34. WiFi is Always the Best Solution – Tech Field Day Podcast

The world is, in fact, wireless being tied to a desk anymore with a wire seems like a punishment. But is wifi always the best solution to all of your problems? Well, if you're using anything more than a laptop and a tablet, I would bet that the answer is probably no.

In this episode, we find out whether or not wifi is always the best solution. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where we bring together a group of IT experts to discuss a single idea around key concepts in the enterprise IT industry. This podcast features a variety of perspectives from members of the Tech Field Day delegate community, and is often recorded in association with one of our events.

Tech Field Day is a part of the Futurum group, and this podcast is also published on our sister company Site Techstrong tv. On this episode, which we're recording ahead of Mobility Field Day, we're gonna be discussing an interesting topic related to wifi. But before we do that, I'd like to take a moment for our guests to introduce themselves, starting with Lee.

So I am a wireless network architect by trade. I'm also, uh, very interested in a whole bunch of other wireless stuff, both, uh, professionally and on the hobby side as a Hammer radio guy among other things. But, uh, looking forward to talking with everybody today.

Awesome. Troy. Hi everyone.

My name is Troy Martin. I'm a wireless practitioner, uh, working in all areas of wireless beyond just, uh, wifi, but other wireless iot, uh, another more proprietary, uh, technologies. I'm looking forward to discussion we're about to have today.

And lastly, Ron. Thank you, Tom. Yes, Ron Westfall, research director here at the Futurum Group, and I always enjoy our conversations, especially around the upcoming mobility field.

Day 12, around the corner. Alright, well thank you all for joining us today. Let's jump us into the premise for the episode.

The world has changed significantly once we realized that we didn't need to be plugged into things anymore. I can remember a time when, uh, the only way to get your email was if you had an ethernet cable plugged into your desktop. Now, we live in a world of laptops, tablets, and phones that use wireless communications to receive all of that data.

But there are some times when wifi isn't the best solution. And we wanted to discuss some of those today. Now, I know that everyone out there is probably already firing up the comments about how wifi is the most amazing thing ever, and I can't live my life without it, but a lot of people do, and a lot of people don't even turn on the wifi, especially if they work in an area where it's not feasible to use wifi or just plain stinks.

So I wanna open this up to my fellow wireless friends here. Where are some situations where you see that wifi isn't the best solution? So I was recently dealing with some researchers.

I, I'm in higher ed dealing with some researchers who are looking to instrument public housing, um, you know, low end, uh, housing for energy efficiency and such. These researchers came at the topic, uh, from the perspective of wifi. We wanna put these wifi based sensors in every housing unit.

And, um, you know, wifi is so cheap and easy, it ought to be a slam dunk. And then we started talking through it. How are you going to get on everybody's individual networks?

The sensors that you are talking about all need an AC outlet, uh, plugin, um, you know, just getting access to the spaces into people's homes. You know, this is, this is not gonna be easy, the thing that you're trying to do with wifi. And then we talked about the benefits of low raw wan.

You know, put one gateway somewhere, put sensors in the apartments, um, you know, you're gonna get one chance to be in these apartments, get sensors in there with batteries that last years and don't need an AC outlet. And pretty soon it, it became pretty clear that this was a better application for what they were trying to do for the go, their operational goals. You know, wifi just didn't stand up in this discussion.

So, you know, there's one for low round wan. There's, uh, certainly others, but, you know, I'll yield and, uh, see who else has got something. Good point, Lee.

I think it's not only about the consumer space, it's also about businesses and enterprises. And I think, uh, what we're seeing is more uptake of technology such as, uh, private 5G following on, you know, private LTE that's certainly ongoing here in the US but also globally. And I think what's important here is that I think you're gonna see more, you know, what can be characterized as private public implementations.

So it's not so much, you know, wifi has to be ripped and replaced, but it needs an, and, you know, an augmentation technology to really make wireless work optimally for an enterprise. So what we're seeing is more combinations of where private 5G is being implemented to take care of certainly the wide areas where wifi is really not applicable or in play at all, but also in, you know, a challenging scenario such as, you know, manufacturing facilities, you know, mining and environments and so forth. And that's why we're seeing, I think, more interest in, uh, platforms that can provide unified visibility across both wifi and private, uh, wireless implementations.

