Category Archives: Wireless

Painless Progress with My Ubiquiti Upgrade

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I’m not a wireless engineer by trade. I don’t have a lab of access points that I’m using to test the latest and greatest solutions. I leave that to my friends. I fall more in the camp of having a working wireless network that meets my needs and keeps my family from yelling at me when the network is down.

Ubiquitous Usage

For the last five years my house has been running on Ubiquiti gear. You may recall I did a review back in 2018 after having it up and running for a few months. Since then I’ve had no issues. In fact, the only problem I had was not with the gear but with the machine I installed the controller software on. Turns out hard disk drives do eventually go bad and I needed to replace it and get everything up and running again. Which was my intention when it went down sometime in 2021. Of course, life being what it is I deprioritized the recovery of the system. I realized after more than a year that my wireless network hadn’t hiccuped once. Sure, I couldn’t make any changes to it but the joy of having a stable environment is that you don’t need to make constant changes. Still, I was impressed that I had no issues the necessitated my recovery of my controller software.

Flash forward to late 2023. I’m talking with some of the folks at Ubiquiti about a totally unrelated matter and I just happened to mention that I was impressed at how long the system had been running. They asked me what hardware I was working with and when I told them they laughed and said I needed to check out their new stuff. I was just about to ask them what I should look at when they told me they were going to ship me a package to install and try out.

Dreaming of Ease

Tom Hildebrand really did a great job because I got a UPS shipment at the beginning of December with a Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE, a new U6 Pro AP, and a G5 Flex Camera. As soon as I had the chance I unboxed the UDM SE and started looking over the installation process. The UDM SE is an all-in-one switch, firewall, and controller for the APs. I booted the system and started to do the setup process. I panicked for a moment because I realized that my computer was currently doing something connected to my old network and I didn’t want to have to dig through the pile to find a laptop to connect in via Ethernet to configure things.

That’s when my first surprise popped up. The UDM SE allows you to download the UniFi app to your phone and do the setup process from a mobile device. I was able to configure the UDM SE with my network settings and network names and get it staged and ready to do without the need for a laptop. That was a big win in my book. Lugging your laptop to a remote site for an installation isn’t always feasible. And counting on someone to have the right software isn’t either. How many times have you asked a junior admin or remote IT person what terminal program they’re using only to be met with a blank stare?

Once the UDM SE was up and running, getting the new U6 AP joined was easy. It joined the controller, downloaded the firmware updates and adopted my new (old) network settings. Since I didn’t have my old controller software handy I just recreated the old network settings from scratch. I took the opportunity to clean out some older compatibility issues that I was ready to be rid of thanks to an old Xbox 360 and some other ancient devices that were long ago retired. Clean implementations for the win. After the U6 was ready to go I installed it in my office and got ready to move my old AP to a different location to provide coverage.

The UDM SE detected that there were two APs that were running but part of a different controller. It asked me if I wanted to take them over and I happily responded in the affirmative. Sadly, when asked for the password to the old controller I drew a blank because that was two years ago and I can barely remember what I eat for breakfast. Ubiquiti has a solution for that and with some judicious use of the reset button I was able to reset the APs and join them to the UDM SE with no issues. Now everything is humming along smoothly. The camera is still waiting to be deployed once I figure out where I want to put it.

How is it all working? Zero complaints so far. Much like my previous deployment everything is humming right along and all my devices joined the new network without complaint. All the APs are running on new firmware and my new settings mean fewer questions about why something isn’t working because the kids are on a different network than the printer or one of the devices can’t download movies or something like that. Given how long I was running the old network without any form of control I’m glad it picked right up and kept going. Scheduling the right downtime at the beginning of the month may have had something to do with that but otherwise I’m trilled to see how it’s going.

Tom’s Take

Now that I’ve been running Ubiquiti for the last five years how would I rate it? I’d say for people that don’t want to rely on consumer APs from a big box store to run your home network you need to check Ubiquiti out. I know my friend Darrel Derosia is doing some amazing enterprise things with it in Memphis but I don’t need to run an entire arena. What I need is seamless connectivity for my devices without worry about what’s going to go down when I walk upstairs. My home network budget precludes enterprise gear. It fits nicely with Ubiquiti’s price point and functionality. Whether I’m trying to track down a lost Nintendo Switch or limit bandwidth so game updates aren’t choking out my cable modem I’m pleased with the performance and flexibility I have so far. I’m still putting the UDM SE through it’s paces and once I get the camera installed and working with it I’ll have more to say but rest assured I’m very thankful for Tom and his team for letting me kick the tires on some awesome hardware.

Disclaimer: The hardware mentioned in this post was provided by Ubiquiti at no charge to me. Ubiquiti did not ask for a review of their equipment and the opinions and perspectives represented in this post are mine and mine alone with not expectation of editorial review or compensation.

Asking The Right Question About The Wireless Future

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It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a piece about how Wi-Fi 6E isn’t going to move the needle very much in terms of connectivity. I stand by my convictions that the technology is just too new and doesn’t provide a great impetus to force users to upgrade or augment systems that are already deployed. Thankfully, someone at the recent Mobility Field Day 10 went and did a great job of summarizing some of my objections in a much simpler way. Thanks to Nick Swiatecki for this amazing presentation:

He captured so many of my hesitations as he discussed the future of wireless connectivity. And he managed to expand on them perfectly!

