39. Wi-Fi Marketing Numbers are Lies – Tech Field Day Podcast

Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where each episode we bring together a group of IT experts from a variety of technology fields in enterprise IT to discuss relevant topics in the industry. This podcast is brought to you by Tech Field Day, a part of the Future Room group. Before we jump into the premise for today's episode, I'd like to take a moment for our guests to introduce themselves, starting with Mark.

Hey, I'm Mark ltz, Kerry Cole, Scott McDermott. All right. Thank you all very much for joining us.

Let's jump into the premise for today's episode. We all buy our technology based on a certain amount of assurance that it's gonna do what we want it to do. Um, we want our laptops to be a little bit faster than the one that we're replacing.

We want our phones to be a little bit faster, with a little bit better battery life, but how do we know that those numbers are actually what they say they are? And there's no bigger offender of that than the wireless industry because the numbers that get printed on the back of the box sometimes don't match up with what we meet in reality. So the premise for this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast is that all wifi marketing numbers are lies.

Yeah. I know you're probably already saying, well, duh, Tom. Nobody ever gets those numbers.

But I guess the question would be why do those numbers get put on the back of the box in the first place? Carrie, I think you had a really good answer for this when we were discussing it before the podcast started. Look, it's all, it's all marketing.

It's all I I I will forever ru the day that I chose a technology that is marketed to consumers as my chosen path. They put those numbers on there purely for consumers. You go to Best Buy, pick out your router that does seven gigabits per second.

Nobody ever gets that. It's not real reality. And every CIO reads them.

Every CIO thinks it's possible. Well, I I'm, I'm just curious about this because we all know that I have a background in wired networking. Well, the cables that I plug in are gigabit, and that's all they do is gigabit.

Why, why is there a difference? You're, you, when it comes to wired, it's constrained Within a cable wireless, you have interference from anybody around you. And so that affects it.

You have one AP in theoretical, perfect conditions inside of, inside of a chamber with one ap, one client. You can reach close to those speeds, not you're even in those per pristine conditions, you're not gonna hit it perfectly. But you can theoretically get up there with all the bells and whistles turned on.

One client perfectly set up. You add two clients to that, it messes it, it cuts your, it cuts it in half, and every client you add onto that reduces your throughput. And so it, it theoretically fi or hurts those numbers.

So even in a home environment, you're not gonna have one device on there. I mean, it kind of is. The purpose of me having a wireless router in my house is so that all of my devices don't have to plug into things.

Right. Can I, can I ask it differently though? Okay.

When, when was the last time you saw marketing that told you how fast that wire's gonna be? As far as I know, other than saying it's a 10, 100, 1000 ethernet port, or in some cases multiple, uh, gigabit port, very rarely does anybody say unless you're doing like a data center operation or something. Uh, I, this isn't really new to wifi either.

'cause I, I remember the first time I noticed this was back when a hundred meg was new and full duplex was new, and there were switches coming out and they're like, it's a 200 megabit port. Mm-hmm. Because you get a hundred megabits each direction.

Mm-hmm. I'm like, no, that's not how it works. But, but if it's a hundred megabits and there's two channels, it must be 200 because the math is math.

Except it's not. Because that's one of the things that we've learned is well go look at your car in your garage. Does the speedometer stop at the speed limit or does it go way far beyond that?

And a better question would be for most consumer vehicles, why does the speedometer go past where the engine is governed to? Because I've seen minivans where the speedometer goes to 120 miles an hour. You will never get that thing.

No, because once actually, once that minivan hits a certain speed, it's an engine governor, it cuts all RPMs. So it, it really cannot go that fast. But yet, when you ask the car manufacturers, well, we put it on there so that people think ours is better.

So is this a situation where even though the manufacturers know they're never gonna get those speeds, they put them on there anyway because this is what our customers want? Well, I mean, the, the, I mean, a lot of the numbers, they're based on the standard, right? So we've got theoretical numbers that you can potentially get to, and the hardware does technically do that.

It's just outside of a home that's in the middle of nowhere and has no neighbors. I mean, it's not actually a realistic deployment. It's certainly not in the enterprise.

