7. Wi-Fi 7 Isn’t Enough For Future Wireless Needs – Tech Field Day Podcast

No matter what technology you're using, the numbers are always going to go up and things are going to get faster. But as things get faster, they become less likely to meet the needs that you have. And wifi seven is no different.

In this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, we discuss that wifi seven will not meet the needs for future wireless users. Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, the only podcast that dares to be both on topic and on location. Each episode we meet, we bring together a group of experts in the IT field, practitioners who are willing to share their experience with our audience out there.

Then we focus on a single idea, a key premise in the episode. Before we get started, I'd like to introduce our guests before we jump into the premise for this episode. Starting with Drew.

Hey, everybody. Drew Linz wireless nerd on, uh, all of the social media. Been a veteran of the wireless industry for a minute now, and, uh, now doing a whole bunch of fun consulting focused on wifi transitions to wifi seven, private 4G, private 5G, all the good wireless stuff.

Hey, I'm Rocky Gregory. I am under bionic rocky on all the socials, and I've been doing enterprise focused wireless for about 25 years now. Birds of a feather.

Thank you, Tom. I'm Ron Westfall, research director here at the Futurum Group, and I focus on communication networks, including wifi, including private 5G private networks, and you know, basically the mobile ecosystem, the wireless ecosystem, and all things related to it. Thank you.

And of course, I'm Tom Hollingsworth, event lead for tech Field day, which is a part of the Futurum group. Let's jump into the premise for today's episode. No technology is future proof.

If it was, we'd still be using ARC net, but we're not. We're using wireless. In fact, I don't even know anybody that uses ethernet unless they absolutely have to.

But ethernet is pretty much a baked standard, unlike wireless. Wireless, it seems, it's constantly evolving. We've gone 8 0 2 point 11 A, BG be O-M-G-W-T-F, and now we're just calling them by numbers because marketing is better.

Wifi six, wifi seven, wifi six E maybe. But no matter what you call the standard, it's not always gonna be perfect. So for this episode, the premise is that wifi seven isn't going to meet the needs for future wireless users.

All right, before we get started, we have to, you know, at least mention that at the time of this recording in May of 2024, wifi seven is barely a standard. Like, like the, the wifi alliance has basically said they're gonna allow people to start putting seven on there, but there aren't a lot of devices out there that are available that have wifi seven capabilities. So I wanna open the floor up to everyone here.

What is it about wifi seven that we already know isn't gonna meet the needs of things that haven't even been developed yet? Well, it doesn't go to 10, right? And 10 is the, the top of it.

So unless it goes to 10 or 11, it's never, it's always gonna fall a little bit shorter. Thank you. Have a nice day.

No, it's, I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot to it, but I love where it's going. It, but I just, it's interesting to see, we ran into an issue at the WLAN Pros conference at WLPC this year where we're like, oh, this is great. We can connect wifi seven and we can do MLO.

And this is phenomenal, but they only put a two and a half gig port on the back of the, uh, on the back of the access point. So what is, what's good in having all that data if you can't take it out to the port side? Or what happened to us was what happens when your wireless connections are stronger than your wired connections?

That was an interesting, uh, issue to get into. So, I don't know, what do you think, Rocky? Yeah, I agree.

I agree. Um, you know, in the enterprise especially, there's a push for what's new, what's sexy. Seven is better than six.

We need to go get seven aps. But on the backside, you've got switches that have been there 15 years, and so you're, you're overrunning it the other side of it. Um, the other piece is people will use as much bandwidth as you give them, and it will never be enough.

You know, we are all on DSL for that. We are all on dial up, and it's never been fast enough, gigabit not fast enough. So it will be faster.

Yes, it'll enable more, um, apps, yes, but no one's ever gonna be satisfied. And yeah, to add to that, I am anticipating that there needs to be some enhancements to the standard for anybody who's deploying access points and when to optimize, you know, the wireless experience. 456 gigahertz bands.