New Isn’t Automatically Better

Any time I see someone telling me that Wi-Fi 7 is right around the corner and that we need to see what it brings I can’t help but laugh. There may be devices that have support for it right now, but as Nick points out in the above video, that’s only one part of the puzzle. We still have to wait for the clients and the regulatory bodies to catch up to the infrastructure technology. Could you imagine if we did the same thing with wired networks? If we deployed amazing new cables that ran four times the speed but didn’t interface with the existing Ethernet connections at the client? We’d be laughed out of the building.

Likewise, deploying pre-standard Wi-Fi 7 devices today doesn’t gain you much unless you have a way to access them with a client adapter. Yes, they do exist. Yes, they’re final. However, they’re more final than the Draft 802.11n cards that I deployed years and years ago. That doesn’t mean that we’re going to see a lot of benefit from them however. Because the value of the first generation of a technology is rarely leaps and bounds above what came before it.

A couple of years ago I asked if the M1 MacBook wireless was really slower than the predecessor laptop. Spoiler alert, it is but not so much you’d really notice. Since then we’ve gained two more generations of that hardware and the wireless has gotten faster. Not because the specs have changed in the standard. It’s because the manufacturers have gotten better about building the devices. We’ve squeezed more performance out of them instead of just slapping a label on the box and saying it’s a version number higher or it’s got more of the MHz things so it must be better.

Nick, in the above video, points this out perfectly. People keep asking about Wi-Fi 7 and they miss out on the fact that there’s a lot of technology that needs to run very smoothly in order to give us significant gains in speed over Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. And those technologies probably aren’t going to be implemented well (if at all) in the first cards and APs that come off the line. In fact, given the history of 802.11 specifications those important features are probably going to be marked as optional anyway to ensure the specifications get passed on time to allow the shipping hardware to be standardized.

In a perfect world you’re going to miss a lot of the advances in the first revision of the hardware. I remember a time when you had to be right under the AP to see the speed increases promised by the “next generation” of wireless. Adding more and more advanced technology to the AP and hoping the client adapters catch up quickly isn’t going to help sell your devices any faster either. Everything has to work together to ensure it all runs smoothly for the users. If you think for a minutes that they aren’t going to call you to tell you that the wireless is running slow then you’re very mistaken. They’re upset they didn’t get the promised speeds on the box or that something along the line is making their experience difficult. That’s the nature of the beast.

Asking the Right Questions

The other part of this discussion is how to ensure that everyone has realistic ideas about what new technology brings. For that, we recorded a great roundtable discussion about Wi-Fi 7 promises and reality:

I think the biggest takeaway from this discussion is that, despite the hype, we’re not ready for Wi-Fi 7 just yet. The key to having this talk with your stakeholders is to remind them that spending the money on the new devices isn’t going to automatically mean increased speeds or enhanced performance. In fact, you’re going to do a great job of talking them out of deploying cutting edge hardware simply by reminding them they aren’t going to see anywhere near the promises from the vendors without investing even more in client hardware or understanding that those amazing fast multi-spectrum speeds aren’t going to be possible on an iPhone.

We’re not even really touching on the reality that some of the best parts of 6GHz aren’t even available yet because of FCC restrictions. Or that we just assume that Wi-Fi 7 will include 6GHz when it doesn’t even have to. That’s especially true of IoT devices. Lower cost devices will likely have lower cost radios for components which means the best speed increases are going to be for the most expensive pieces of the puzzle. Are you ready to upgrade your brand new laptop in six months because a new version of the standard came out that’s just slightly faster?

Those are the questions you have to ask and answer from your stakeholders before you ever decide how the next part of the project is going to proceed. Because there is always going to be faster hardware or newer revisions of the specification for you to understand. And if the goalposts keep moving every time something new comes along you’re either going to be broke or extremely disappointed.

Tom’s Take

I’m glad that Nick from Cisco was able to present at Mobility Field Day. Not only did he confirm what a lot of professionals are thinking but he did it in a way that helped other viewers understand where the challenges with new wireless technologies lie. We may be a bit jaded in the wired world because Ethernet is such a bedrock standard. In the wireless world I promise that clients are always going to be getting more impressive and the amount of time between those leaps is going to shrink even more than it already has. The real question should be whether or not we need to chase that advantage.

Wi-Fi 6E Won’t Make a Difference

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It’s finally here. The vaunted day when the newest iPhone model has Wi-Fi 6E. You’d be forgiven for missing it. It wasn’t mentioned as a flagship feature in the keynote. I had to unearth it in the tech specs page linked above. The trumpets didn’t sound heralding the coming of a new paradigm shift. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone that even cares in the long run. Even the rumor mill had moved on before the iPhone 15 was even released. If this is the technological innovation we’ve all been waiting for, why does it sound like no one cares?

Newer Is Better

I might be overselling the importance of Wi-Fi 6E just a bit, but that’s because I talk to a lot of wireless engineers. More than a couple of them had said they weren’t even going to bother upgrading to the new USB-C wonder phone unless it had Wi-Fi 6E. Of course, I didn’t do a survey to find out how many of them had 6E-capable access points at home, either. I’d bet the number was 100%. I’d be willing to be the survey of people outside of that sphere looking to buy an iPhone 15 Pro that can tell me if they have a 6E-capable chipset at home is much, much lower.