And that includes, uh, you know, policies across both of them, administration, management and so forth. So this is actually a, a very, uh, I would say competitive space. It's where the, I think the players that can, uh, address both effectively are gonna be the most successful versus being, say, a wifi only type of play.

I find a lot of people that are familiar with just one wireless technology always wanna find that as the solution for, for all of their problems. If their background is wifi and that's all they see, uh, they try to solve that through some sort of wifi means, uh, changing configuration, tuning their environment. Uh, instead of looking at the bigger picture, what advantages or distinct characteristics of another wireless protocol better meet the design requirements, uh, that have been identified by the end customer and stakeholder.

Uh, we've identified some, uh, common use scenarios, um, you know, monitoring, uh, meters on the outside of homes or providing coverage across a, a large open pit mind. These are environments that classic wifi isn't really tuned or maybe even perhaps appropriately suited to. Uh, it's relatively smaller distance.

It's, uh, very, very high bandwidth. But sometimes if you're just monitoring sensor information, you don't need those. Uh, you, you don't need substantial amounts of data.

You just need regular updates. Is a valve open or closed? Is a battery charging, has a door open or closed?

And you can provide that with either wireless technologies that cover extremely large distances, like upwards of 10 kilometers beyond with lower wan, which has, uh, great advantages being an unlicensed protocol. Or it could jump into the, the licensed protocol space of foreign and 5G type, uh, technologies. And I think, uh, pivoting off of the lower WAN aspect, it does bring, I think, more attention because as we know, Cisco is discontinuing support of, uh, Laura ran.

So this is opening up, I think, uh, more discussion as to, okay, what are Laura R's uh, prospects? I think, uh, as a te technology as a protocol, uh, they, uh, will continue, uh, to be, uh, solid despite, uh, Cisco's, uh, decision, which I think was also factored in by, you know, Cisco's overall corporate, uh, strategy. And I think what we're looking at is, uh, I'm getting a bit more, you know, interest in about what about Sig Fox, which is, as we know, proprietary, what about, uh, wait list, which is open, but you know, it's, uh, sort of like, uh, some challenges, uh, with using, you know, TV white space spectrum to enable that.

And, uh, but I think it's an interesting time. It's really opening up how can we, uh, optimize the spectrum that's out there. It can certainly include, uh, establish wifi.

As you know, many organizations are kicking the tires in wifi seven, uh, as we know, but also maybe, uh, wifi even when it's better suited than say, a, a cellular technology. What are the alternatives out there? And I think, uh, Troy and Lee have really pointed to, you know, what are some, uh, compelling options out there?

So I, I just wanted to touch on the, the, the Cisco discontinuing their lower WAN gateway support, uh, and they're not recommending an alternative, uh, hardware solution to replace that component. Uh, they were a contributor to the Lower WAN Alliance and developing the, the standards, but they certainly aren't, uh, significant end all and be all of the lower WAN portfolio globally as a product set. There's many, many manufacturers that are out there making gateways.

Uh, there's plethora of sensors that are available and actuators that, uh, operate on LoRa. So the, the fact that Cisco's discontinued their product, it's interesting from a networking perspective, but I, I don't think it's a, a, a large piece of the LoRaWAN pie that's, uh, that's out there. Uh, there's also other technologies that we haven't uh, mentioned yet.

Um, although it still has the same, same name wifi, uh, wifi halo, uh, that, uh, addresses a lot of the sweet spots in wireless communications. It provides, uh, sufficient bandwidth. So we're looking at, uh, 20 megs upwards of 90 megs throughput on a single spatial stream, but it also hits the sweet spot in terms of distance, uh, being marketed as a one kilometer technology.

But they've, uh, just hit a distance record, uh, pushing lower, uh, or wifi halo rather up to 16 kilometers, uh, successfully, uh, to communicate. So it's, it's that, uh, neat technology that's, um, leverages the, the wifi protocol stack, um, but, uh, delivers meaningful bandwidth for a lot of applications at a much larger distance than we've seen previously from, uh, classic wifi technologies. Yeah, it's intriguing.

I mean, there's also, uh, uh, you know, uh, narrow band IOT and Symphony Link. And so I think, uh, you're right. Uh, you know, Cisco was, you know, one participant in the overall Laura oan, uh, ecosystem, and that's not going away.

