Tag Archives: Wi-Fi 7

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.

Networking Is Fast Enough

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Without looking up the specs, can you tell me the PHY differences between Gigabit Ethernet and 10GbE? How about 40GbE and 800GbE? Other than the numbers being different do you know how things change? Do you honestly care? Likewise for Wi-Fi 6, 6E, and 7. Can you tell me how the spectrum changes affect you or why the QAM changes are so important? Or do you want those technologies simply because the numbers are bigger?

The more time I spend in the networking space the more I realize that we’ve come to a comfortable point with our technology. You could call it a wall but that provides negative connotations to things. Most of our end-user Ethernet connectivity is gigabit. Sure, there are the occasional 10GbE cards for desktop workstations that do lots of heavy lifting for video editing or more specialized workflows like medical imaging. The rest of the world has old fashioned 1000Mb connections based on 802.3z ratified in 1998.

Wireless is similar. You’re probably running on a Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) or Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) access point right now. If you’re running on 11ac you might even be connected using Wi-Fi 4 (802.11n) if you’re running in 2.4GHz. Those technologies, while not quite as old as GigE, are still prevalent. Wi-Fi 6E isn’t really shipping in quantity right now due to FCC restrictions on outdoor use and Wi-Fi 7 is a twinkle in hardware manufacturers’ eye right now. Why aren’t we clamoring for more, faster, better, stronger all the time?

Speedometers

How fast can your car go? You might say you’ve had it up to 100 mph or above. You might take a look at your speedometer and say that it can go as high as 150 mph. But do you know for sure? Have you really driven it that fast? Or are you guessing? Would you be shocked to learn that even in Germany, where the Autobahn has an effectively unlimited speed limit, that cars are often limited to 155 mph?. Even though the speedometer may go higher the cars are limited through an agreement for safety reasons. Many US vehicles are also speed limited between 110 and 140 mph.

Why are we restricting the speeds for these vehicles? Safety is almost always the primary concern, driven by the desire for insurance companies to limit claims and reduce accidents. However, another good reason is also why the Autobahn has a higher effective speed limit: road conditions. My car may go 100 mph but there are very few roads in my part of the US that I would feel comfortable going that fast on. The Autobahn is a much better road surface for driving fast compared to some of the two-lane highways around here. Even if the limit was higher I would probably drive slower for safety reasons. The roads aren’t built for screaming speeds.

That same analogy applies to networking. Sure, you may have a 10GbE connection to your Mac Mini and you may be moving gigs of files back and forth between machines in your local network. What happens if you need to upload it to Youtube or back it up to cloud storage? Are you going to see those 10GbE speeds? Or are you going to be limited to your ISP’s data rates? The fastest engine can only go as fast the pathways will permit. In essence, that hot little car is speed limited because of the pathway the data takes to the destination.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the space about ever-increasing connectivity from 400GbE to 800GbE and soon even into the terabit range. But most of it is specialized for AI workloads or other massive elephant flows that are delivered via a fabric. I doubt an ISP is going to put in an 800GbE cross connect to increase bandwidth for consumers any time soon. They won’t do it because they don’t need to. No consumer is going to be running quite that fast.

Likewise, increasing speeds on wireless APs to more than gigabit speeds is silly unless you want to run multiple cables or install expensive 10GbE cards that will require new expensive switches. Forgetting Multigig stuff for now you’re not going to be able to plug in a 10GbE AP to an older switch and get the same performance levels. And most companies aren’t making 10GbE campus switches. They’re still making 1GbE devices. Clients aren’t topping out their transfer rates over wireless. And even if they did they aren’t going to be going faster than the cable that plugs the AP into the rest of the network.

Innovation Idling

It’s silly, right? Why can’t we make things go faster?!? We need to use these super fast connections to make everything better. Yet somehow our world works just fine today. We’ve learned to work with the system we have. Streaming movies wouldn’t work on a dial-up connection but adding 10GbE connections to the home won’t make Netflix work any faster than it does today. That’s because the system is optimized to deliver content just fast enough to keep your attention. If the caching servers or the network degrades to the point where you have to buffer your experience is poor. But so long as the client is getting streaming data ahead of you consuming it you never know the difference, right?

Our networks are optimized to deliver data to clients running on 1GbE. Without a massive change in the way that workloads are done in the coming years we’re never going to be faster than that. Our software programs might be more optimized to deliver content within that framework but I wouldn’t expect to see 10GbE become a huge demand in client devices. Frankly, we don’t need that much speed. We don’t need to run flat out all the time. Just like a car engine we’re more comfortable running at a certain safe speed that preserves our safety and the life of the equipment.

Tom’s Take

Be honest with yourself. Do you want 10GbE or Wi-Fi 7 because you actually need the performance? Or do you just want to say you have the latest and greatest? Would you pay extra for a v12 engine in a sports car that you never drive over 80 mph? Just to say you have it? Ironically enough, this is the same issue that cloud migrations face today. We buy more than we need and never use it because we don’t know what our workloads require. Instead, we buy the fastest biggest thing we can afford and complain that something is holding it back. Rather than rushing out to upgrade your Wi-Fi or Ethernet, ask yourself what you need, not what you want. I think you’ll realize the network is fast enough for the foreseeable future.