63. MLO is a Lie – Tech Field Day Podcast

The world is filled with promises of the next best thing just around the corner. And wireless is no different. Wifi seven promises to be the fastest thing that you've ever seen, but unfortunately, one of the pieces that is promising that isn't ready just yet.

In this episode, we're gonna talk about MLO is a lie. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where each episode we bring together a group of experts from across the enterprise IT space to debate a number of topics and theories in enterprise IT Tech Field Day is a part of the Futureum group, and each episode is usually recorded in conjunction with one of our tech Field day events. We're here at Mobility Field Day this week.

But before we introduce the topic or premise for this episode, I'd like to take a moment for our guests to introduce themselves. Alan, I'm Alan Crow. I'm a principal engineer at nexo.

Hey, to Mackenzie from the uk and I've been a wireless nerd for 25 years now. Chris Reed, principal consultant at Verizon focusing on wifi. And I'm Tom Hollingsworth, practice lead for Mobility at Tech Field Day.

Let's jump into the premise for this episode. No doubt you've seen lots of coverage of something called wifi seven. You don't know what it is, but you know that you need it because the number is bigger.

That means that it must be better. But the primary feature that everyone is looking for in wifi seven is something called Multilink operation or MLO. But unfortunately I have news for you.

MLO is a lie. Okay, let's jump into that because I can hear people typing about how I'm wrong, and Lord knows I love to be wrong on the internet, but gentlemen, what is Multilink operation and why is it something that so many people are clamoring for in this latest revision of wifi? Yeah, let's get off Chris.

Setting the stage first, uh, MLO is the ability for a client to send or receive, um, frames to two different radios, either the same frame or different frames staggered, um, or to two different aps at the same time. Um, so fundamentally that's, uh, that's what it is. And the benefit is supposedly both speed increases as well as reliability increases of those, those same transmissions.

Um, it's been the, the primary seller of the wifi seven. It's been the, the, the hotness for it. Um, but I, I don't know that at least to start with it's going to work at all.

We had enough problems with O-F-D-M-A, even now, getting it to work in the real world, um, and having a real benefit from it has been a problem. And that was a technology that was already in use. It was already on radios.

They already understood the behavior for it. We just adopted into wifi and it's still had that problem. Now you're telling me that we're expecting this to work across multiple aps at the same time.

Uh, I, I have real concerns about that happening in the real world, at least in the, the short to midterm. We have enough problems roaming between two aps, let alone talking to two aps at the same time. Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think that the other thing to be said about Multilink operation is it's not just all, all those benefits, better reliability, increased speed, that you don't actually get all of those. There's driven flavors of multilink operation and depending on which flavor you implement or depending on what benefit you get, and I don't think that's, people already talk about that as much right. With it as well.

And I guess one question that I've got is which flavor is actually going to bring a, a tangible benefit that we'll actually see in, in enterprise class networks? Well, I wanna back up a little bit here because one of the things that I think we might want to explain also to our audience out there, why do we need Multilink operation? Because I can think of a time back in my formative years when I was studying how to create Ether channels and LACP trunks between switches, and at no point was this ever sold to me as, you know, double the bandwidth.

In fact, usually the way that it was described was it was redundancy, right? So if one of my cables goes out that it's still one link and all the traffic's going back and forth between one. In fact, anybody who ever told me, oh, well if you lag two Ether channels together, you're gonna get two gigabits per second.

They obviously didn't know what they were doing because there was a preference for it to pick one channel. Why do we need MLO? Is it going to increase speeds for wifi?

Is it gonna increase reliability for wifi? Who, who do we wanna listen to though? Well, I, we wanna listen to the marketing people who tell us it automatically makes it faster.

Is it the practitioners that talk to us more about, you know, it is gonna add reliability, it's gonna add survivability and some of the rest of it. I think that's some of what, at least from my perspective we run into these days is, especially with wifi being driven very heavily on the consumer side, everything's all about faster, faster, faster. Mm-hmm.

You said it, you know, in the intro, it's, it's, why do I need wifi seven? Because the number's bigger. Yeah.

Um, and I think that's really what we, a lot of cases, especially in the s and b market, we suffer from, from a technology standpoint, what are we looking to get out of MLO is a great question. Yeah. And to Peter's point earlier, we have to talk about the separate flavors and the benefit that comes with that flavor.

