was also a bit of a porker at 4 1/2 pounds, but I go a svelt 2.2 pounds for you less macho types. And I’m rated at 26,400 mAh- just at the edge of legal airline carry-on. I charge in about 3 hours, and will power an AP for around 6-8 hours, depending on model. I could go on, but I’m already bragging a bit so maybe I’ll just show you some specs.

But first I gotta tell you- they are shipping me with this very cool bag!

You can already see the benefit there, I’m guessing. It’s not just a protective case for my handsome finish, it’s also an accessory at survey time when you need to attach me to something. (Think safety, says I.)

Now back to some specs and application notes from my demo reel. I think you’re gonna like what you see… Look for me around late September or early October of this year. Meanwhile, feast your eyes on this goodness:

VenVolt 2 by Ventev, ports, etc

I trust that you dig it? Of course you do. Because you’re smart and good-looking, too. Or maybe just smart, as I take a second look. But what matters is that I’m (almost) here for you, and you’re gonna want to make sure we get together for your Q4 surveys. I’ll see you then.

Hugs,

Ventev’s VenVolt 2

Mist Systems Has an Advantage- but Also Gets a Yellow Card

Now the race is on
And here comes pride up the backstretch
Heartaches are goin’ to the inside
My tears are holdin’ back
They’re tryin’ not to fall
My heart’s out of the runnin’
True love’s scratched for another’s sake
The race is on and it looks like heartache
And the winner loses all
-Sang by George Jones

Though events like Mobility Field Day 6 may not be typically thought of as being contests, I can only imagine that those participating from the vendor side feel the competitive heat. The spotlight is on, the dollars to participate have been spent, the camera is rolling, and there is a tight window to differentiate your offerings and approach from the rest of the pack- all while a group of delegates interrupts your presentation and peppers you with questions. Success is measured by Twitter conversations, blog posts, and ultimately sales numbers. As a long-time Field Day participant from the delegate side of the paradigm, I can’t help but think that Mist still has an advantage of sorts when they present. I’ll explain that here, but will also point out that cockiness can sometimes cost you based on one comment made by Mist during MFD6.

The Mist Advantage

Mist was a late-comer to the mature WLAN industry, being founded in 2014. But those involved with starting the company are hardly newcomers to the game, and they have done a good job of making a start-up extremely relevant in a competitive market. I’d dare say they have been disruptive. And of course they were bought for a zillion dollars by Juniper. So what is The Mist Advantage when it comes to these presentation-oriented events?

Their short history.

Sure, they have decent technology, and even if you get tired of AI-everything in the company’s messaging, that is obviously working for them. But it’s what Mist DOESN’T have that’s just as significant to their appeal: they don’t have years and years of messaging fog and technical bloat to overcome. Their story is still fresh, and when you sit down to listen to them, your mind doesn’t involuntarily think about their long history of bugs, frequently changing “campaigns” and named networking frameworks, and all the ways customers have been frustrated with their licensing and support. Because… that history doesn’t exist yet.

The irony with Mist is that many of their key corporate players have come from companies that DO suffer from the effects of simply having a long history, and were likely personally responsible on some level for at least some of the baggage left behind at the companies they left. Such is life in Silly Valley, and I applaud anyone who recreates themselves and learns from the past.

How long will the Mist story remain untainted by it’s own longevity? This will be an interesting question to watch play out. But I have yet to hear of any customer switching FROM having a Mist WLAN to a legacy vendor, and the continual development of products and underlying magic is impressive on Mist’s part as evidenced by what you’ll see in the MFD videos.

Yellow Card Thrown

I recommend that anyone interested in Mist or wireless networking in general watch the Mobility Field Day videos from the company’s presentations. These folks know their stuff, and the enthusiasm is palpable. But I do have to call out one thing that didn’t set well, and sounded maybe a bit beneath the Mist Team.

The day before Mist presented, Aruba Networks showed their Wi-Fi 6E AP630, a fairly ground-breaking offering that brings real-world networking in new 6 GHz spectrum to the wireless space. For months now we’ve all been giddy about 6 GHz being made available for use by the FCC, so Aruba giving the world an early 6E AP and being able to show what it does in a controlled environment is a good thing.

I’ve heard every single vendor so far at Mobility Field Day 6, including Mist, say things like “you gotta start somewhere” or “this is just our first step towards blah blah blah”- reasonable utterances for companies who need to innovate or wither. So when the topic of 6E access points came up and Mist seemingly slighted Aruba for putting out a lowly 2×2 6E AP while Mist has nothing to show yet in 6E, it seemed a bit low-brow. The comment was noticed by a few other folks out there as well, and I’m curious your take on this if you happened to catch the dialogue.

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.

Celona Tees Up Bigtime on CBRS

Private 5G networking has been discussed a lot over the last year. Engineers and installers are getting trained on design, installation, and support. Though it’s not exactly a new topic, it is still fairly exotic. It’s like we’re all kind of waiting for CBRS to take some big, meaningful step forward that signals “OK, it’s really finally here. Really, like for real.” With Celona’s latest news, that big step has arguably just been taken.

