56. Wi-Fi is Fast Enough – Tech Field Day Podcast

You've spent all of your money upgrading your wifi gear, but for some reason, things don't seem to be going faster. It doesn't matter if it's at your house or at your office. The numbers just aren't adding up.

In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, is wifi fast enough? Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of influential IT experts from across the industry to discuss a single idea about key concepts. This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of our Tech Field Day delegate community, and we often recorded in association with one of our events.

In this case, our upcoming mobility Field Day Tech Field Day is a part of the Futurum Group, and this podcast is also published on our sister side at Struck Techstrong tv. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about wifi, but before we get to that, I'd like to take a moment for our guest to introduce themselves, starting with Keith. Oh, hey.

Name's Keith Parsons. I, uh, produce produced A-W-O-P-C conference. The Wireless and Professionals Conference as well have been doing wifi for, oh, more than two decades.

So this, this is gonna be fun. Hey, I'm Rocky Gregory. I'm principal architect at eTech.

Previous to that, I was global Director of Wireless for Nike. Thank you, Tom. I'm Ron Westfall, research director here for Communication Networks at the fu um, group.

All right, well, thank you all very much for joining us. Let's jump into the premise for today's episode. No doubt you've gone into a store recently and been overwhelmed by the amount of choices that you have when it comes to wifi hardware.

Sure. The wifi alliance has simplified it by adding numbers like six, six, e, and seven. But what you are really interested in is the other numbers on the back of the box, the throughput numbers.

Is this gonna be the magic device that allows me to stream my movies even faster? Is this gonna be the thing that allows me to download those files off of the internet even quicker than I possibly could have? Well, the answer is probably not, because as it turns out, wifi is fast enough.

All right. Before you start a fly, more in the comments, because I've actually been involved in one of those before when I said that the new, uh, radio in the MacBook M1 was fast enough compared to the, uh, radio in the previous generation, even though there was only a hundred, uh, megabits per second difference in the two. I think we need to kind of start off by, by letting people know that, you know, the wifi speed that you see on the back of the box isn't exactly the wifi speed that you're gonna get from the access point.

I'm gonna leave it to my experts out there to maybe explain to our audience real quickly, why is there a disconnect between those two numbers, the, the, uh, perceived throughput versus the actual throughput. I, I'll, I'll, I'll start. That's a, that's a pretty easy one because, uh, marketing is the, is the actual answer.

Marketing likes to show really big numbers, and the numbers they use are not throughput. They're what's going on at the phi layer, the physical layer. So the bits are actually going fast, but a whole lot of the bits have nothing to do with carrying your payload.

So wifi has, uh, the 8 0 11 protocol. It's a lot of overhead built in, so you'd be lucky to get half of what the bit traffic is, is actual payload. So that's one.

Two, when they are marketing those, they take the best possible technique that could be used with that version. Say wifi seven with eight spatial streams. Well, clients don't have eight spatial streams, so your device will never reach the reach the level that the AP has on its box.

So they're, they're, they're good barking numbers, but in reality, you'll never hit those numbers so that you shouldn't be looking at those numbers. You should be looking at what does your application actually need. And for this one, I'd like to just go back to a simple one.

Uh, the lowest slowest possible wifi today is six megabits, and that's, that's terrible. That's MCS zero. It's the worst wifi you can have.

And it's six meg, which is more than you need to send a YouTube video at 4K. So one user watching, one Netflix can work with the worst possible wifi. So it's not really about throughput.

I, I agree with Keith and I, I don't think it's unique to the wifi industry. I mean, marketing is out there across the entire industry, so we can certainly look at, you know, the routing, switching vendors doing the same kind of thing, et cetera. And what I think is important here is, okay, what is the wifi industry doing to, you know, enhance what is realistically possible in terms of throughput speeds, uh, regardless of the environment, whether it's enterprise, consumer, uh, new deployment, uh, you know, a brownfield deployment, et cetera.