And as a result, can right size coverage, uh, all the more better. And, uh, what I'm uh, referring to is, you know, the capability that allows a organization to implement, for example, uh, combining the five gigahertz and the six gigahertz channels in an optimal way, as we know currently, there are many countries and regions that must sacrifice the lower eight six gigahertz channels. And that is basically sacrificing about a third of the overall six gigahertz channel.

And so who wants that? Because the traditional filters are simply preventing the use of adjacent five gigahertz and six gigahertz channels. And so, you know, that is a significant trade off.

Uh, you're basically, if you just go with a standard wifi seven implementation, you can end up, uh, sacrificing up to 30% of the capacity. And, uh, so that is coming up short. So I anticipate that, uh, access points and the overall implementation will need to have this type of capability.

Uh, we're seeing companies like HPE Aruba advocating this type of approach in order to compensate for, uh, this, uh, built-in concern, if you will. And so that is, you know, one thing that I believe, uh, needs to be addressed or accounted for in terms of, you know, wifi, uh, why, why five seven and what more needs to be done to, uh, really, uh, make it, uh, zing for the customers out there. So I, I'm gonna push back on one thing because I mean, you, you guys all have brought up really interesting points that, you know, there, there's all, there's never enough bandwidth in the world, right?

If, if I had, uh, a, a, a gigabit pipe running into my house from my ISP, it still wouldn't be enough 'cause my kids would need a terabit pipe. But when you look at the hardware that's inside of these devices, it really hasn't generation generationally involved much. My devices, whether it's my MacBook or my desktop, still have gigabit ethernet ports.

In fact, it's very rare that you find any kind of a desktop port that is a 10 gig, uh, ethernet handoff. I mean, the, the Mac minis have one, but they're using those kind of in a very specialized form factor. Like basically as digital media servers where people are having to push and pull like large video files and things like that, they're not intended for like day-to-day use.

What is it about wifi that's causing it to overrun the other standards? Because on the same token, I see a lot of access points that have m gig as a function, but I don't see a lot of people that are like, oh, well, we need to start putting 10 gig ethernet ports on these access points. What is it about the wifi standards that's just causing this to balloon?

I think a lot of it also has to do with latency, right? And quality of experience. If you, if you drop the amount of latency and the, the amount of time that it takes to deliver all of that data to a wireless client, regardless of what it's connected to on the ethernet side, it's going to increase that quality of experience for anyone that's using it.

And especially if you're in an environment where it's a wireless to wireless connection. If I'm, if I'm sending data back and forth to someone on the same access point or on the same network, you know, on that, on that ap, then it makes a lot of sense. If I'm doing video editing across multiple devices or servers, assuming that they would be connected to via wireless, then it could be kind of cool.

But still, it all comes down to that ethernet port. And I think that that's where the issue remains, is can the, you know, are people willing to make the investment in the ethernet that provides the power and the data capability to that access point? If they are at that significant level, I mean, what, what are they using it for that's requiring that much data?

And is that a good solution for them at that level? Because you're right, I mean, you get to a certain point and it's, if I can consume 10 gig per second on my iPhone, does that just mean that TikTok loads faster? You know, how much of that has to do with DNS to begin with?

So it's like, at what point is, is it a, a rate of diminishing return to have that much speed delivered over wireless? And, and that's where I look at resource units, and that's where I look at wifi six E going in, you know, six going into six E, going into seven now moving into eight. Is that the ability to deliver small amounts of data very rapidly and big amounts of data when they need to be delivered with that old, you know, extremely low latency.

Latency to me is what's gonna drive QOE. It's not gonna be the speed it's gonna be. I mean, if speed is, if, if we have all the speed in the world, how does that help me?

You know, how does that help me as a, as an end user of, of some of these devices? So I don't know. But to what you're saying, Ron, I think, you know, it's interesting the six gig conversation, right?