So, so let's talk about the benefit of reliability. So in, in that scenario, it'd be sending the same frame to two different radios. That way if it does, if one doesn't get there, the other one is going to, you're getting reliability there, but at the expense of you're, you're using double the bandwidth, um, because you're using the other radios bandwidth as well, um, at the same time.

And, and that for normal, and That's just one flavor, isn't it, of reliability. This is the problem with amlo. There's so many different flavors.

So sending the same frame to two radios requires you to have a multi radio scenario. Yeah. Whereas I think most clients are just single radio.

So they're gonna be doing what they call single radio, um, where, where they're gonna be able to establish a connection with say, a five gigha and a six gigha radio of the same ap. Um, but they'll only have ability to use one of those connections at any one time. So does that increase the liability?

Well, potentially, yeah. So one of the problems with wifi is, um, sometimes con congestion channels getting con congested. You, if you've ever been on a Zoom call on a conjecture channel, you end up sometimes getting jitter delay.

4 gigaherz. Actually, that's why we see it a lot, right? If you've got the ability to go per packet, actually I want to choose which link is the least congested I'm going to send on that link.

And if something that link becomes congested or interference, which was what one of the presenters talked about, um, I can then use you a link. I think that that does potentially give us a benefit for realtime applications like video and streaming. Um, but, uh, so, so I see that as potentially a real benefit.

All them met MO benefits, I'm not sure about it, but It's a lot of, it's a lot of complication for a slightly niche use case because outside of realtime applications, like do, do kinda standard TCP transmissions, does that need that? Or is it only UT UDP realtime protocols that we, we care about using that for? But, But, but they're becoming more important now then like, and, and now we used to asking wifi design inmate, do you want to do volume?

We, we never asked that question anymore, right? Because teams zooms calls are a daily norm in, in the enterprise office environment. So everyone is doing realtime voice and video now and wifi.

So I think they, if we can increase the reliability, but I think that can be a benefit. I'm not, but in terms of all the benefits of MLO, I'm, I'm not convinced. 4, right?

4 and five, maybe some five and six. 4, yeah, we'll do it, but how much do we rely on it to be available and ready to take video calls? 4 network in a state that's ready for a video call, it's, it's not gonna get better.

Well, uh, and it's how reliable is that gonna Do then? 4 gigha away from your car put network, I disable it, right? Yeah.

4 and five gigs, so you can do MLO driven ss, right? So I do think the real benefit will come with five and six. Yeah.

4. Yeah. But then we need a wider deployment, not six ski radios to Develop, which brings into all the fun that we need for to deploy this, right?

It's not just MLO that we've gotta deploy now, right? Yeah. As much as, as much as we would love to say everybody's doing WPA three, how many people are doing WPA three?

And and what does that bring into the folks that aren't doing it? And, and where do we go there? And Well, I think that's a good answer because MLO requires wifi seven.

Yeah. And, uh, and wifi seven requires WPA three. 4 and you want to en enable MLO or WIFI seven at all, sure.

4 or five gig won't be able to connect. And I don't think that's been quite fought through, um, as much so, so in the six gig has been That's great. That's all fret, it's new.

Mm-hmm. Uh, yeah. So if you've got a legacy right now, uh, let's, let's just talk, uh, pre Sure.

Key only. 4 and five gigahertz radio, uh, it's WPA two psk. Yeah.

You swap that out for your fancy new wifi seven ap, in order to use this, you have to migrate to WPA three. Mm-hmm. Your clients have to support beacon protection.

Uh, your clients al also have to support, uh, management frame protection. Yep. Which is, is required for WPA three.

But, uh, in, in, uh, legacy WPA two, when we enabled it, we did have a lot of client problems. Uh, so there's a, there's a few steps that we have to get to in order to even start to play with this much less use it and see a world benefit. And I, I'd say luckily, at least for those people who are running a WPA two with A PSK and that's it, it's easier for them, right?

It's the, it's the enterprises that are on WPA two with EPE or something like that, where they've gotta make that jump to ETLS for and certificates and the PKI that comes with it and all those things to get to WPA three to then get to w you know, wifi seven to then get to MLO. 4 and five only, but they're wifi seven aps, right? So now we've got a, okay, I've got, I can't buy these aps because I want to get to five and six, but I can't because that AP is wifi seven but doesn't have 60 tz Go For it.