We're not gonna deploy anything that gets even remotely close to those numbers, even from a theoretical basis, because that just, we can't do a good wifi deployment. In that case, You're also relying on the clients to support full, because the standard talks about 16 by 16 radios. Nobody has 'em eight by eight.

Nobody has 'em outside of a few cases. Nobody has those type of radios. That's to get the theoretical, the maximum.

Then you have to have the other side that supports it as well. The client side, where typically these are iPhones or laptops or something that do not have the space to put that many radios, let alone they're running on battery. And so they want to, you have things that drop your ability there.

And so you're never gonna hit that. These standards, we have wifi seven wifi seven's better than six. What is wifi seven?

It's high efficiency, not A ac wifi six is high efficiency wifi seven's extremely high Throughput. That's right. Right?

That's right. Um, and so you have these standards that are focusing on different things. We we're going for speeds speed, speed speeds, high throughput, H WiFi's five, I don't remember that.

Wifi five, high HT high throughput. We're going for speeds. Now the industry's going, well, we've, we can't push speeds, so let's go for the next metric of efficiency.

Get, reduce that latency because cellular's trying to come in and take over that. So let's change that mode. Those numbers continue because that's what we've trained the consumers on.

That seven's better than six, which is better than five. So we have to keep pushing those numbers. But it's okay to say, I'd be perfectly fine if it, they just said wifi seven is better.

But when they say that you're gonna get seven gigabits, and to get seven gigabits, that means that we have to turn on 320 mega megahertz channels, which I saw somebody post the other day say something I completely agreed with. You know, like the change my mind thing, 320 megahertz channels are a bad idea. Change my mind.

I'm not gonna change your mind because I completely agree, but somebody commented, I've never, I've never seen wifi not work with the maximum channel width. Then you haven't done enough of it because you, that's the problem when they, when they market it performance oriented that way. And that to achieve those numbers means you have to turn on 320 megahertz channels and all the other stuff that just makes it difficult.

You have to make decisions that make bad wifi designs, right? Yes. But here's the problem.

It's for those that know they don't make those decisions, right? But almost all of those that know report to somebody that doesn't, that somebody that doesn't says, well, I want that. I need that.

Of course we need that. And I, I, to this day on the channel width topic, I contend that we almost never need wider than a 20 megahertz channel. Performance is almost always more than adequate on a 20 megahertz wide channel.

And we can drive capacity on the network so much higher if we just keep narrow channels, push the overall capacity up. You can stream 4K video, you can stream eight K video, put megaherz Channel. You can almost everything.

The only thing that I've ever really run into is raw packs imaging. Yep. In a hospital that could use more bandwidth.

And even at 20 megaherz, it's still good at, but you go When you go wider, that does a lot of the cla to get on and off faster, On and off the air faster for sure. So there is efficiency. Efficiency, yeah.

Right. But Well, And because we've got that constrained medium, it's like we're sharing that medium. So we've got to, we are, everybody's on the same channel because it's like a giant hub.

But when you think adv, There can be advantages, but it becomes very use case Specific. But the, the reality, I think, and again, data would probably show that I'm not entirely right here, but driving up capacity overall in the network, it eliminates a little bit of the need to get clients on and off the channel faster because they're spread out more. They're, they're balanced across more aps.

Um, I, it it's just one of those, it's kind of a pet peeve of mine. I can't stand the marketing of, of the Yeah. The numbers of wifi.

But at the same time, and this is something that I've run into in my own research and writing, when the M1 MacBooks came out and everyone was freaking out because, oh, the wifi is slower in them. Well yes, because you're using a more advanced two spatial stream card as opposed to the three spatial stream card that the old one had, and it was 100 megabits per second slower at theoretical max. In reality, you won't be able to tell the difference because you're not gonna be pushing it to the absolute theoretical maximum with your crappy home network setup.

And how do we measure those things? net where we're at the mercy of the internet and all of the latency that we have to deal with there? And how many times have we seen the wifi get blamed for, I don't know, the IPV six tcam table overflowing on a switch at a large vendor conference?

So we, there's a lot of things that go into this, but what really matters to people is not the, to quote Sam Clemons, it depends methodology, but the box says it does this. Why does it not do this? But to be fair, that's not something that is specific to wireless.