With six gigahertz, it's the, for the areas that are affected by people who haven't adopted six gigahertz, India and all these other, you know, countries that still haven't jumped on, on the bandwagon with some of them yet. It's fascinating 'cause you do lose that amount of, you know, of, of capacity, but only in the areas that are affected. And I don't think that the chip set manufacturers and the AP manufacturers should turn around and change their model based on what few have not adopted yet.

But it reminds me of the article I read just this past week with, you know, in India where the carriers association was trying to outlaw any six gigahertz devices from coming into India because they said, Hey, you can't sell those on Amazon anymore. Like the whole signal jam or thing that they're trying to push across the globe. It's, we don't want people buying, uh, access points that are capable of six gigahertz because it hasn't been ratified in that country yet.

So I think that, that there is that trade off the manufacturers have to do, you know, whatever is in the, the capacity of, of, you know, the, the capability, if you will, of what spectrum is available to them. But I think that's where that software defined radio stuff really comes into play. It's like, okay, well if your country can't use this, then all good, but don't, you know, don't limit what we can do here because of what your country hasn't done.

So it's, it's a fair trade off. But Tom, I did want to point out, you know, you, you mentioned that not a lot of the aps have gone through these, these iterative changes, not just with the, with the gigabit port, but if you think about the amount of memory, the amount of compute, and the amount of resources that are available on the hardware themselves, not a lot has changed. And it's always been that race to the bottom.

How do you create the most cost effective, efficient access point to just deliver, you know, convert data from wire to wireless, but now like Aruba's announcement of super, super cool to see what they're doing, loading, you know, almost doubling the amount of memory that's on the, on the device and like totally jumping, you know, by orders of magnitude, the compute power on those aps signaling that, you know, the shift of what they're trying to do compute wise is pushing even further out to the edge and down to the access points. I think we're in a really cool time where we're starting to see that, where those access points went from being these big beefy aps to being the, don't worry, we have a controller to manage it all to, don't worry, we're gonna stick out in the cloud. And now, you know, what's, what's old is new again going, how do we bulk up these aps to put some serious horsepower on them, not just well, in the name of ai, if you will, but at least there's gonna be some really cool benefits, I think to come of that.

And yes, uh, the mention of AI, I think, uh, definitely is underlying this entire conversation. Yes, there are, you know, new AI enabled capabilities that can be put on access points to quite simply optimize things like energy efficiency, uh, you know, being able to throttle down the access point, uh, at different intervals according to the amount of traffic that's on the network that's, you know, affecting that, uh, specific access point or sets of excess, uh, points. And also, yeah, I think it, it goes back to Tom's point about, you know, what is it on the content side or the workload side that it will warrant, you know, yet more speed, when is enough, is enough.

And I think, uh, that there is warrant for these investments on the part of, you know, the access point manufacturers, the silicon vendors, and certainly, you know, all the partners, uh, that are involved, uh, because AI workloads are going to become increasingly predominant and that it will relate to both, you know, the gen ai, uh, workloads, the inferencing, uh, but also, uh, in terms of, you know, what can be deemed, you know, some traditional AI capabilities involved with that automation to improve, again, the latency. That's really, you know, I think, uh, that's a fair point that it's gonna be critical to have improved latency and quality of experience. And, you know, the speeds and feeds will always matter, but they won't be as, uh, I guess vital in terms of say the decision making and you know, what access point to implement and so forth.

And so, yeah, I think that is a, a good way of looking at, you know, what's new and different. And a lot of it is quite simply related to ai. You know, I'll, I want to just jump back on that topic real quick because at wifi now in Sarasota, a couple of weeks ago, uh, the group from Media Tech was out there and they were talking about the chip sets and what they're envisioning from, from an AI perspective on happening on their, on their routers.

And as they push it further to the edge. And when you talk about Tom, your point about, you know, how much is too much, you know, again, to me it all goes back to QOE, right? Quality experience is gonna be the ultimate determining factor on how well a network is working.