The newest flagship device has cool stuff. Better cameras, faster processor, more RAM, and even titanium! The reasons to upgrade are legion depending on how old your device is. Are you really ready to sink it all because of a wireless chipset design? There are already a number of folks saying they won’t upgrade their amazing watch because Apple didn’t make it black this year. Are the minor technical achievements really deal breakers in the long run?

The fact of the matter is that the community of IT pros outside of the wireless space don’t actually care about the wireless chipset in their phone. Maybe it’s faster. Maybe it’s cooler. It could even be more about bragging rights than anything else. However, just like the M1 MacBook Wi-Fi, the real-world results are going to be a big pile of “it depends”. That’s because organizations don’t make buying decisions based on consumer tech.

Sure, the enterprise may have been pushed in certain directions in the past due to the adoption of smart phones. Go into any big box store and see how the employees are using phones instead of traditional scanners for inventory management. Go into your average bank or hospital and ask the CIO what their plans are to upgrade the wireless infrastructure to support Wi-Fi 6E now that Apple supports it across the board on their newest devices. I bet you get a very terse answer.

Gen Minus One

The buying patterns for enterprise IT don’t support bleeding edge technology. That’s because most enterprises don’t run on the bleeding edge. Their buying decisions are informed by the installation base of their users, not on their projected purchases. Enterprises aren’t going to take a risk on buying something that isn’t going to provide benefit for the investment. Trying to provide that benefit for a small number of users is even more suspect. Why spend big bucks for a new access point that a tenth of my workforce can properly use?

Buying decisions and deployment methodology follow a timeline that was decided upon months ago, even for projects that come up out of the blue. If you interview your average CIO with a good support team they can tell you how old their devices are, what order they are planned to be replaced, and roughly how much that will cost today. They have a plan ready to plug in when the executive team decides there is budget to spend. Strike while the funding iron is hot!

To upend the whole plan because some new device came out is not an easy sell to the team. Especially if it means reducing the number of devices that can be purchased because the newer ones cost more. If anything it will encourage the teams to hold on to that particular budget until the prices of those cutting edge devices falls to a point where they are more cost effective for a user base that has refreshed devices and has a need for faster connectivity.

Wi-Fi 6E suffers from a problem common to IT across the board. It’s not exciting enough to be important. The current generation of devices can utilize the connectivity it provides efficiently. The airspace in an enterprise is certainly crowded enough to need new bands for high performance devices to move into. But does the performance of Wi-Fi 6E create such a gap as to make it a “must have” in the budget? What would you be willing to sacrifice to get it? And would your average user notice the difference? If you can’t say for certain that incremental improvement will make that much of a difference for the non-wireless savvy person then you’re going to find yourself waiting for the next revision of the standard. Which, sadly, as the benefit of having a higher number. Which means it’s obviously better, right?

Tom’s Take

I like shiny new things. I didn’t upgrade my phone this year because my older one is good enough for my use case. If I were to rank all the reasons why I wanted to upgrade I’d put Wi-Fi 6E near the bottom of the list. It’s neat. I like the technology behind it. For the average CIO it doesn’t move the needle. It doesn’t have an impressive pie chart or cost savings associated with it. If you upgraded everyone to Wi-Fi 6E overnight no one would notice. And even if they did they’d be asking when Wi-Fi 7 was coming out because that one is really cool, even if they know zero about what it does. Wi-Fi 6E on a mobile device won’t matter in the long run because the technology isn’t cool enough to be noticed by people that aren’t looking for it.

Cross Training for Career Completeness

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Are you good at your job? Have you spent thousands of hours training to be the best at a particular discipline? Can you configure things with your eyes closed and are finally on top of the world? What happens next? Where do you go if things change?

It sounds like an age-old career question. You’ve mastered a role. You’ve learned all there is to learn. What more can you do? It’s not something specific to technology either. One of my favorite stories about this struggle comes from the iconic martial artist Bruce Lee. He spent his formative years becoming an expert at Wing Chun and no one would argue he wasn’t one of the best. As the story goes, in 1967 he engaged in a sparring match with a practitioner of a different art and, although he won, he was exhausted and thought things had gone on far too long. This is what encouraged him to develop Jeet Kun Do as a way to incorporate new styles together for more efficiency and eventually led to the development of mixed martial arts (MMA).

What does Bruce Lee have to do with tech? The value of cross training with different tech disciplines is critical for your ability to continue to exist as a technology practitioner.

Time Marches On

A great example of this came up during Mobility Field Day back in May. During the Fortinet presentation there was a discussion about wireless and SASE. I’m sure a couple of the delegates were shrugging their shoulders in puzzlement about this inclusion. After all, what does SASE have to do with SNR or Wi-Fi 6E? Why should they care about software running on an AP when the real action is in the spectrum?

To me, as someone who sees the bigger picture, the value of talking about SASE is crucial. Access points are no longer radio bridges. They are edge computing devices that run a variety of software programs. In the old days it took everything the CPU had to process the connection requests and forward the frames to the right location. Today there is a whole suite of security being done at the edge to keep users safe and reduce the amount of traffic being forwarded into the network.

Does that mean that every wireless engineer needs to become a security expert? No. Far from it. There is specialized knowledge in both areas that people will spend years perfecting. Does that mean that wireless people need to ignore the bigger security picture? That’s also a negative. APs are going to be running more and more software in the modern IT world because it makes sense to put it there and not in the middle of the enterprise or the cloud. Why process traffic if you don’t have to?

