Moving Beyond Legacy Wi-Fi with Innovation & New Standards with Sam Clements – Delegate Dialogues

My name is Samuel Clements. I'm a delegate for Mobility Field Day 13. I work at wwt.

You can find me on socials on Blue Sky at Samuel Clements Mobility Field Day so far has been a pretty great event. It's, um, it can be a, a little harrowing sometimes getting through all of the content that we, uh, see from the presenters, but good lord, it's the place to go, uh, see what's coming next in our industry. And it really is a great at a glance view of, you know, the things we're gonna expect to see in the coming six to 12 months.

Uh, I think from all of the major players, you know, the thing that sticks out in my mind, um, right now is the presentation from yesterday from CEL about the Cel Edge product where you can do, um, CVRS private LTE without an extra appliance for handling data plane. So they're punting a lot of services up into the cloud, and it's those sort of things where it makes, it's just like some of those very, very common sense approaches to some of these technologies that I think are really gonna help make things easy, easier, or probably more accessible. I feel like, you know, Celonis leading the way with some of those, um, innovations on the, on the LTE side of the house, on the CBRS side of the house.

And then, you know, I look at folks like Arista who are taking, um, you know, traditional wifi networking concepts such as controllers, and they're putting their own spin on, you know, what that use case looks like. And so, you know, those are sort of the things that I see stand out, um, right now. Um, especially on the Arista side of the house where they've taken and seemingly just created and replicated controllers data plane functionality out of, you know, things that had laying around in a, in a reasonably standard sort of way.

That's really exciting stuff to see, you know, in the coming months in the wireless mobility space. I think it's really gonna be about fleshing out wifi seven. I think there's gonna be a lot of efforts on, um, getting the last of the products out the door, whether those are hospitality products or outdoor products and, you know, the, the portfolios are coming and they're looking quite good now.

But I think the easiest to give, give away from this, uh, from this entire event is over the coming six to probably 12 months or so. I think everybody everywhere is going to be fixated on making sure that their wifi seven portfolios from a hardware perspective are as fleshed out as they need to be. Um, I'm looking at a lot of folks who are still wondering why they're having wifi six and wifi six, and now wifi seven.

Why are we maintaining three generations of product portfolios? And I feel like the, what what we're seeing here this week is, uh, is sort of the beginning of the end of some of those other platforms, especially the wifi six platforms. We see a concerted effort on wifi seven.

It's stabilizing. We have clients, we have software support, the features are online and they're working. And so I feel like there's a tremendous amount of momentum behind that, and I feel like that's gonna be one of the biggest, most practical shakeups out of the, out of the, Out of lever.