Uh, no, but I, I think that's good though, that it's good that wifi seven supports all the bands. 4. Yeah.

For per Specific cases. I think it's got two for MLR to be a thing. Oh, yeah.

Um, I think though, here's a question. We, we've talked a bit about reliability and some of the issues do we need, and if you are using it for throughput, so that's when you're gonna send split your data over two leads. Correct?

Do we need it? Do we need more throughput? Always.

Well, We always need more throughput, But obviously you, you must have watched the lead the previous episode of this podcast where we talked about the fact that wifi seven is fast enough. Because most of the time that we run into these problems where people are complaining that the wifi is down or that we're not getting enough bandwidth, it has absolutely nothing to do with the underlying infrastructure. And it has more to do with the fact that the application that you're using has bad coding that won't allow it to take advantage of multiple links, or that your AP is only uplinked at one or two gigs at most, and then your internet connection is a hundred megabits or 400 megabits.

Yeah. So it doesn't matter how fast we can get the wifi to run, unless you're transferring a movie from your laptop to your Plex server. But even then, I'm not totally convinced you need multilink operation, um, multi radio.

I, I'm just not convinced we need it. I, I think there's a few niche cases potentially in the home when you talk about, you know, doing, um, via gaming and you want to have, I dunno, 20, 30 people all in some sort of immersive VR game that's gonna be all connected over the wifi. There, there is those type of scenarios, right.

But in a standard enterprise, um, I'm, I just don't think users Yeah. Require, I, I still say today, if you gave me, um, a, a AC access point, I could probably design it for an, uh, a wireless network to meet any enterprises requirements today. Oh yeah.

Absolutely. And I, I mean, we saw the same thing when we started sticking multi gig interfaces and 10 gig interfaces in our aps, and people were like, we're not even using a gig interface. Why are we doing those higher level up lengths?

Well, it's some of the same questions. Yes. When we're talking the radio side, Six year hertz low power indoor is kind of the first time that we've really been able to see it, uh, start to push that one gig limit.

Right. So, so now I think it makes a little more sense to, to have them, uh, in those radios. But, but remember that's relatively recent as well.

Yeah. So we're talking about do we need extra bandwidth? We just went from 25 channels on five gigahertz.

If you're using all of them, we got that extra 1200 megahertz spectrum, so now we can do wider channels. We're getting more speed from that. Do we now need additional speed on top of it?

Sure. I don't know how many people at their house are renting through hundred and 20 megahertz channels and have the latest gear that allows them to do some form of MLO because they're, um, I don't know, downloading weather data sets. But I remember, uh, even in my house, my, my limit is my internet back home connection.

Mm-hmm. It's not the wifi. I can be, I can max out my, I get, I can get 200 meg at home, but I max out my 200 meg of 220 over the wifi mm-hmm.

And I was doing that with AC equipment. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I can have me let my wifi go faster, but, But there's still that push to home still that pushing consumer, that consumer gets seven first There's bigger, better massive aps with, you know, porcupine antennas coming every which direction, you know, and I can go faster.

They're gaming routers, right. That kind of thing. But yeah, we're still hitting that limit.

I mean, we are starting to see higher adoptin of gig to the home. Um, and so, you know, it, it is coming, but yeah, I think on the enterprise side, No. So could it be that the reason why consumers get it first, other than the fact that they're more than willing to pay for it, is that they're never gonna hit the head limits of what wifi seven can provide.

So for them it feels faster because of the placebo effect without all of the features that are actually necessary to make it go faster. And I think it's that, I think the other piece is a lot of home wifi is terrible. And so if you're gonna take, and, and we have, let's say it's a gig channel on, on our, you know, on the wifi right?

If we, if we say it's a gig theoretical and it's deployed horribly and they're only getting 500 meg, well if I make that, you know, if I make that gig theoretical, two gig theoretical and they're only getting gig, it is faster for them. They're still hitting that limit when they hit the internet. Yeah.

But, uh, home use home in the middle of the field is kinda the only place that those super wide channels make any sense. Yeah. Uh, because if as soon as you get into a neighborhood or you get into an apartment building is already enough contention around that, that you're not getting the advantage of those, But they're still deploying 'em.

Yeah. Yeah. Out, out of the, out of the box.

Like all over the place. Yeah. These, uh, these home devices are, are shipping and coming up with 160 megahertz wide channels by default, 320 megahertz wide.