If you don't believe me, check out the throughput numbers on a firewall, which are all lies as well, because they specially craft 64 byte packets to get their maximum packets per second throughput or battery life. Because there isn't a soul on this planet that believes that when Apple says that that new iPhone will get 12 and a half hours of battery life, what they didn't tell you was is that the screen is turned down to one lumen and it is playing a video in Safari that has been optimized for Kodak. In reality, yeah, you're probably lucky to get eight or nine hours out of it.

And a lot of organizations like Consumer Reports have gone to this, the length of saying, we're gonna test the battery ourselves and give you real world numbers, not theoretical numbers. Should there be a situation where standards body or an independent body says, well, these are lies. Here's what you can really expect under average conditions.

And what are those average conditions? Multiple clients connected to the same AP interference sources, concrete walls filled with rebar everywhere. Yeah.

Even one building that's designed to specifically to be the same as different environment. Mm-hmm. Neighbors or other things Like that.

Well, and then, and then looking back to the client thing, it's like, what client are we using? Is it the Pixel nine with all of the fancy features, or is it, you know, an iPhone five? I mean, you could get radically different numbers Many times.

Was it dropped? I think that, yeah, that's, you have battery safe mode turned On. Right?

Are you using the, the nice expensive Apple charger for your phone, or are you using the cheap one from Walmart that only runs at half the, the rate? And why is my phone taking so long to charge? Well, because it turns out that there's only so much that you can do with the technology that you're given.

And that's one of the things we're running into. But I think you guys have kind of hinted at part of it as well. It's inherent in the fact that we keep revising these, um, technologies and making the numbers go higher.

Right. You know, we went from, you know, 8 0 2 point 11 AC to AX to be, and then we started, well that doesn't make sense to consumers. So let's just, let's call them wifi five.

Yeah. And six and seven. Oh wait, we did something with wifi six.

But it's not a different protocol. It's just a different spectrum. But what do we call it?

We call it six E. That's right. But it's Gonna be the same standard.

But we dealt with the same thing in the cellular space, right? Because we had 3G, then we had LTE, which was 4G, but did you know there was a three and a half G and at and t was notorious for rating it as 4G four ge even though it wasn't. That's how that Came about.

But, but then do we even know what the spect what the official, uh, acronym for 5G is? Or does just everybody call it 5G Nr? But that's the thing is it's become embedded in people to the point now where companies are trying to sell us on six G, which isn't even a thing yet.

So is it a part of this because people expect to see those numbers? It could be. I, I think, I guess my, my request to the industry is stop publishing them.

Publish. Yes. It's wifi seven.

When wifi eight comes out, put that it's wifi eight. We don't need to talk about the three theoretical maximums that are completely unachievable in enterprise, if you wanna put it. I get it.

If you're buying it for home, at home, I run really wide channels. 'cause I don't care about my neighbors and I don't, I only have three access points in my house. I can do whatever I want to.

That you scale that beyond that, and all of a sudden my decisions that I made at home become a problem. So I, I think if, if it was just marketed as wifi seven, wifi eight, you know, that would make life a lot easier. But People just want to hear that they have the fastest one.

And how do you prove that it's the fastest One, one Wifi eight's definitely faster than seven, isn't it? Yeah, it is. If you have a client that can use it, do you have one?

Is It That's, I guess that's my point. Like does it matter? It it's faster.

It's eight, eight is bigger than seven. It must be better. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's just, it's challenging because we deal with it every single day in real, in the real world where we have to walk in and walk back those numbers and say, no, that, that, that, that's not possible.

We're not gonna run 320 megahertz channels in your hospital because, well, we'd only have four of 'em and we have a lot more access points than that in the, in the same RF domain. How many times have we've heard that wi that wifi five is good enough? Mm-hmm.

Because that was the high throughput that the speed wise looking to speed. That's your, that's where we're at. Wifi six.

Wifi seven. Beyond leaving out the six gigahertz, because that changes things because it's another band of spectrum. 4 and five gigahertz spectrum side, wifi five was good enough.