And one thing I wanna like, uh, shine a spotlight on is, uh, a couple of key takeaways that I saw from the wifi world Congress that was just, uh, completed out there in Mountain View. And, uh, I think what's interesting is, uh, I've been having these conversations and many of them are wifi centric, but some of them are like, let's look at, you know, the network overall and what's needed. And yes, um, on interject AI here, because I think it will have a positive impact on what's needed.

And that is improving really the quality of experience, uh, for a wifi implementation, you know, at home within the enterprise. And this includes, uh, players, uh, such as, uh, Qualcomm, uh, media tech as well as AirTies. And what they're looking at is that because wifi is integral, you know, it's an essential connectivity technology for, you know, any, uh, experience that is the AI capabilities can actually improve what's going on at the edge edge that is implementing, uh, AI at the edge.

You know, bringing AI to where, uh, the data is, if you'll, and as such, what I think is going to, uh, happen is we're going to see AI become an ally for improving wifi performance as well as quality of experience. And, uh, that includes reducing the latency more, just having more intelligence at the edge to, you know, optimize what's going on out there amongst the access points, but also what's going on at the backhaul and o the overall network that is, you know, having more visibility, awareness, and intelligence as to what's going on, not just with the wifi portion of the network, but the overall network. Now that's simpler within, you say home environments, but the same principles apply.

And so I think that's something that's important that this was getting, I would say, uh, a lot of not just, uh, technical, um, emphasis, but also again, that marketing emphasis. And so this is gonna help the CSPs out there become, I would say, more proactive at being able to troubleshoot an issue with a, a wifi implementation or telling the customer, Hey, it's not your wifi, it's something else. It's your browser, it's your pc, and so forth.

But just having more rapid turnaround and being able to do that and having, uh, just that more capabilities at hand to solve, you know, the, the problem at hand when it comes to performance. I think the other piece is that's an unloaded network that they're talking about when they put the number on the back of the box. And especially in the enterprise, you know, when you're serving 50,000 clients on a campus, they aren't all gonna get that connection that they had at home.

And so there's the expectation setting, and in a lot of enterprises that the critical app has become speed test net, right? So it's the person sits down at their desk, their app is slow, they hit speed test net, and the phone rings at the help desk. The wifi sucks, right?

So to Ron's point, there are so many pieces in between the user and Google and the user and Facebook, whatever they're going to, but in the end user's view, it's always the wifi because it's the, the unknown, right? It's, it's what they see ultimately is their entire connection. So I think there's, um, the, the visibility throughout the network to Ron's point is absolutely critical.

It's very critical within the enterprise where, again, there's this perception that if it's not as fast as it is at home, it sucks. Right? com, whatever, to say, see, it's, it's, it's not what, what's the number that they're after?

And the, and I, I, I had my ISP to my house came by and he's like, what are you complaining for? And I said, it's not that I'm not getting, I can get 300, 400, 500 some days. net.

They're hosting their own server, it's their upstream internet that's slow. And when you explain all of the parts to them, well, yeah, but, but you got this big number. It's not about the big number.

It's kinda like doing wifi surveys and say, Hey, it's all green. Yeah, that, that doesn't matter. Just because you had a a signal doesn't mean your WiFi's good.

So there's, there's a lot of things we can do in a troubleshooting sense. One of the things that, that's a good, good answer to this premise we're talking about is how do you measure that quality of experience from the client side? And vendors have been thinking about this for a long time, and they've realized there's a whole bunch of different parts.

The, the wifi is just the, like the last mile. It's from the access point to your client device, but the entire network is being judged from the, and the consumer's standpoint. So we need to have our tools that can look at the wifi portion client to ap, and then the AP through the switch fabric over to the WAN link, and then out to wherever the apps are.

We need to be able to see all those parts. And one of the things that Ron was talking about bringing AI in is a lot of the vendors are now using AI to look at the, that really rich set of data they have collected from how long did DHCP take, how long did it take for a DNS query to come back? Where is the latency in all those little hops and is it affecting an entire building or everyone off one switch or F of one WAN link?