I'm expecting 320 megahertz wide channels by default for the wifi seven products as well. Yeah. But it goes back to one of the things that Sam Clemons wrote years ago about drag racing school buses.

Why do we ship them by defaults? Because that way when they get tested, they run as fast as possible, and I don't have to deal with the fallout of what happens when they're broken. You have to call support and figure out why your neighbor keeps dropping your wifi connection.

Mm-hmm. But it comes back to bigger number better. And, and we've been dealing with that in it for years.

Yeah. But when you get into the nuance of what actually makes it better and why this isn't ready for prime time yet, how can we approach the stakeholders in an organization who may be hell bent on deploying this and then hell bent on seeing massive performance increases and being sorely disappointed with their investment when bigger number not so much bigger. I, I think that's a really key point, and that I see this all the time, and I've done deployments, um, saw it with ax, we deployed some new ax aps and I ended up having to turn off most of the iax features.

Um, and it was just because of all the, so, so you think about multi user MO um, the, the channel sounded and the overhead associated to it actually made them have less air time. Mm-hmm. So, and when I turned off all the features, it worked better than the royal system, but they went, but our business unit said we have to turn those features on because that's what we've been sold on.

Mm-hmm. And there was, and I was like, you turn them on, they won't work. You know, you, you're gonna see let's performance.

I I've gotta optimize. But they just Yeah. But from a business point of view, they said, no, we spend money on aax, we want the aax each stand on, and if they don't work, we want the vendors to go and fix it.

Yeah. But before we even get to whether we can use it, uh, whether we can use it, if it all works perfectly, the problem is gonna be on the manufacturer chip sets, uh, and, and drivers as well as the, the client, uh, chip sets of drivers. Are they going to implement it properly?

Is it all gonna work correctly? Are they gonna make the calculations to actually have it happen? Or is that calculation gonna come up with, I'm never gonna try this?

Uh, 'cause even if you enable it in the infrastructure, if the client device isn't participating in it doesn't matter. And that goes back to the other problem of this is a two-pronged problem. I can go to my favorite big box store, or my favorite online retailer and order a brand new porcupine AP that supports every cool feature set of wifi seven.

And if my iPad from 2019 still goes as fast as it was going, I'm going to rant and rave and scream and leave bad reviews. Not realizing that the wifi client chip set in my device is nowhere near ready to support this. And how do we communicate that to users that Oh yeah, we can definitely support MLO if you're willing to buy everybody in the building new laptops And even those new laptops, the right laptop.

Yeah. You have to buy the right new laptops. 'cause a lot of them aren't shipping with wifi seven chip stops yet.

Are, are we getting back to this problem with 8 0 2 point 11 in when Belkin shipped a pre-standard version that only worked with one card? Because I can tell you what it felt like deploying that to the owner of the company and him wondering why his brand new laptop didn't work with his brand new ap. And I'm like, well, you gotta use the card that came with it.

And then it is not just the card, it's, there's, there's the operating system support it as well. Mm-hmm. So with Windows, you've got to be Windows 11 and you've gotta have a certain patch mm-hmm.

Installed. Yep. Or you're not doing, or you're not spotting wifi, you're not doing wifi seven features.

And maybe that's why Microsoft Is forcing All the new updates, right? Yeah. But then it comes back to, well, why should it only Windows 11 do it?

0. So why can't you make this work on Windows 10? Yep.

And then someone's gonna come out with a software program that you install on Windows 10 to enable this feature, and it's actually malware and mm-hmm. You know, you've compromised your machine, but people will do just about anything to be faster. Yep.

So how can we educate the wider populace about the nuances of about YY five seven really is better, but what better actually means? So I, I don't think it's anything that we can really do. We as practitioners can really, uh, do, this is a, a tale as old as time problem.

This is marketing, uh, coming out with statements that are technically true but not accurate. Um, we ran into this with, with, uh, the wider channel. It's and, um, and ax and ac and the speeds that they could do.

And that you, you need five gig ports on it. You didn't, uh, you absolutely didn't. We come out with, um, data sheets that say this AP can supports a thousand clients.

Yes. They can associate no one's doing anything if it's at a thousand clients. Um, and it's not just, uh, it's not just wifi, it's across other, um, kind of other technologies as well.