Apple on their Apple watches still puts wifi five mm-hmm. Radios in these to save cost because it's good enough. It does what we need.

But it's no different than when Intel was faced with a problem of all of their processors getting faster and faster and they were hit hitting theoretical maximums of what the silicon could support. So how did they fix that? Well then they just like wifi, they said, well, it's not about the overall raw speed, it's about how much work you can get done.

So that's when they said, well, why don't we put two CPUs on the same d the core series. And now when you look at Intel Xon, can you tell me what the speed of the processor in your laptop is? That's A great point.

They stopped marketing it. They stopped marketing the gigahertz of whatever it is. Well, not only that, but then they ran into a core count problem, right?

Because now, well, if four cores is good, six must be better. Eight is really good. And I know somebody who bought one of those Intel MacBooks that had eight cores in it and couldn't use it because it got too hot.

Can you tell me how many cores there are in an M series? MacBook? Nobody can, unless you read the spec sheet because nobody cares.

And did you know that most of them are actually not high performance cores? They're efficiency cores. Because what they're trying to do is preserve battery life, and they've learned how to make a good enough machine.

So do we need to get to the point where we don't care what wifi is in it? It's wifi, wifi six. It's wifi seven.

But I know people that have said, well, I'm not gonna buy the new iPhone because it's not wifi seven. Well, okay. Do you, do you have a use case for it?

Well, no, but I want the best one. So the moral of this is we should just go to call stop numbers altogether and just call it wifi. Why not?

Yeah, let's just go back to calling it, it's just wifi. I mean, I honestly, I haven't looked at it until laptops for a while. They're still marketing them's like I five, I seven, I nine, Whatever.

They actually have done away with that branding because they do that. Yeah. I, I think it, we can, we can still keep the wifi 5, 6, 7, that number culture, because that makes the marketing people happy.

Mm-hmm. I think we've maintained that, but it's, it's a shift in our thinking. We built this industry upon that wifi, A, A, B, and G and all, all the way up.

That's how we built the industry. And so as we were discussing earlier, we trained consumers to look for that. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. It was us that taught 'em that. So you gotta look.

You want your next, you want your best. Oh, you want wifi seven? I think maintaining, you don't necessarily have to get rid of the wifi seven, eight piece as you move forward because you do have to distinguish it and it makes the marketing people happy.

But the a EC, the ax, the numbers, all this stuff is the antiquated way of where, where we're doing this Intel's antiquated way. They've decided we're done with this, with the wifi side. We should probably follow this.

But do you need to do that? Because I reference Apple, yes. We still have numbers after our iPhones, but the iPad does not.

True. There is no version number of an iPad error or an iPad Pro. There's a year that it was released.

And you can tell 'em apart by the specs that are in that they don't have version numbers because nobody cares. Because it's not about getting the next fastest one. It's not about getting a new one every year.

It's about getting one that does my job. And my M1 still works as good as anything that I've ever had and will continue to work that well until I decide to get rid of it. And it doesn't even have wifi six.

All right. I think that'll just about do it for this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. As you can tell, we all know that the numbers are lies and we just accept it, right?

But it reminded me of a story that I told at lunch the other day about the, uh, VO two max on my watch. I know that it's not right because I've been told by everybody on the internet that these things lie, but I don't care because if it lies, at least it's consistent with itself. So my VO two max might not actually be 42, whatever that means.

It could be 20 or it could be 60, but as long as it is the same number or a growing number or what have you with itself over the time that I've been tracking it, I don't care. And the same thing goes for the wifi speeds. I may have bought it based on the fact that it's super fast, but I know that I'm never gonna see that speed as long as it's fast enough for me to get the things done that I need to get done, provided internet conditions or not.

Horrible. And I'm perfectly happy with a little bit of white lie now. And then, thank you for tuning in.

Make sure that you follow us on all of the social platforms. com/tech field day. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast application of choice.

Uh, if you do, please leave us a rating and review so people kind of understand what we're all about around here. We're not your typical podcast. com/podcast to view all of our episodes as well as see the upcoming field day events where we usually record episodes like this.

We will be back with more great discussions premises on the Tech Field Day podcast very soon. But until then, take care and don't believe all the numbers that you see.