It also means that people need to look outside of their specific skillset to understand the value of cross training. There are some areas that have easy crossover potential. Networking and wireless have a lot of commonality. So do storage and cloud, as well as virtualization and storage and cloud. We constantly talk about the importance of including security in the discussion everywhere, from implementation to development. Yet when we talk about the need to understand these technologies at a basic level we often face resistance from operations teams that just want to focus on their area and not the bigger picture.

New Approaches

Jeet Kune Do is a great example of why cross training has valuable lessons for us to learn about disruption. In a traditional martial arts fight, you attack your opponent. The philosophy of Jeet Kun Do is to attack your opponent’s attacks. You spend time defending by keeping them from attacking you. That’s a pretty different approach.

Likewise, in IT we need to examine how to we secure users and operate networks. Fortinet believes security needs to happen at the edge. Their philosophy is informed by their expertise in developing edge hardware to do this role. Other companies would say this is best performed in the cloud using their software, which is often their strength. Which approach is better? There is no right answer. I will say that I am personally a proponent of doing the security stuff as close the edge as possible to reduce the need for more complexity in the core. It might be a remnant of my old “three tier” network training but I feel the edge is the best place to do the hard work, especially given the power of the modern edge compute node CPU.

That doesn’t mean it’s always going to be the best way to do things. That’s why you have to continuously learn and train on new ways of doing things. SASE itself came from SD-WAN which came from SDN. Ten years ago most of this was theoretical or in the very early deployment stage. Today we have practical applications and real-world examples. Where will it go in five years? You only know if you learn how it works now.

Tom’s Take

I’ve always been a voracious learner and training myself on different aspects of technology has given me the visibility to understand the importance of how it all works together. Like Bruce Lee I always look for what’s important and incorporate it into my knowledge base and discard the rest. I know that learning about multiple kinds of technology is the key to having a long career in the industry. You just have to want to see the bigger picture for cross training to be effective.

Disclaimer: This post mentions Fortinet, a presenter at Mobility Field Day 9. The opinions expressed in this post reflect my own perspective and were not influenced by consideration from any companies mentioned.

Aruba Isn’t A Wireless Company (Any More)

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Remember when Aruba was a wireless company? I know it sounds like something that happened 40 years ago but the idea that Aruba only really made wireless access points and some campus switches to support them isn’t as old as you think. The company, now known as HPE Aruba Networking (née Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company), makes more than just Wi-Fi gear. Yet the perception of the industry is that they’re still a wireless company looking to compete with the largest parts of the market.

Branching Out of Office

This year’s Aruba Atmopshere showed me that Aruba is trying to do more than just campus wireless. The industry has shifted away from just providing edge connectivity and is now focused on a holistic lineup of products that are user-focused. You don’t need to go much further than the technical keynote on the second day of the conference to see that. Or the Networking Field Day Experience videos linked above.

Do you know what Aruba wanted to showcase?

  • Campus Switches
  • Data Center Switches
  • Private 5G/LTE
  • SASE/SSE
  • IoT
  • Cloud-Enabled Management

You know what wasn’t on that list? Access points. For a “wireless” company that’s a pretty glaring omission, right? I think it’s actually a brilliant way to help people understand that HPE Aruba Networking is a growing part of the wider HPE business dedicated to connectivity.

It’s been discussed over the years that the HPE acquisition of Aruba was a “reverse acquisition”. That basically means that HPE gave Aruba control over their campus (and later data center) networking portfolio and let them run with it. It was successful and really helped highlight the needs that HPE had in that space. No one was talking about the dominance of Procurve switches. HPE was even reselling Arista gear at the time for the high end customers. Aruba not only was able to right the ship but help it grow over time and adopt home-grown offerings.

When you think of companies like Juniper and Cisco, do you see them as single product vendors? Juniper makes more than just service provider routers. Cisco makes more than just switches. They have distinct lines of business that provide offerings across the spectrum. They both sell firewalls and access points. They both have software divisions. Cisco sells servers and unified communications gear on top of everything else they do. There’s more to both of them than meets the eye.

Aruba needed to shed the wireless moniker in order to grow into a more competitive market segment. When you’re known as a single product vendor you tend to be left out of conversations. Would you call Palo Alto for switches or wireless? No, because they’re a firewall or SASE company. Yes, they make more than those products but they have a niche, as opposed to more diverse companies. I’m not saying Palo Alto isn’t diverse, just that they define their market segment pretty effectively. So much so that people don’t even call application firewalls by that name any longer. They’re “Palo Altos”, giving the company the same generic trademark distinction as Kleenex and Velcro.

User Face-to-Face

Aruba needs to develop the product lines that help get users connected. Wireless is an easy layup for them now so where do they expand? Switches are a logical extension so the CX lines were developed and continue to do well. The expansion into private LTE and security also help significantly, which are bolstered by their recent acquisitions.

Security is an easy one to figure out. Aruba has gone from SD-Branch, focused on people working in remote offices, to add on true SD-WAN functionality with the Silver Peak purchase, to now offering SSE with Axis Security being folded in to the mix. SSE is a growing market segment because the services offered are what users consume. SASE works great if you’re working from home all the time. In the middle of the pandemic that was a given. People had home offices and did their work there.