Uh, there are, you know, plenty of suppliers out there. And again, I think, you know, Cisco's decision making wasn't necessarily, uh, technology only decision. It was also, you know, a business decision.

But I think, uh, it's just stimulating, you know, conversation about, okay, what, um, are, you know, alternatives? Because to your point, Cisco didn't recommend a replacement technology. And so this is, I think, you know, kind of what we're seeing on, say, on the AI side, a lot of, uh, you know, tire kicking in, you know, uh, stimulative conversations around what else, uh, can, uh, be applied to solve, you know, many of these problems, you know, energy saving, uh, you know, but with, you know, long range and, and of course, the latency and easy to upgrade capabilities all factored in.

I'll tell you one thing I'm dealing with that kind of ties in a few of these thoughts. Uh, large public venue, um, you know, sports events, the wifi ticket scanners have perpetually been crushed by people coming in through the gates. And it, you know, you can try every optimization in the world, and it's still very challenging.

So, um, you know, watching, hoping for the advent of CBRS, uh, ticket scanners, uh, because, you know, the, the one venue I am, uh, talking about, I have in mind, uh, it is CBRS equipped, those scanners would be ideal to get those critical devices out of the mix of wifi. There's also a, um, virtual, a VR component and eSports and all of that, and the desire to put, um, the, the, you know, Oculus style headsets on, uh, wireless, and it needs to be super high speed and low latency and all of that, even with six gig, six gig is going to be polluted, uh, pretty quick. You know, people are gonna pop up their own home, uh, routers the way they do now in different venues, and it, it's, it's hopeful at six gig makes everything a lot better, but it's not going to be a grand panacea.

So in this one VR setting, uh, we're going with a 60 gig, uh, link between the PC and the headset, and that was basically developed for these, uh, VR applications. So, you know, lots of things that you can do over wifi, maybe are doing over wifi now, but they're also, uh, either real world pain points or potential pain points. And it's just so nice to think about vacating that very popular spectrum that is wifi and looking at the, the alternatives, you know, and there, you know, all the other advantages, power savings and all of that, um, absolutely, uh, has merit and it's worth talking about, but just being in other spectrum is such a good feeling when you get there and see, Hey, there's really nothing else here.

This works great. I've heard a lot of discussion around using other alternate technologies for very specific use cases, and it feels to me like one of the things that a lot of companies have said was, well, if wifi is the way that we go, then we have to build our devices to meet a certain kind of criteria. And in a lot of cases, what that means is, you know, they, they have a, a higher power budget because wifi radios are a lot more, um, power hungry compared to smaller devices.

Uh, like Troy alluded to, sometimes they don't need to send a, a ridiculous amount of data, they just need to send updates and things like that. Do you feel like the, um, explosion of non-WiFi wireless technologies is allowing, uh, vendors and, and manufacturers to create devices that fit in a better, uh, you know, power budget or, you know, range budget simply because, well, now that I know that I don't have to include a, a wifi radio in there or make sure that I have a wifi infrastructure, I can change the way that I build these things. I think there's a lot of, uh, complementing technologies that, uh, that are fine tuned to meet the needs of different application requirements.

And we're, we're seeing this, uh, across a lot of the access points that are being released. 45 and six gigahertz, but as Lee was mentioning, those, those are some challenges using that. Unlike and spectrum, these access points are also coming loaded with various iot radios, whether they support, uh, ZigBee thread, Bluetooth, uh, they also have USB adapters that you can connect even in more, um, IOT type technologies.

You could add your Loro band gateways, uh, 8 0 2 point 15 four radios, uh, wireless heart, uh, ISA 100 point 11 a radios and expand upon that. So we're already building an infrastructure and ecosystem that allows us to bring a lot of different wireless technologies all together and then use that as, um, a staging point to expand and deploy support, uh, other devices connecting to our network as we need to across a, a common platform, which gives us, uh, one device that we can manage, but enable multiple radios to support, uh, different types of end devices with their specific requirements. Yeah.

Yeah. To add to that, I think it's, uh, that it's the flexibility. It certainly could be on a per device or it can be on, you know, a per product basis.

It's literally giving, you know, the, uh, organization, the customer, the options, uh, so they don't feel like, okay, I'm shoehorned and to only having to use, you know, a wifi implementation. Again, you know, there's the ZigBee, the Bluetooth, uh, capabilities. What I think is, uh, where a lot of the innovation is ongoing across all these wireless technologies, and it came out, you know, at 5G Americas is that now we're seeing, you know, spectrum optimization.