And be able to help identify those problems sooner by looking at that huge set of data that they're collecting. Oh, sure. No problem.

Rocky, I'll just make a quick observation here. I think, uh, to Keith's point, and, and your point earlier, Rocky, about, you know, a network wide intelligence is that I think it's fueling the campus network as a service or nas, uh, use case. And I think that was, uh, another important takeaway, uh, from the recent Congress, and that I think is being accelerated by, uh, players like Nile that have demonstrated, you know, uh, with, uh, demos like Elite 2025 now that they can support up to 2 million square feet, uh, and also show, uh, you know, an implementation of a zero trust, security implementation along with, uh, the other, you know, built-in, uh, benefits such as rapid deployment and having just that, that network wide awareness.

And I think this is gonna help, you know, with, uh, the competitive, uh, mix that is, you know, help enterprises with campus or any organization with a campus requirement just have, you know, a, a more options out there. And yes, folks like Cisco and hp, Aruba and CommScopes, uh, ruckus, all these folks have, uh, these, uh, NAS offerings. But I think that this is aligning with what we're talking about here.

It's fueling, I would say, more interest in that use case. And I anticipate that we'll see more adoption of this approach to solve, you know, some of these problems that we're talking about. Over to you, Rocky.

I was gonna go back to again, the user experience piece and having that end-to-end visibility. You look at a large enterprise and there's the corporate code of arms. I, am I in frame where it's your fault?

No, it's your fault, and you've got a switching team, you've got A-D-H-C-P team, you've got a DNS team, you've got a WAN team, and you know, there can be finger pointing. Sometimes everyone's not holding hands and, and singing Kumbaya and, you know, for the wireless professional because we get the blame nine of 10 times. Having that instrumentation in the network, being able to see it from client to end point and, um, being able to find those bottlenecks is, is absolutely critical today.

It's the only way that you're going to be able to suss out in these more and more complex networks exactly where is that bottleneck, where are the issues? So especially in the enterprise and especially for meantime to innocence or, you know, to be nice to find the issue and work as a team and be able to fix it. So I think it's, it's pretty mission critical to have that view at this point.

And, And some of the new technologies that they're bringing to bear with, with not just the artificial intelligence stacking that data, but the ability to, to have synthetic testing that, that your infrastructure can switch roles temporarily and become a client and join and act like a, like a device collect data and report that proactively. So you don't have to wait until the end user's device fails. You have a built in system that will test that, or in, in the case of some of the NAS providers, they have a digital twin, a full copy in digital form of the entire infrastructure that they can run tests against and, and solve the problems before they happen.

So I like the proactiveness that's coming, and yet with all of this, we've been looking at RRM, the radio resource management, trying to solve the RF issues for 20 year plus years now, and it still has issues. So we're, we're, this is an ongoing problem, but it's nice to see that they're, they're pulling all the pieces together. It's not just an RF issue, it's not just A-D-H-C-P issue that they have the ability to see in real time what's going on in the entire network.

And RRM being broken has a title, Keith, it's job security for us, right? Like keep it broken. I love being a wireless guy, but in, in truth, that complexity I don't think is really understood even within IT organizations end to end that radial frequency is actually really difficult.

It's only about 20% physics and the rest is black magic, right? So you, you've got a lot of moving parts that people just don't understand outside of the wireless community. So having that instrumentation helps with broken RRM.

Yeah, sometimes it's our fault, sometimes the baby's ugly, right? So it's, it's important to be able to suss all of those individual pieces out and um, to absolutely verifiably be able to say, Hey, we found a bug in the RRM. And I think there's a key too that there's not just the, the infrastructure vendors, there are overlaid networks, there are client-based solutions that give an even deeper view that can sit in the background of a client and runs synthetic transactions.