But now that restrictions are relaxed and people aren’t going into the office all the time. This hybrid work model means no hardware to do the inspection. Since SSE is not focused on hardware it’s a great fit for a mobile hybrid workforce. If you remember how much Aruba was touting the BYOD wireless-only office trend back in 2016 and 2017 you can see how SSE would have been a wonderful fit back then if it had existed. Given how the concept of a wireless-only BYOD office was realized through not having an office I’d say SSE is a perfect fit for the modern state of the enterprise.

Private 5G is a bit more complicated. Why would Aruba embrace a technology that effectively competes with its core business? I’d say that’s because they need to understand the impact that private cellular will have on their business. People aren’t dumping Wi-Fi and moving en masse to CBRS. We’ve reached a point where we’re considering what the requirements for private LTE deployments need to look like and where the real value lies for them. If you have a challenging RF environment and have devices capable of taking SIM cards it makes a lot of sense. Aruba having a native way of providing that kind of connectivity for users that are looking to offer it is also a huge win. It’s also important to note that Aruba wants to make sure it has complete control over the process, so what better way than acquiring a mature company that can integrate into their product lines?

Tom’s Take

I can’t take full credit for this idea. Avril Salter pointed it out during a briefing and I thought it was a wonderful point. Aruba isn’t a wireless company now because they’ve grown to become a true networking company. They offer more than just APs and devices that power them. There have a full line of products that address the needs of a modern user. The name change isn’t just a branding exercise. It represents a shift in the way people need to see the company. Growing beyond what you used to be isn’t a bad thing. It’s a sign of maturity.

Wi-Fi 6E Growing Pains For Apple

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You may have seen that the new iPad Pro has Wi-Fi 6E support. That caused a lot of my wireless friends to jump out and order one, as I expected. As I previously mentioned, 2023 is going to be a big year for Wi-Fi 6E. I was wrong about the 6E radio on the new iPhone but given the direction that Apple is going with the iPad Pro and probably the MacBook as well we’re in for a lot of fun. Why? Because Apple is changing their stance on how to configure 6GHz networks.

An SSID By Any Other Name

If you’ve ever set up wireless networks before you know there are some different suggestions about how to configure the SSIDs with multiple bands. One school of thought says that you need to combine both 2.4GHz and 5GHz in the same SSID and let the device figure out which one is the best to use. This is the way that I have mine set up at home.

However, if you do a quick Google search you’ll find a lot of other wisdom that suggests creating two different SSIDs that only work on a single band. The thought process here is that the device can’t distinguish between the different bands once it makes a decision so it will be stuck on one or the other. While that doesn’t sound like a bad idea it does have issues in practice. What if your device chooses 2.4GHz when you didn’t want it to? What if your device is stuck on 5GHz at the limit of the noise floor in your office and you want it to swap to the other band for better throughput instead of adding another AP?

There are several reasons to have more control over how the frequency band is chosen. Sadly, Apple has never allowed the device to choose the band when joining a network. The only way to influence that selection has been to create different networks, which leads to management issues and other challenges for devices that are unable to join one network or another. The management issues made the planning process rather challenging.

Now, with the advent of a device that has a Wi-Fi 6E radio in the 6GHz range, Apple has changed their thinking about how a network should operate. In a new support post, Apple now clarifies that the SSID names should not be different for the three different bands. There’s no other mention of what happens at a device level as far as band selection.

In a different tech support article, Apple describes what happens if you don’t give them the same name. If you join a 6GHz-only network on the new iPad Pro, the device will detect there is no corresponding 5GHz network and search for one from the same AP and let you join it as well. The article for this even mentions the ominous “limited compatibility”, even if the dialog box doesn’t. If you choose to join this split SSID setup there is another confirmation box that encourages you to go tweak your SSID settings to make the name the same on both networks. I’m not sure if that same prompt comes up for 2.4GHz networks too. Maybe I can borrow someone’s iPad to test it.

Disabling New Tech

Even though Apple has never allowed users to select the band that they want to use on an SSID there is a new feature for 6GHz that gives you the opportunity to work around any issues you have with this new band. In the settings for the SSID there is a toggle for “Wi-Fi 6E Mode” that allows you to disable 6GHz on that SSID until enabled again. This way you can use the recommended settings for the SSID per Apple but still disable the pieces that might be broken.

Interestingly, this toggle only appears for 6E networks according to the support article. There’s still no way to toggle between 2.4GHz and 5GHz. However, adding this support to the network settings should be easy to carry down into the other bands. Whether or not Apple does it is a much different matter. Also, the setting isn’t currently in MacOS Ventura. That could be because there isn’t a 6E radio available in a Mac yet and the setting might not show up until there’s a supported radio. Time will tell when Apple releases a MacBook with a built-in Wi-Fi 6E radio.

Tom’s Take

After months of professionals saying that Apple needs to release support for Wi-FI 6E it’s finally here. It also brings new capabilities from the software side to control how the 6E radios are used. Is it completely baked and foolproof? Of course not. Getting the radios into the iPad was the first step. By introducing them now with software for troubleshooting and configurations and following it up with a likely 6GHz MacBook and iMac lineup soon there will be plenty of time to work out the issues by the time the iPhone 15 gets support for Wi-Fi 6E. Apple is clearly defining their expectations for how an SSID should work so you have plenty of time to work through things or change your design documents before the explosion of Wi-Fi 6E clients arrives en masse in 2023.