Back in February of this year, I pondered on the past and short future of CBRS in this blog. I’ve gotten to know Celona (the private mobile network company) up close and personal at Mobility Field Day events last year and in 2020 and through a number of private briefings. From where I sit, the entire CBRS and Celona thing has been kind of a slow simmer- waiting for things to break open and get real.

We’re there now.

Platform, Products

Celona is ready to rock and roll the CBRS-hungry enterprise crowd with all the makings of a build-it-yourself 5G networking solution. The details are here, but the short version goes like this- product components of Celona’s integrated solution architecture include:

Celona RAN: Indoor and outdoor CBRS LTE access points built for Enterprise environments. They provide up to 25K indoor sqft and 1M outdoor sqft of coverage. Radio functions are fully automated via Celona software with their power level and frequency channel assignments in the CBRS spectrum, no manual configurations required.

Celona Edge: Private LTE/5G core Enterprise appliance that’s designed to integrate with any existing network environment. Deployable on-premises for strict SLA enforcement for local applications, within private / public / edge clouds for service scalability, or both.

Celona Orchestrator: The AIOps platform that enables remote installation of Celona’s access points and Edge software, across multiple enterprise sites. Orchestrator provisions Celona SIM cards against required device level access control policies within the enterprise network. Providing more than monitoring of infrastructure components, Orchestrator also keeps track of application and device KPIs for Celona MicroSlicing™ (think QoS on steroids, but there’s more to it than just that).

Everything you need to build your own private 5G environment.

Aruba Networks Partnership

Celona has also formed a partnership with Aruba networks, who will sell Celona gear where a given customer is looking for not just Wi-Fi but also private mobile networking. Given Aruba’s lofty position in the WLAN space, this is a good thing for Celona as they set out to conquer this new market.

A Fat Wad of Series B Funding Never Hurts

Not that further validation that Celona is doing things right is needed, but one could argue that the cash the company has just secured is another indicator that industry is taking both Celona and their new tech solution seriously.

There are some decent folks at Celona that I’ve known in different roles at other companies, and it’s exciting to see them move their collective vision forward. I’m looking forward to seeing how this unfolds for Celona, the fledging CBRS industry, and for the customers about to go down this road.

See the new Celona Platform.

Ventev Products Make the WLAN Better

As I watched the Ventev presentations being delivered as a delegate at Mobility Field Day 5, I couldn’t help but think of my own positive experiences with the company’s antennas, enclosures, and site survey power supply products.

A quick aside- if you didn’t realize: Ventev=Terrawave=Tessco. All same-same. It is what it is.

Problems Solved.

To me, Ventev has frequently been the answer to “We got a unique wireless network situation, we need a unique solution” scenarios. Sometimes i’s a mounting issue, other times its a question of pushing signal in a specific direction. One thing I LOVE about Ventev in this era of hyper-complicated WLAN systems, licensing, and code bugs is that their products play in the “No BS zone” of wireless networking. You need a thing, you need that thing to work right and for a very long time, you pay for it once, and you enjoy the fruits of making a good choice. 

That zone is getting smaller when it comes to enterprise WLAN, sadly… as the space ventures deeper into Marketing And Gratuitous Complexity That We Can License The Hell Out Of Above All for certain vendors. Thankfully Ventev  is outside of those games, and will be an important player in reliably putting the icing on any vendor’s wireless cake.

A Look Behind the Technical Curtain

I have made my share of antennas. Some have worked fantastically, and some were complete duds. I’ve been doing Wi-Fi since the early days, when making your own Pringles Can antenna for 2.4 GHz was a thing, and have been a licensed amateur radio operator (KI2K, Extra Class) for longer. Pieces of wire, coaxial cable, copper pipes,  threaded rods, and all sorts of bits and pieces have been fashioned into antennas by my my hands. When you make your own then test for performance, you get a different appreciation for antennas that do what you want and need them to.

During the Mobility Field Day 5 presentations, Ventev gave us feel for how they approach antenna design, then iterate that design for whatever important criteria is in play. For example, sometimes an antenna is big, sometimes it is small with the same general coverage- this comes about by manipulating wavelength fractions and other parameters to end up with similar electrical characteristics despite antennas having different dimensions and shapes. Modeling the designs is imperative, and Ventev uses the very cool CST suite for that.

There is a lot more to Ventev’s presentation at Mobility Field Day 5, and I don’t want to give it all away. Suffice it to say that they are an important player with a lot to offer to any WLAN environment, and to be familiar with their offerings is to be equipped with what you need to make your wireless projects more successful.

Here are the links to Ventev’s sessions at MFD5:
– Not All Antennas are Created Equal
– Antenna Innovation With Dennis Burrell
– Taking the Telecom Closet Outdoors