AFC and Wi-Fi 6e AFC Update

We are going to do an extremely abbreviated update on a FC, um, A FC for SP power and wifi six E. Anybody deploying that yet? Yeah, kind of have to.

I spend, uh, since we came up with these, I spend a great deal of my time with government affairs folks and folks in the field going, what about and what do we do here? So there is a lot to talk about because this is evolving. Uh, wifi 60 and LPI rules, we got really nice power levels for LPI presume many of you have deployed it.

It's not as horrible as we thought. With the low power levels indoors, things seem to cover the other thing that we're finding out with six gigahertz, and we're waiting to see how this looks in large public venues. Uh, but we think with six gigahertz with no active probing, the noise floor might stay low when we get a bunch of clients in there.

So not sure that we absolutely a hundred percent need SP power in as many places as we thought we did at one point in time. The other side of this is more power is always better for SNR. So what we got was livable.

What we did with it after we got it was celebrate the fact that we got three dbs of noise control and got better SNR every time we doubled a channel, which made a lot of sense right up until fully understood what that 18 D-B-M-E-I-R-P really means, right? So when I take a look at how the other plans were laid out in the world, they had 10 and 11 DBM per per megahertz. And we thought, hey, they're getting away with murder over there, but they still go to 23 DBM Max power.

So they ended up with a few more DBS of power. Good news is that makes a lot of difference. The problem, well the problem is we're gonna go back and find that right slide.

So the SP band, um, or the SP power was given to us back at the time we granted or created wifi six C and it's just now getting to the point where we're getting ISCD uh, Canada certified finally. So as of last week, we were still waiting on DUT test results to officially do that, but we're set up in, uh, in a FC databases for ISED coming online already. And what this gives us is more power, but more specifically more power in that first 20 megahertz.

It gives us more power across the entire band, but it comes with the cost that we're gonna have to interface with a automatic frequency control or an automated planning database, if you will, of where we've got six gigahertz resources. Because outdoors we have a lot of things that use six gigahertz. Um, one we just learned about, I just learned about too was at sea we've been talking about cruise ships and how you handle that.

Well, it turns out they use a lot of six gigahertz outta satellites to measure temperature of the ocean. Apparently it radiates at five to seven gigahertz. So they measure a lot of that and they're concerned about interference.

So the whole problem is you look at, you get three DB more power every time you double, but you still have 18 DBM and 20 megahertz. And if you went out and measured this, you saw 160 megahertz channel come in just as hot as a 20 megahertz channel. And the reason for that is you were scanning beacons.

If you take it the next step, ah, I thought we fixed that one. If you take it to the next step, what you need when you start getting a higher ceiling is more power at that cell edge. And at 20 megahertz, you're only gonna get 18 DBM forever and ever and ever.

So if the ceiling's too high to get 18 DBM down on the floor and make use of it, now you're gonna need an sp. Now you're gonna need an A FC and you're gonna have to integrate that. It's not a horrible thing.

Presently we've got it built into the architecture on both catalyst and the uh, the cloud stack. We do the proxy. It's completely transparent to the user.

Once you give it the criteria that's required and the the things that are required are an absolute location. So you can get A-G-N-S-S reference from that. We can build references, but you do have to have a known location because you're gonna interfere with something that's important if you aren't in the right place.

Second thing is you have to take an estimate of what you think the accuracy is of that and what the height of the antenna is. But once you put that data in, you're gonna get back a grant that's gonna give you what they call power constraints. We'll paint it out for you as to what channels and what power you have and we'll give you a really good idea of how you're managing that.

Boy that's slow. So two ways we can distribute GNSS on the back end. We can do it over the air using NDP or the neighboring protocols that we already have built into the stack.

And that's actually fairly accurate. You're gonna see an air, uh, amplitude magnify. The further you get away from A-G-N-S-S source, you're probably gonna want to have more than one source.

And since this is kind of critical to you getting this power, you definitely want to have a failover plan. So if A-G-N-S-S goes down on you or you lose that AP or that reference, you don't want to have that impact the outcome. Second way that we can do that is by a switch connection.

If you think about it, you are a hundred meters from a switch at the end of your ethernet cable. You can get 200 meters between two aps period. And that's the limit.

So if you do this over The switch, each stack has its own way. You do it over the switch, it's an automatically assumed 200 meter error radius. So it's gonna say, I know my position within 200 meters.

Now that bid us right up next to the water. It turns out you can go pretty far over water with six gigahertz. Why do we need this?

Uh, A FC is gonna determine a grant, it's gonna look at assets that it has, it's gonna take a look at where your location is and if that crosses over into a known six gigahertz registered transmitter, it's gonna pull the power back and it's gonna make it so that we don't interfere with that. And that's the primary goal. And I'm gonna skip ahead 'cause we're gonna close quick.

So quickly. GNSS is required. We've got it built into everything at this point in time.

Clients, I did a quick search on the client database. There are two different classes or three classes of clients. You can have a dual mode client, which has been growing steadily and we see most clients going there.

I was a little surprised to see LPI clients almost doubled since the last time I checked this. So we're still doing LPI and then SP only clients still holding steady. That tends to be just a device on the edge of an ISP.