Key Takeaways and Insights from Mobility Field Day 13 – Tech Field Day Takeaways

I'm Tom Hollingsworth, practice lead at Tech Field Day. And here are my takeaways from Mobility Field A 13. Hi everyone, it's Tom and we just finished up a great event Mobility Field Day 13.

It was a very packed three days of presentations covering a lot of different technologies around wireless, mobility, wifi, 5G, you name it. We had many great presenters who were bringing us some of the latest advances that they have been making in the technology. And I learned a lot at this event from the great presentations, but also from the great questions that our delegates were asking.

And as I flew home, I thought to myself there were three main things that I feel like were important to the community at large, and I wanted to share those takeaways with you. The first is the impact of large public venue wifi. A lot of us enjoy going to sporting events or concerts, and these are almost always held in large arenas, whether they're basketball or hockey or football stadiums.

And the experience of going to a concert or a sporting event has changed significantly in the last 20 years. I mean, think about the fact that before you used to get a program handed to you when you walked in the door and now all of the programs are delivered digitally. Uh, think about the act of using a concession stand.

Uh, used to be you got to go down and stand in line and hopefully catch some of the exciting plays or your favorite song on the little TVs up by the concession stands. Now there's an app for that. You just scan a QR code at your seat and the concessions are delivered to you, uh, by someone who is, is running around the stadium.

More importantly, think about all of the content that's created in these uh, venues. You, you have a highlight clips on TikTok. You have Instagram posts of your favorite singer walking past you as they're singing in the crowd.

That wouldn't be possible without connectivity. And companies are starting to understand that creating those experiences not only is important to the users and the consumers of their products, but it's also critical because that is an opportunity for them to showcase their technology. And during Mobility Field, a 13, we saw several examples of this.

One that I wanted to call out was the Fortinet acquisition of Everest Networks. They're a company that has specialized in doing large public venues for a long time. And this was actually, uh, breaking news for us because, uh, they announced the acquisition in the earnings call the day before, and then were able to kind of dig in and show us some of the technology that was part of that acquisition and how they were gonna be using it going forward.

You definitely wanna pay attention to large public venues as we go forward, as many more events become, you know, destinations for people who really want to participate, but not only participate but share what they've seen with the rest of the community. The second big takeaway that I had was about user experience. And we all know that the spec sheet has numbers and those numbers are a best case scenario in most instances.

However, the end of the day, what matters most is what the users think. And it always seems like the users think that the wifi is the problem, whether it's internet hiccups, whether it is slow system performance, the wifi is down. Now we know that it's not the case because we're technology professionals and we have experience and troubleshooting, but what we have to do is manage those experiences.

And while our answer to the wifi is slow, is usually a list of questions, users can't answer that because to them the difference between it working correctly and not working at all is not that wide of a gap. And so a lot of the companies in the industry have really focused on user experience monitoring. They've been able to quantify what they see in their infrastructure and use those measurements as a way to determine the relative health of a connection.

Now we've seen this before. We know that while our laptop or our tablet might be connected to a wireless access point at full fidelity because we're sitting right underneath it, sometimes it's the little things like DNS or perhaps it's even latency on the link going to the internet and back that could introduce problems. And when you consider that most people today use some form of an app on their devices to communicate, and those are very hard to troubleshoot as they're not.

They're usually a black box of software. We have to monitor everything around it in order to make sure that our users are experiencing the internet and doing their jobs at the efficiency that they would like. And so companies like Cisco and Juniper and ubiquity are including user experience monitoring in their dashboards so that you can see these problems before they become real issues.

And you can take corrective actions in the case of Juniper with the use of Marvis. They can even give you suggestions about how to fix the problem so you can go implement it. And I think that that's a big step forward as we look at the way that technology has shifted away from having to have, you know, very in-depth knowledge about how to troubleshoot specific problems into this generalized, these numbers don't look good.

Tweak these settings to make those numbers look better. And what that translates in down the road is that your users are happier, or at the very least, they're not blaming the wifi. The third thing that I thought was a big takeaway, at least for me as the networking nerd, was the fact that companies like Juniper and Arista are starting to couple the wireless access layer more tightly with the data center infrastructure.

And this was apparent in a great talk from Ken Duda at Arista about using VXLAN as the wireless access point connectivity protocol to the campus switches. Now, I know I'm getting a little bit into the weeds here, but we have used a number of tunneling technologies over the years to connect wireless access points to the switches. And when I heard that companies were starting to use vxlan, it just clicked in my head.

That makes sense. That's what VXLAN was built for. It's a multi-tenancy technology that allows us to carry multiple VLANs worth of information.

But more importantly, it's something that's supported by the hardware that the access point is connecting to. We have built specialized hardware to terminate those VXLAN tunnels into the underlay, and that means that we're no longer thinking of ways to scale controllers. We're no longer worried about how many users are connected to the device and whether or not it's gonna overwhelm the upstream switch.

And it also gives us a lot more capabilities to integrate more closely into the rest of the infrastructure. I mean, if you're already running a core that is EVPN and VXLAN across your data center, you don't have to bolt on an additional technology to scale all of that down to your users. Now granted, that's all the way down to the access point because the laptops that you're talking to don't understand vxlan.

But realistically speaking, if you could turn your entire set of campus switches into effectively one large controller, or at the very least one termination endpoint set, that gives you a lot more flexibility into the future about how you want to do that. And I know that this is something that's kind of on the cutting edge and the companies who have had a lot of experience with this are the companies who have been leading the way in VX lane development. I expect that we're gonna see a little bit more out of this and who knows, it could potentially become the industry standard very soon.

Once again, one of the reasons why Mobility Field Day is such a valuable event for me is because the number of people who are in the room, who are so well versed in the technology is beyond measure. Uh, I told someone the other day that most of the people who sit in those seats are CW e, which is considered to be the gold standard for top tier wireless talent. And seeing the way that they analyze these problems and hearing the questions that they ask and understanding the perspectives of the practitioners that they work with on a daily basis, not only is this valuable for the companies that are producing the technology, but it is also critical for the community that is listening to these questions and understanding the interplay of these technologies.

And hopefully they're taking this away back to their organizations as they consider how to build out a future wireless infrastructure. I wanna say a special thank you to all of the great presenters who were a part of this event. Juniper Networks, Cisco cel, Arista, Fortinet, Ubiquiti Nile, as well as our very own Ron Westfall presenting on future and research.

I also wanna say a special thank you to our first time delegate Alan Crow. Alan, you did a great job and you really carried forward all of the great content that you created last year and were able to sit at the chair and be a part of all of this great experience. Don't forget that we are all over social media.

net. That is my handle. Thank you for watching this episode of Tech Field Day takeaway series on the Tech Field Day plus YouTube channel.

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Thank you very much for watching and I can't wait to see you at the next event.