Why 2023 is the Year of Wi-Fi 6E

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If you’re like me, you chuckle every time someone tells you that next year is the year of whatever technology is going to be hot. Don’t believe me? Which year was the Year of VDI again? I know that writing the title of this post probably made you shake your head in amusement but I truly believe that we’ve hit the point of adoption of Wi-Fi 6E next year.

Device Support Blooms

There are rumors that the new iPhone 14 will adopt Wi-Fi 6E. There were the same rumors when the iPhone 13 was coming out and the iPhone rumor mill is always a mixed bag but I think we’re on track this time. Part of the reason for that is the advancements made in Wi-Fi 6 Release 2. The power management features for 6ER2 are something that should appeal to mobile device users, even if the name is confusing as can be.

Mobile phones don’t make a market. If they were the only driver for wireless adoption the Samsung handsets would have everyone on 6E by now. Instead, it’s the ecosystem. Apple putting a 6E radio in the iPhone wouldn’t be enough to tip the scales. It would take a concerted effort of adoption across the board, right? Well, what else does Apple have on deck that can drive the market?

The first thing is the rumored M2 iPad Pro. It’s expected to debut in October 2022 and feature upgrades aside from the CPU like wireless charging. One of the biggest features would be the inclusion of a Wi-Fi 6E radio as well to match the new iPhone. That would mean both of Apple’s mobile devices could enjoy the faster and less congested bandwidth of 6 GHz. The iPad would also be easier to build a new chip around compared to the relatively cramped space inside the iPhone. Give the professional nature of the iPad Pro one might expect an enterprise-grade feature like 6E support to help move some units.

The second thing is the looming M2 MacBook Pro. Note for this specific example I’m talking about the 14” and 16” models that would features the Pro and Max chips, not the 13” model running a base M2. Apple packed the M1 Pro and M1 Max models with new features last year, including more ports and a snazzy case redesign. What would drive people to adopt the new model so soon? How about faster connectivity? Given that people are already complaining that the M1 Pro has slow Wi-Fi Apple could really silence their armchair critics with a Wi-Fi 6E radio.

You may notice that I’m relying heavily on Apple here as my reasoning behind the projected growth of 6E in 2023. It’s not because I’m a fanboy. It’s because Apple is one of the only companies that controls their own ecosystem to the point of being able to add support for a technology across the board and drive adoption among their user base. Sure, we’ve had 6E radios from Samsung and Dell and many others for the past year or so. Did they drive the sales of 6E radios in the enterprise? Or even in home routers? I’d argue they haven’t. But Apple isn’t the only reason why.

Oldie But Goodie

The last reason that 2023 is going to be the year of Wi-Fi 6E is because of timing. Specifically I’m talking about the timing of a refresh cycle in the enterprise. The first Wi-Fi 6 APs started coming into the market in 2019. Early adopters jumped at the chance to have more bandwidth across the board. But those APs are getting old by the standards of tech. They may still pass traffic but users that are going back to the office are going to want more than standard connectivity. Especially if those users splurged for a new iPhone or iPad for Christmas or are looking for a new work laptop of the Macintosh variety.

Enterprises may not have been packed with users for the past couple of years but that doesn’t mean the tech stood still. Faster and better is always the mantra of the cutting edge company. The revisions in the new standards would make life easier for those trying to deploy new IoT sensors or deal with with congested buildings. If enterprise vendors adopt these new APs in the early part of the year it could even function as an incentive to get people back in the office instead of the slow insecure coffee shop around the corner.

One other little quirky thing comes from an report that Intel is looking to adopt Wi-Fi 7. It may just be the cynic in me talking but as soon as we start talking about a new technology on the horizon people start assuming that the “current” cutting edge tech is ready for adoption. It’s the same as people that caution you not to install a new operating system until after the first patch or service release. Considering that Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 is effectively Wi-Fi 6E Service Pack 1 I think the cynics in the audience are going to think that it’s time to adopt Wi-Fi 6E since it’s ready for action.

Tom’s Take

Technology for the sake of tech is always going to fail. You need drivers for adoption and usage. If cool tech won the day we’d be watching Betamax movies or HD-DVD instead of streaming on Netflix. Instead, the real winners are the technologies that get used. So far that hasn’t been Wi-Fi 6E for a variety of reasons. However, with the projections of releases coming soon from Apple I think we’re going to see a massive wave of adoption of Wi-Fi 6E in 2023. And if you’re reading this in late 2023 or beyond and it didn’t happen, just mentally change the title to whatever next year is and that will be the truth.

Friday Mobility Field Day Thoughts

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I’m finishing up Mobility Field Day 7 this week and there’s been some exciting discussion here around a lot of technology. I think my favorite, and something I’m going to talk about more, is the continuing battle between 5G and Wi-Fi. However, there’s a lot going on that I figured I’d bring up to whet your appetite for the videos.

  • What is mission critical? When you think about all the devices that are in your organization that absolutely must work every time what does that look like? And what are you prepared to do to make them work every time? If it’s a safety switch or some other kind of thing that prevents loss of life are you prepared to spend huge amounts of money to make it never fail?
  • Operations teams don’t need easier systems. They need systems that remove complexity. The difference in those two things is subtle but important. Easier means that things are simplified to the point of almost being unusable. Think Apple Airport or even some Meraki devices. Whereas reduced complexity means that you’ve made the up front configuration easy but enabled the ability to configure other features in different places. Maybe that’s by giving your engineers the ability to log in to an Advanced dashboard or something like that.
  • When you’re trying to figure out where your audience is on a subject, always aim slightly above their technical level. If all goes well you will pull them up to where you want them and they’ll appreciate the opportunity to stretch their thinking to meet you there. If not you’ll provide them lots of great material to learn about when they get there later.