Or you have something third party that sits and runs the synthetic transactions. And I think those are key force multipliers in the enterprise. And, and those features that you just mentioned can be automatic that when things are happening that they're actually just doing it without any IT person's involvement.

It's just there. And some of the new features that I really like in the, in this, this age of AI and RRM is that some vendors make a change to an RRM algorithm implement it, and the value of whether or not it was successful is automatically calculated based on clients. Did the client see an improvement?

And if they did, that was a good choice, if not revert back to what we had before without any end user involvement. No, it stuff have has to be involved and then it's a self-learning process. And you took the words outta my mouth, Keith, what is going on that can help improve, you know, uh, these challenges and automation I see is making more progress.

And it's also not only specific to, you know, the wifi implementation, but I'm, I'm seeing, you know, the, at the, uh, CTO uh, level or the CIO level, the prerogative to implement automation across, again, not just the wifi and, you know, mobility network, but across the entire network. And that is, I think, uh, re uh, vig invigorating, uh, for example, intent-based networking, uh, principles, but also, uh, more attention as to, you know, how can capabilities like event-driven automation can again, uh, compliment and reinforce, you know, that network wide visibility and observability that's, you know, folks like Cisco and HPE and Juniper are all, you know, prioritizing in terms of, you know, why go with them in terms of, you know, the wifi network. So I find it encouraging.

I think it's something that is, uh, bearing fruit, but also it's showing that, okay, we have to, you know, walk away from, you know, some of the silos in this case, uh, that have, you know, been a, a, a barrier for, uh, get just that, getting more intelligence about what's going on with the, the wifi part of the network. net is like the ultimate, um, you know, arbiter of how quick a connection is is probably inaccurate. I I would go one step further though, in saying that the way that most people interact now with the internet has nothing to do with raw speed.

com online or, you know, firing up their favorite mail app or streaming through Netflix. And when you introduce that kind of barrier, you run into other problems. A, a good example is Netflix, right?

Um, the speed of Netflix is impacted by your connection, whether you're using a gigabit wired connection or you're using a, a wifi seven wireless connection. But what really impacts it is, um, latency in the network connection is the movie that you're looking for preloaded into a content network that is easy to fetch. Um, there, there are things outside of the user experience that aren't printed on the back of the box that we have to worry about.

And that's one of the things, uh, a recent article that I posted on Textron, it talked about user experience monitoring, which is one of the next big phases that we've been hearing about from, from wifi companies where they're saying, you know, we need to look at more than just the raw numbers in the connection. We need to look at things like retries. We need to look at things like, um, you know, jitter in the connection.

So are we, are we kind of hamstringing ourselves by focusing too much on that one number without giving our users that holistic expectation? Or do the users even care at this point? I, I think it's the former.

net example is how the end user sees the network, right? net, and they're getting that much of the picture of what's actually happening. So it, you know, and they're making assumptions based on that.

And I don't know that you can educate, again, a campus of 50,000 people, but you end up with 50,000 wireless engineers, right? Everyone's gonna tell you what's wrong with your wifi, the signal's bad, blah, blah, blah. And to be able to go into a dashboard or to the points earlier, have AI pop up and say, you know, you, you've got a crappy connection here.

Um, or to be able to go in and pull a report and say, you know, this was a great connection, but high latency, a lot of jitter in getting to Salesforce that day. To your point, Tom, Luckily though, the vendors know this too. And so the vendors, whether it be HP or Juniper or Cisco, they're all working towards that holistic view.

Um, but the whole idea that it's about speed is been a fallacy for a very long time, and yet we still revert back to that because it's just, it's a simple, easy little number. Um, one, one example I can give is at a, uh, airport, there were some people who wanted to download movies, and that's what you get off a plane, you wanna download a movie to go to the next site. Yeah.

Uh, and the airport authority wanted to throttle their connection because it's not fair. One person's taking too much of the bandwidth, and after multiple cycles of testing, it was stop with the bandwidth, just give them everything they want. And when they ran the data, they found that if you, if you throttle it, actually you chew up more airtime.