You know, there is a spectrum shortage issue, uh, that's ongoing, you know, certainly in the US North America, and, uh, there, you know, plans to see how can, you know, spectrum be better rationalized in terms of how it's distributed, uh, you know, potentially how it's re auctioned and so forth. And that's gonna be important. But in the meantime, you know, how can more channels be packed in on a, uh, per unit basis, on a per ship set, uh, basis, you know, how can, uh, you know, uh, uh, the spectrum, uh, be, uh, used where, uh, it's not going to cause, you know, uh, egregious trade offs with latency and power envelopes and so forth.

And so I think that's where we're gonna see a lot of innovation already, you know, major operators are like, over the next three years, realistically, this is the only way we're gonna be able to get more out of the existing spectrum, and that's squeezing more capabilities out of the spectrum that is available to us, uh, over the next three to four years. And I, I think that, um, uh, identifies one of the, the big contrast between wifi and a lot of other wireless, uh, technologies that are out there is because they're limited and, uh, being squeezed for so much, uh, spectrum, they're, they have those finite boundaries where they're paying significant dollars for access to that medium. They are trying to be as efficient as possible in squeezing every last moment of airtime, uh, and increase the number of channels that they have available to 'em.

If you compare and contrast that with wifi, uh, it seems very much the opposite of, you know, we just released 1200 megahertz of spectrum, uh, to the Canada and, and US and other countries as well, but we're, we're looking at jumping up to 320 megahertz wide channels. Um, and we, we still have to deal with the inefficiencies of wifi, where there's huge gaps in time where there's just delays in communication, right? We're, we're waiting for devices to back off and compete with each other, uh, wasting time that we could have been transmitting, could have been sending data, uh, just due to the built in inefficiencies of that protocol.

So we have an incredibly inefficient protocol that just one rights to massive amounts of spectrum versus other wireless technologies that are incredibly resourceful, uh, with the, the pressure spectrum that they have available to them. That's funny you mentioned those 320 meg, uh, wide channels. Wifi is also one of those things where the standard is written one way and promises all of this stuff and then, you know, it can deliver a fraction of it.

And the, you know, multi-user, MIMO, you know, 16 by 16 wifi devices, I mean, there's a, a laundry list of like pie in the sky things that we all either hoped for or we're still hoping for when we think about wifi seven, but it seems to be a perpetual falling short on the way the standard is written and all the things that are marketed and promised versus what's realized. The other technologies, at least so far that I've seen, they're more true to what's promised. And that's kind of refreshing, low raw wind, you get whatever it is, three or four, uh, potential data rates, and you're, you're gonna get what's promised.

There's no weird pie in the sky over promising, uh, Bluetooth, same way. It's like, you're, you're getting what you're getting, and wifi tends to be this, uh, very strange paradigm of sounds great. Give it a year.

Let's see what happens. And I, I find it just, you know, like I said, just, you know, comforting, refreshing, whatever you want to call it, when a, when the other wireless standards are devoid of, of that goofiness that wireless has, again, going back to the 320 mi, 320 meg channels, are we gonna see that practically in the real world? Eh, it would be nice, but I am, I'm eternally skeptic, uh, skeptical about that kind of thing.

It's interesting that you bring all this up, Lee, because it sounds an awful lot like the networking industry years ago when we had competing standards like Token Ring and Fitty, and a lot of other stuff that you've probably only ever read about in a textbook, because in, you know, in the immortal words of Bob Metcalf of Threecom, I don't know what the future of ethernet or the future of networking is gonna look like, but we're gonna call it ethernet. Ethernet didn't win because it was the best protocol. It didn't even win because it was the, uh, most technically adept, it won because it was cheap and it was ubiquitous.

Everybody had it, and everybody supported it. And so everybody just kind of agreed to build around it. And I would argue that in today's world, we're still dealing with the fallout of having to work around some of the limitations of ethernet is are we reaching a point where we're going to fracture into multiple different kinds of protocols that are trying to solve the challenges of wifi without necessarily cleaning up the standard?