Tom’s Take

Technology changes quickly but the way we teach it doesn’t need to if we do it right the first time. By taking the time to aim high and educate instead of retelling something we’ve already said a few times we create content that endures.

Wi-Fi 6 Release 2, Or Why Naming Conventions Suck

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I just noticed that the Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new spec for Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a fan of referring to technology by the standard, not by a catch term that serves as a way to trademark something, like Pentium. Anyway, this updated new standard for wireless communications was announced on January 5th at CES and seems to be an entry in the long line of embarrassing companies that forget to think ahead when naming things.

Standards Bodies Suck

Let’s look at what’s included in the new release for Wi-Fi 6. The first and likely biggest thing to crow about is uplink multi-user MIMO. This technology is designed to enhance performance and reduce latency for things like video conferencing and uploading data. Essentially, it creates multi-user MIMO for data headed back the other direction. When the standard was first announced in 2018 who knew we would have spent two years using Zoom for everything? This adds functionality to help alleviate congestion for applications that upload lots of data.

The second new feature is power management. This one is aimed primarily at IoT devices. The combination of broadcast target wake time (TWT), extended sleep time, and multi-user spatial multiplexing power save (SMPS) are all aimed at battery powered devices. While the notes say that it’s an enterprise feature I’d argue this is aimed at the legion of new devices that need to be put into deep sleep mode and told to wake up at periodic intervals to transmit data. That’s not a laptop. That’s a sensor.

Okay, so why are we getting these features now? I’d be willing to bet that these were the sacrificial items that were holding up the release of the original spec of 802.11ax. Standards bodies often find themselves in a pickle because they need to get the specifications out the door so manufacturers can start making gear. However, if there are holdups in the process it can delay time-to-market and force manufacturers to wait or take a gamble on the supported feature set. And if there is a particular feature that is being hotly debated it’s often dropped because of the argument or because it’s too complex to implement.

These features are what has been added to the new specification, which doesn’t appear to change the 802.11ax protocol name. And, of course, these features must be added to new hardware in order to be available, both in radios and client devices. So don’t expect to have the hot new Release 2 stuff in your hands just yet.

A Marketing Term By Any Other Name Stinks

Here’s where I’m just shaking my head and giggling to myself. Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 includes improvements for all three supported bands of 802.11ax – 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz. That means that Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 supersedes Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E, which were both designed to denote 802.11ax in the original supported spectrums of 2.4 and 5GHz and then to the 6GHz spectrum when it was ratified by the FCC in the US.

Let’s all step back and realize that the plan to simplify the naming convention of the Wi-Fi alliance for marketing has failed spectacularly. In an effort to avoid confusing consumers by creating a naming convention that just counts up the Wi-Fi Alliance has committed the third biggest blunder. They forgot to leave room for expansion!

If you’re old enough you probably remember Windows 3.1. It was the biggest version of Windows up to that time. It was the GUI I cut my teeth on. Later, there were new features that were added, which meant that Microsoft created Windows 3.11, a minor release. There was also a network-enabled version, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which included still other features. Was Windows 3.11 just as good as Windows for Workgroups 3.11? Should I just wait for Windows 4.0?

Microsoft fixed this issue by naming the next version Windows 95, which created a bigger mess. Anyone that knows about Windows 95 releases know that the later ones had huge new improvements that made PCs easier to use. What was that version? No, not Windows 97 or whatever the year was. No, it was Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (Win95OSR2). That was a mouthful for any tech support person at the time. And it showed why creating naming conventions around years was a dumb idea.

Now we find ourselves in the mess of having a naming convention that shows major releases of the protocol. Except what happens when we have a minor release? We can’t call it by the old name because people won’t be impressed that it contains new features. Can we add a decimal to the name? No, because that will mess up the clean marketing icons that have already been created. We can’t call it Wi-Fi 7 because that’s already been reserved for the next protocol version. Let’s just stick “release 2” on the end!

Just like with 802.11ac Wave 2, the Wi-Fi Alliance is backed into a corner. They can’t change what they’ve done to make things easier without making it more complicated. They can’t call it Wi-Fi 7 because there isn’t enough difference between Wi-Fi 6 and 6E to really make it matter. So they’re just adding Release 2 and hoping for the best. Which will be even more complicated when people have to start denoting support for 6GHz, which isn’t universal, with monikers like Wi-Fi 6E Release 2 or Wi-Fi 6 Release 2 Plus 6E Support. This can of worms is going to wiggle for a long time to come.

Tom’s Take

I sincerely hope that someone that advised the Wi-Fi Alliance back in 2018 told them that trying to simplify the naming convention was going to bite them in the ass. Trying to be cool and hip comes with the cost of not being able to differentiate between minor version releases. You trade simplicity for precision. And you mess up all those neat icons you built. Because no one is going to legitimately spend hours at Best Buy comparing the feature sets of Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, and Wi-Fi 6 Release 2. They’re going to buy what’s on sale or what looks the coolest and be done with it. All that hard work for nothing. Maybe the Wi-Fi Alliance will have it figured out by the time Wi-Fi 7.5 Release Brown comes out in 2025.