'cause it doesn't matter if it's up or down, it matters. Can you, can you actually access it in a way that you need to? And with ai, you know, the, even the generative AI stuff and the, you know, the chat GBT stuff, like when you ask it a question, you want it to respond immediately.

You don't wanna sit there and wait, you go, you know, wait for the spinning ball to figure out what it's doing. That's typical computering, you know, now you want it to deliver that automation or that that answer immediately. And one of the things that they brought up was, imagine if your home router or your wifi access point from an advertising perspective, imagine if that access point now understands who you are as a user profile, what you do, where you go, et cetera, et cetera.

And the advertisements that are generated for you on your web browser aren't coming from a server farm somewhere with a graphic and an image, but they're actually being generated based on your user profile on the access point or on the home router, or as close to you as possible. Now, the, the time for response for those advertisements to take place isn't drew hitting the ap, hitting the switch, going out to core network, grabbing it, bringing it all the way back, it's drew to the access point and an advertisement immediately delivered. And I think about, you know, back in the old days when, when everyone figured out you could hit f, you know, uh, what is it like, like F seven on your, on your web browser or F 12, and you could see, you know, all the DNS requests that are made every time you load a webpage, if you limit the amount of time, if you, if you decrease the amount of time to serve those advertisements, whenever you open Reddit or you know, or your news website or whatever it is now, your quality of experience is gonna be much higher because you're not waiting for the DNS request, you're not waiting for any of that information to take place.

It's all being generated on the access point because of that beefier power and that super low latency. And I thought that, that was hearing that I was like, mind blown, you know? And now I don't want my AP really knowing who I am.

But in the day when that happens, imagine, imagine something like that for a home user and then how that transpires in enterprise. Yeah, it's, it's interesting. It's kind of the give me convenience or give me death to quote that I Kennedy's.

Um, is it, am I happy enough with the convenience of getting all of those ads right away to ignore the fact that this little box in my house is going even further than the Amazon Echo as far as what it's storing locally about me, right? So I think that's a, a, the smarter that we make stuff on the edge by adding ai, the faster stuff happens, but the creepier it hits, right? If I, if I open the box to my router and it says, oh, by the way, I'm gonna listen to everything you say and I'm gonna serve you ads directly, that's creepy as hell, especially the stuff I surf.

I don't want that on a box in my house. So like, um, you know, yes, it'll improve speeds. So is that enough?

Is that enough convenience to make something like that acceptable? And we do it on the web now, so maybe it's, maybe it's, but um, you know, is it the next time that media tech, not that they've had, you know, a, an incident, but the next time that links has, has an in, uh, an incident, delink has an incident, someone jumps onto one of my Internet of Crap devices and jumps into my router, pivots into it. Is, is that data something that is, is stuff that I'm comfortable being protected on a little home device running tiny box, right?

And, and how does that play out in the enterprise, right? I mean, if you think about maybe not delivering advertisements, but delivering authentication, delivering, delivering, you know, in intranet, does anyone use the term intranet anymore? Intranet feeds, you know, like any, any localized data caching for Salesforce or caching for, you know, workday or, you know, whatever it is.

How can things like this be leveraged to deliver very quick answers or leveraging AI on the actual access point to, to deliver something that normally would've taken a large amount of time? Because I think, again, this, you know, I don't wanna, I don't wanna do the bill Gates, you know, reference, but it's the, the amount of speed that we have, the amount of throughput that we have right now delivered within an appropriate amount of time is, is always going to be expanding. But the things that we're doing with it haven't really changed that much.

We're sending text, we're receiving text and images. I mean, that's like, it, you at some point, you know, it's the banana, you know, it's the, it's, it's throwing a banana down a hallway. It's like, well, what point is it?

8 gigabit per second using MLO using five gig and six gig combined. 8 gig? Um, you can get a lot of stuff really fast.