And it's the one thing in wifi we have the least of is airtime. And you used more of it by putting a bandwidth throttle on, just let them get as fast as they want. If they can download the movie in three seconds, they get off the network and give you back your wifi, give you back your airtime.

So I think we need to be looking at a bigger model that's not just the number, it's how did that number affect the actual end user experience in airport it is, give it to 'em as fast as they can take it and they'll get off your network. In hotels, it's something different. So in each environment, we need to understand how the technology works, but also how to fix it in those situations.

And it's just comforting me to know, to see the vendors are out there addressing this specific issue, and they're looking at each of the parts and how to, how to tune the middle better, specifically for Zoom calls, uh, WebEx teams, whatever. That's the focus of how do we make those go as fast as possible. Keith's point, I think what is the good news is like for all of WiFi's challenges, the market is going to continue to grow significantly.

And I think we understand, you know, some of the reasons why it's, uh, the, uh, ease of installation and, uh, relative costs compared to some alternatives out there. And I think we're seeing that, you know, with private networks, yes, they have a presence, they're adding, you know, more organizations, but usually they're being implemented in coordination with, you know, the wifi implementation that already exists. So it's not like, okay, private networks are gonna replace wifi because wifi is well understood.

It's, you know, the double that is known, so to speak. And, and if anything, most cases, something like a private network implementation will be a compliment to it. And I think wifi just has more potential out there because, you know, circling back, you know, to, uh, the, the Congress is that I saw a couple of important takeaways about, hey, can wifi halo be something that will make a difference for, you know, scaling these, you know, billions of iot connections out there and do it in just that, in an affordable and secure way?

3 kilometers now in open environments. And so I think that's something that will be, be a factor in terms of, okay, iot connections don't have these performance demands they have for, you know, high bandwidth intensive applications, you know, like Netflix at the home, but you know, certainly, you know, workloads, uh, you know, at the, uh, enterprise environment. And so, you know, being able to support, you know, 78 kilobits or, you know, at the very top level, 150 megabits, well, that's something that I think is driving, you know, wifi fis, uh, I would say, um, not just, uh, capabilities, but also, uh, favorability in terms of why is this gonna get more and more consideration in implementation out there And, uh, in the ecosystem.

As you can see, there's more that goes into speed than just a number. It's the complex interaction of the technology that lies underneath. And no user is ever going to be truly happy with everything unless it's instantaneous.

What you have to do as an IT professional is create a balancing act. You need to invest your money wisely to provide the most utility for your users that you can, while also setting expectations that you're accessing resources that are not directly on your computer. So you're gonna have to expect a little bit of delay.

Now the thing you have to understand about that is, is that no matter what you tell them, and no matter how you try to convince them, they're still gonna complain that it's too slow. So maybe you can convince them that they can upgrade out of their budget instead of yours. That will just about do it For this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, I'd like to take a moment for our guest to kind of give you an idea of where to find them.

If you wanna learn more about subjects like these and the other things that they talk about, Keith, where can people go to learn more about your writings? com. And on the other social media, I'm Keith r Parson.

com. Thank you, Tom. Naturally, there's LinkedIn under, uh, my namesake Ron Westfall.

In addition on XI could be found at r Westfall DX and RUM Group. Uh, please visit the website RUM group, uh, do com. Not only does it include the most valuable tech field day, uh, content, but also our future research and future intelligence content, which includes, uh, for example, AI data sets, et cetera.

So that's where I can be found. And we wanna thank each and every one of you for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. If you enjoyed this discussion, please make sure that you subscribe on YouTube or use your favorite podcast application so you don't miss an episode, and consider giving us a rating and a review because that really helps people as they're searching out new, uh, podcasts to listen to.

This podcast is brought to you by the Tech Field Day Group, which is a home of IT experts from across the enterprise, which is a part of the Futurum Group. com/podcast or view us on Techstrong tv. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back with another great episode next week.