You Down with IoT? You Better Be!

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Did you see the big announcement from AWS re:Invent that Amazon has a preview of a Private 5G service? It probably got buried under the 200 other announcements that came out on so many other things so I’ll forgive you for missing it. Especially if you also managed to miss a few of the “hot takes” that mentioned how Amazon was trying to become a cellular provider. If I rolled my eyes any harder I might have caused permanent damage. Leave it to the professionals to screw up what seems to be the most cut-and-dried case of not reading the room.

Amazon doesn’t care about providing mobile service. How in the hell did we already forget about the Amazon (dumpster) Fire Phone? Amazon isn’t trying to supplant AT&T or Verizon. They are trying to provide additional connectivity for their IoT devices. It’s about as clear as it can get.

Remember all the flap about Amazon Sidewalk? How IoT devices were going to use 900 MHz to connect to each other if they had no other connectivity? Well, now it doesn’t matter because as long as one speaker or doorbell has a SIM slot for a private 5G or CBRS node then everything else can connect to it too. Who’s to say they aren’t going to start putting those slots in everything going forward? I’d be willing to bet the farm that they are. It’s cheap compared to upgrading everything to use 802.11ax radios or 6 GHz technology. And the benefits for Amazon are legion.

It’s Your Density

Have you ever designed a wireless network for a high-density deployment? Like a stadium or a lecture hall? The needs of your infrastructure look radically different compared to your home. You’re not planning for a couple of devices in a few dozen square feet. You’re thinking about dozens or even hundreds of devices in the most cramped space possible. To say that a stadium is one of the most hostile environments out there is underselling both the rabid loyalty of your average fan and the wireless airspace they’re using to post about how the other team sucks.

You know who does have a lot of experience designing high density deployments with hundreds of devices? Cellular and mobile providers. That’s because those devices were designed from the start to be more agreeable to hostile environments and have higher density deployments. Anyone that can think back to the halcyon days of 3G and how crazy it got when you went to Cisco Live and had no cell coverage in the hotel until you got to the wireless network in the convention center may disagree with me. But that exact scenario is why providers started focusing more on the number of deployed devices instead of the total throughput of the tower. It was more important in the long run to get devices connected at lower data rates than it was to pump up the wattage and get a few devices to shine at the expense of all the other ones that couldn’t get connected.

In today’s 5G landscape, it’s all about the clients. High density and good throughput. And that’s for devices with a human attached to them. Sure, we all carry a mobile phone and a laptop and maybe a tablet that are all connected to the Wi-Fi network. With IoT, the game changes significantly. Even in your consumer-focused IoT landscape you can probably think of ten devices around you right now that are connected to the network, from garage door openers to thermostats to light switches or light bulbs.

IoT at Work

In the enterprise it’s going to get crazy with industrial and operational IoT. Every building is going to have sensors packed all over the place. Temperature, humidity, occupancy, and more are going to be little tags on the walls sampling data and feeding it back to the system dashboard. Every piece of equipment you use on a factory floor is going to be connected, either by default with upgrade kits or with add-on networking gear that provides an interface to the control system. If it can talk to the Internet it’s going to be enabled to do it. And that’s going to crush your average Wi-Fi network unless you build it like a stadium.

On the other hand, private 5G and private LTE deployments are built for this scale. And because they’re lightly regulated compared to full-on provider setups you can do them easily without causing interference. As long as someone that owns a license for your frequency isn’t nearby you can just set things up and get moving. And as soon as you order the devices that have SIM slots you can plug in your cards and off you go!

I wouldn’t be shocked to see Amazon start offering a “new” lineup of enterprise-ready IoT devices with pre-installed SIMs for Amazon Private 5G service. Just buy these infrastructure devices from us and click the button on your AWS dashboard and you can have on-prem 5G. Hell, call it Network Outpost or something. Just install it and pay us and we’ll take care of the rest for you. And as soon as they get you locked in to their services they’ve got you hooked. Because if you’re already using those devices with 5G, why would you want to go through the pain on configuring them for the Wi-Fi?

This isn’t a play for consumers. Configuring a consumer-grade Wi-Fi router from a big box store is one thing. Private 5G is beyond most people, even if it’s a managed service. It also offers no advantages for Amazon. Because private 5G in the consumer space is just like hardware sales. Customers aren’t going to buy features as much as they’re shopping for the lowest sticker price. In the enterprise, Amazon can attach private 5G service to existing cloud spend and make a fortune while at the same time ensuring their IoT devices are connected at all times and possibly even streaming telemetry and collecting anonymized data, depending on how the operations contracts are written. But that’s a whole different mess of data privacy.

Tom’s Take

I’ve said it before but I’ll repeat it until we finally get the picture: IoT and 5G are now joined at the hip and will continue to grow together in the enterprise. Anyone out there that sees IoT as a hobby for home automation or sees 5G as a mere mobile phone feature will be enjoying their Betamax movies along with web apps on their mobile phones. This is bigger than the consumer space. The number of companies that are jumping into the private 5G arena should prove the smoke is hiding a fire that can signal that Gondor is calling for aid. It’s time you get on board with IoT and 5G and see that. The future isn’t a thick client with a Wi-Fi stack that you need to configure. It’s a small sensor with a SIM slot running on a private network someone else fixes for you. Are you down with that?