But again, when you talk about, when you talk about the hardware vendors and what they're doing to take advantage of it, I love the idea that Aruba has added not just more, um, ram and more memory, but also more functionality. Now they're going, okay, well this is a platform, it's, well, let's you know, they loaded on that. The location services, they do two 11 az, you know, they're, they're going out in different ways where they're starting to combine more IO OT along with the BLE, along with wifi, along with Multilink operation.

Now it's, it's using the access point as a platform more than just using the ap. And I think that that's great. I'm just waiting for now, you know, when did the switch, when did the switching teams come out and say, no, no, no, don't put it on the ap, put it on the switch.

'cause it has to connect to the switch anyway. And it's probably more effective to build a big expensive beefier switch so that all the aps can reference the switch. I mean, is it gonna start to go back again like it did with the cloud, like it started to go up to the cloud and now it's coming back down?

Is that something that we see in the future? It's a local CDN, right? Your, your AP becomes a local CDN.

And, um, you know, in the enterprise where I, in the information security space, I'd be saying, Uhuh, nope, nope, nope. I don't want anything living there. I want one point of ingress, egress the, the back of the controller, and that's it.

So I think it's, it's cool, it's nifty for, you know, my home, but I don't want that going on in my enterprise where I've got IP everywhere. I want that IP consolidated, not pushed out to the edge of the network. Yeah, and I, I think these are excellent points because of points to context.

As we know, it's not unique to access points or wifi seven or, you know, wifi six technology. It's about the customer. It's about the use case.

And so yes, there will be variance in how they need to be implemented. There will be many enterprises that'll welcome an intelligent hub type of implementation for the very reasons we outline it can improve and everything from security to energy efficiency to, uh, again, uh, literally running a container on an access point in order to aggregate more information at the edge in a more intelligent way and rapid, uh, way quite simply. And I think it also, uh, align, uh, to the point about yes, uh, access points are gonna be integral to wireless implementations, but also they have, you know, their inherent, uh, limitations.

And that is, uh, for example, the use of private wireless in order to a, a accommodate the mobility, uh, requirements that can come up in, uh, many large enterprise settings such as, uh, stadiums such as manufacturing sites and so forth. So I'm also keen in looking at how wifi is more blended and managed, uh, at least or administered with say, uh, private networking capabilities, the private public, uh, combinations if you will. Because as we know, there are many scenarios where wifi makes sense at the headquarters, but you need, you know, a private 5G implementation be, uh, for the fleets, you know, for the, uh, far reaching, uh, locations and so forth.

And so, uh, this is something that is just gonna fuel, you know, this journey that I think will just make it all the more interesting how wifi seven plays a key role in all this that can also deliver its own advantages and also work more effectively ultimately with, uh, other technologies. You, you've definitely spoken about how the, the content consumption model has changed. You know, it used to be that everything was a mainframe and we all went to the mainframe and then we'd had client server, uh, with a lot of east west traffic and not a lot of north south traffic.

And that's what we as networking professionals refer to it as, meaning north south headed to the internet and east west headed between servers inside of a land, but most of the users in the rest of the world don't even know that distinction to them. It's fast, right? com, like, it just gives you a number, right?

Most people don't understand the difference between my access point being fast versus my ethernet being fast. And most of the time, what are they gonna do anyway? Well, if things are running slow, they're gonna bail back to their 5G LTE radios because those have fewer things in the way getting to their point of content consumption because most everything is in the cloud.

I mean, as we're recording this podcast, we're not using local video cameras to do it. We are using a cloud service that is administered through a web browser. And that's how most people do things now, is they, they consume their, their whatever they're interested in.

So yeah, you, you can create a CDN locally and accelerate some of that, you know, communication because I can fetch data from it faster. But most people now are not consuming their content on a traditional desktop PC or even a traditional laptop pc. They're either consuming it on an iPad or they're consuming it on a mobile phone.