It's like, oh, well, yeah, we could try to implement this in wifi if we really wanted to, but it's probably just better to go over here and use, you know, wifi plus or, or whatever we're gonna call that protocol because it's just faster now. It's only gonna work on your device, and it's not gonna interoperate with anything else. Which is kind of one of the things that makes wifi kind of so, you know, important in the industry are, are we gonna get to a point where we're basically dealing with the token ring and the wi, uh, arc net and the fit of wifi?

Yeah, it's a great, uh, I would say philosophical question in some ways where we had, you know, what could be called, you know, the religious wars of, you know, the late nineties, early two thousands. And I think, uh, what is distinct here is that, you know, wifi is fundamentally a connective, uh, connectivity technology, certainly, uh, it relies on, you know, ethernet, uh, you know, uh, links, uh, to, you know, fully, uh, succeed, uh, where it's being, uh, applied for local connectivity. But I, I think what we're gonna see is that, you know, the wifi ecosystem is so extensive that it's not going to extensively be, uh, garnished by, uh, competing technologies.

I think it's, uh, going back to, uh, the fundamental point of wifi and, you know, what can wifi, uh, uh, do, but how can it be augmented, uh, to meet the business objectives of, you know, the business or, you know, the, uh, fundamental connectivity needs of the consumer. And again, it's about that flexibility. I think wifi, uh, even with its, uh, you know, limitations, uh, will continue to be supported on a broad basis.

And things like wifi seven can help address, you know, some of the, uh, previous, uh, limitations. And I, I think that's how it's gonna play out. It's not gonna be, okay, ethernet eats token ring, it's gonna be okay, wifi, how, uh, can it be best optimized where it's applicable?

Uh, but how can it be best complemented by these alternative technologies? I do think too, to your point, Tom, it's almost like a, it's almost like a 180 on the, you know, in my mind, the way you asked the question, you know, it used to be an arms race for speeds and feeds and what wireless or what wired technology is going to win out and dominate. I mean, that's kind of what it felt like was the market was self sorting, and then ethernet eventually emerged the Victor, um, at least in my mind, that's how it felt.

Um, you know, when I was a, a networking child, you know, and now today it, it's almost like we're not looking to get to one dominant wireless technology, but we're kind of all more enlightened and open-end or open-minded to finding the best technology for the individual scenario. And that allows for all of these things to come out. And just the overall, uh, culture of being wireless minded.

It's like, for a while, wireless meant wifi to most people, and now at least I think for us as technologists, wireless means just that without wires. And now let's talk about the specific scenario and what's the best wireless fit for it. So I think maybe there's a, you know, maybe there's more critical thought going on, uh, with wireless and more adaptability to the individual scenario.

And it's not just the, you know, it has to be one technology to rule them all. Like, maybe it was when ethernet kind of arose as the ringmaster, but you know, like I say, it just, it, to me, it feels different, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I agree with the, the sentiments that have been shared as well.

I, I think it's much less of a competition to find that dominant wireless technology. Um, but enabling a, a scenario where we can deploy complimentary solutions, uh, in parallel, uh, operating to, to meet the needs of, of different applications. Uh, now tying it back across one kind of, um, uh, backhaul type, uh, system that's easy to manage, uh, under, you know, 1, 1, 1 single pane of, of, of glass, uh, that type of scenario I think is, um, more desirable.

Um, but, uh, fighting for one technology over the other or trying to convince, uh, decision makers that we have to choose one versus the other. Uh, I think we very much need to approach this as, uh, positioning complementary technologies and enabling multiple wireless backhaul, uh, or a access technologies to deliver on the solutions that, uh, customers and businesses are looking for. I guess we've answered the premise of in the positive, uh, wifi isn't always the best solution, but it matters more that you need to understand what your solution needs to look like as opposed to just going out there and throwing something at the wall to see what sticks.

Because every one of the competitors to wifi that we've discussed so far have a niche. They, you know, maybe it's a distance, maybe it's, uh, being more optimized for sensors or things like that. If you're just expecting to drop something down and it's gonna work mostly like wifi, but be a little bit cheaper or reach a little bit further, you may find yourself challenged.

And that's why it's so important to be able to do the research on all of these things. And one of the places that you can learn about technologies like this is during Mobility Field Day, which will be happening November 20th in Silicon Valley. com and check out the schedule for that.

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com slash podcast. You can also check us out on Techstrong tv. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back with another great episode next week.