We look at firewall data sheets and the amount of throughput that they say yes, but if you enable any feature whatsoever, it's half of that throughput. This is all just marketing. It's not a technology problem.

Yeah. And I, I love my friends in marketing, but at the same time, we've gotta figure out a way that our data sheets, that our communications, that those kind of things are realistic numbers. Not the theoretical max.

I mean, we could talk about 4K quo, right? I mean, nobody Talks about 4K. I know.

Well, why? Because we know it's not realistic. Um, I think that's the, the, we as practitioners, the only way that we can do this is, is continuing to push that, that talk track of here's the realistic numbers.

I've had that conversation with clients. They're like, well, this data sheet says it can support 500 u you know, 500 users. Why do you need five of them in this area?

It's like, well, because it can't, you know, realistically we have to bring them back. I, I think another thing that's worth maybe mentioning, um, and again, I dunno how we educate people like this, but I, there's some, some of that I want the chips that manufacturer said to me is that they will, when, when they bring out, let's say a wifi seven chip set, that the, the first chip sets out the DOT are not going to be, there's gonna be problems with it. It's not gonna work very well.

Same with the first, but the next chip set they bring out will be wifi eight. They're not gonna bring out a haze, our fixed wifi seven one. But if you want to get good wifi seven ap, you probably need to buy wifi eight.

Right. A AP if you wanted to buy, have a good AC access point. Actually, the what?

The aax aps were probably the best AC ones. And then wifi seven aps are probably really good aax aps. So you've got to not think.

So that's why when the event there's a selling us on all these new features, you've gotta say, well actually no, this is a really good AX ap. Mm-hmm. Um, because it's actually the new, they've actually improved a lot of the features of AX in the wifi seven ship sets.

Mm-hmm. And then all the new features are the probably that's not gonna work very well. Yeah.

How we Communicate that, I dunno, It's the first pancake problem, right? No matter what you do, the first pancake is never gonna look or taste right. And by the time you get to the last pancake, you figured everything out.

But except for AC wave one and wave two, we're never gonna see a wifi seven wave two. No, we're not. We're gonna see wifi eight wave one where we, we really worked our butts off to make this reality.

So I guess you're just gonna have to go with it. And, and we've seen that from the vendors saying, yeah, here's all the things that are in even six E, right? And seven, here's all the things that are in the spec, but we've only implemented these.

And yeah, you may see a wave too. And then it's like, no, no, no, because the speed we're Going because they're optional, not required. Yeah.

And, and I think that's the, some of those same communication points that we continuously run into As well. You're, you're, when you're a customer and you're buying this, you're, you're, and you're buying a wifi seven ap, the future proofing that you get from wifi seven isn't wifi seven, it's it's six gigahertz. Yeah.

It's not, it's not even six E. It's just, it's the spectrum. And you've got that in that radio.

That's what gets you the benefits now. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Whether It's AI intelligence or autonomous driving, or even a foldable phone, we're being sold on the promise of something great that's just around the corner and it's not quite ready yet. But if you stick with me for a little bit longer, you're gonna see something amazing until you have to go buy something completely different. 'cause it turns out we didn't know how to make that work in the first place.

And I feel like that's kind of where we are with MLO. Everyone keeps hearing about how important it is and how much better it's gonna make things. And they're ignoring all of the other things that have been included that improve what's going on.

I mean, we've been fighting this battle for years. 4 other than removing congestion. So we have to be realistic about what we're actually looking for, and we have to be ready to do the hard work to take advantage of those solutions.

And maybe that means upgrading our hardware. Maybe that means leaning on our software vendors to be more supportive of what we're trying to accomplish. But it also means that maybe we have to be realistic about what we're actually needing.

And instead of just hoping that the speedometer goes all the way to the other side, and I can claim that it's faster, that'll just about do it for this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. Before we leave, I'd like to let our guests let you know whether you can find more of what they like to talk about. Alan.

Yep. Uh, Alan Crow. You can find me on LinkedIn or hit me up at Nets Stack Plumber because I'm the plumber at a security company.

Um, yeah. Peter Mackenzie. com is my website.

And at Mackenzie wifi on LinkedIn, Twitter, blue Scott, sky and YouTube. I'm Chris Reed. You can find me on Blue Sky, uh, at the CM read, uh, or you can find me on LinkedIn or occasionally in the woods.

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