And just to that point, I mean the, the discussion about wifi seven being fast enough or being able to meet the needs of future, um, con consumption models, all we have to do is look at the latest generation of the iPad, which was just announced as of the recording of this podcast. It's running a, an advanced M four processor and everyone says this is the fastest thing that Apple's ever made. Too bad.

They put iPad OS on top of it. And that's how we're, we're seeing this now, is it doesn't matter how fast your, your network connectivity is, it's still the way that we consume the stuff through that os that is, or through the network connectivity that's dictating how quickly we are able to interact with things. And I think that that is one of the ways that the LTE and 5G have finally caught up to wifi.

It used to be we had to have wifi because the cell networks were so crappy. Like you, you wanted to go find a Starbucks so you could hop on the free wifi to be able to do stuff. Now there's even a setting in, uh, iOS devices so that if your wifi is crappy enough, your phone will fail back to a 5G signal because it's a better quality signal.

So are we ever going to get to a point where wifi seven or what a wifi eight or whatever we're gonna call the next revision of it, is fast enough that we don't have to compete with 5G. We can say this is good enough for what we need to do. Now, I think you, we may get there, but it's informing the end users that it's enough, right?

com because every senior director would sit down and do a speed test and it's too slow. So my people are being slowed down. Well, no, no, your people can do their jobs and they can do them very well.

So it goes back to, um, as much bandwidth as you give them, they're going to use. But it's also looking at that perception of somehow informing your end users that it is enough. Because the only metric that matters in wifi is the person sitting in front of the screen, is it good enough for them?

Or do they, um, are they happy with it? And the enterprise, that's all that matters. So if we give them all the speed and they find ways to use it, all the better.

But in reality, to your point, I think, Tom, they don't really need it. com is faster on my ES at home. Why can't it be that fast on the $50 million wifi network in my enterprise?

You know? And I think, again, going back on QOEI, I think back, you know, 10, 15 years ago, remember interop, remember net world interop? So I used to do, uh, I used to do wifi 1 0 1 at interop, and it was standing room only every time I did it because everyone wanted to understand what wifi was.

And I had this moment at the beginning of every single one of my sessions, and I would ask everyone to get interactive. I'd say, hold up your hands if you're on the cell network, hold up your hands if you're on wifi, okay? If you're on wifi, are you on two gig or you own five gig if you're on the cell network or you own band 42 43, 48 52.

If you're on Band 800, raise your hand. And everyone, you know, looked perplexed. And I said, the point of this entire conversation is that it doesn't matter 'cause no one cares.

You don't care how you're connected. You don't care how your device is connected, what you care about is your quality of experience. And now, from an orchestration perspective, if you think, if you think back on how wifi seven interacts with how wifi period interacts with private wireless, how it interacts with 5G, that's why to me, that Kajeet announcement with Kajeet and Cisco or Kajeet Meraki talking about how they're bringing management of i of Kajeet IOT devices into Meraki cloud, it was fascinating because I was like, okay, here it comes.

Because Kajeet ISS known for their neutral host stuff as well. And it's that idea that someday there's that dashboard that is just the wireless dashboard, not the wifi dashboard, not the 5G dashboard, but just the wireless dashboard. It's giving you the amount of capacity that you need with the latency that you need to do what you're trying to do based on your application awareness on the, on the network.

If you're trying to send a tweet, it gives you this much, if you're trying to stream video, it gives you this much, and it does this one on 4G, it does this one on, uh, it does this one on, you know, wifi, it does this one on, you know, LoRaWAN, whatever it is. It's the idea that we're moving to this convergence point where all of those things should be controlled by one. And that's where that whole AI conversation comes in because it's like, well, if I've gotta manage, you know, uh, BLE and I have to manage wifi, and I have to manage 5G, and I have to figure out how to slice that network to give the user what they need for what they're doing, no network administrator is going to be able to control that and orchestrate that without some level of sophistication.

You know, it's bad enough. Now with wifi seven, we're doing multilink optimization, which is great. MLO is great, I love it.

But look at what wifi eight's doing where you're taking two disparate access points and you're getting five gig from this one and two gig from this one, and I'm sending two gig out that one, and I'm receiving it on six gig over here. We're getting to a point where network administration, troubleshooting, et cetera, is not going to be able to be easily done, I don't think. And having the, the smarts, if you will, I got the smarts real good, the quote from Urban Cowboy, having the smarts to be able to do that on the access point level or on the switch level without leaving, uh, you know, the, the actual building or the the room or the submarine or whatever it is.

That's the part that's encouraging to me because it's like, if you have all these aps that are trying to orchestrate between each other, but you don't want that data going northbound, then what? You know, because that QOE is going to be absolutely aware or it's gonna be subject to your network, being aware of what to give you, when to give you and how to give it to you in the shortest amount of time. So Yeah, I agree.

Kind of entire connectivity neutrality, right? So I don't care in the end, in the enterprise, in my experience, it's always the wifi that's the problem, right? And so my engineers would go, we'd get the call, the wifi stinks here, let me look at your phone.

Maybe you should turn on the wifi, it might work better. So, you know, if we can abstract that and give the right experience at the right time, I don't care what network it goes over to, but it goes over. But to your point, drew, I do need to have that, oh God, single pane of glass.

Sorry, I hate it. I'm sorry. I, I do need to have that.

That's my user experience if they're sitting in HQ regardless of how they're connected. Yeah, I think one thing that can help with the complexity, the disparate implementations is again, um, our new friend, or not new friend, but popular friend ai, which can I believe along with machine learning, uh, capabilities help automate some of that orchestration that, you know, single pane of glass type of implementation. I don't like the term either, but it gets the idea across.

This is a common shorthand reference for us to understand that we just need that streamlining of how to better administer and have governance of, uh, our networks. And I think it's, it's always going to be, you know, this dynamic blending, uh, because, you know, for example, the 5G connected laptop, uh, use case business case, uh, pretty much is predicated on public wifi. Security is an issue, especially if you're in the government or national security or any organization or enterprise that has, you know, high security requirements that's going to matter.

And so, uh, for example, if I'm not mistaken, government subcontractors, they don't want them using their public wifi ever on any laptop that's issued and that it goes to common sense. And so I think this is just an example of how it's just going to be predicated on the use case, uh, the requirements of the customer. And we're gonna see, uh, both, uh, types of major implementations, but also other forms of wireless, uh, technology.

We touched on a reddig, ZigBee, Bluetooth, certainly all of them coming under an umbrella when it comes from an enterprise perspective, basically being more intelligently administered and also being able to use things like, uh, proactive or predictive analytics to better anticipate these issues that, uh, have been succinctly, uh, touched upon. Well, as you can see, the genesis of making faster and faster speeds of anything always has a lot of other factors that go into it. Whether it is the direction that your traffic is traveling, whether it's the applications that you are accessing or realistically speaking, whether or not the people who are in charge of the budget wanna see the number keep going up and up and up.

You have to understand the way that your users utilize your connectivity. You have to understand where your data is stored. Is it something that is local?

Is it something that is remote? You have to educate your users about why things look faster in certain places than they do in others. And you have to make sure that you have all of this documented in such a way as to be able to send it out very quickly when someone comes knocking on your door and wonders why their Netflix is faster at home than it is in the office.

And if you do that, I think you'll find that wifi seven will be good enough for what you need now unless someone really gets into VR headsets, in which case all bets are off, and we're gonna need wifi nine by that point. That'll just about do it for this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. net or jump onto the Waves podcast so you can hear me talk about this kind of fun stuff every week.

com, which is my very seldom updated, uh, blog. Yeah, you bet. The Futurum group.

We certainly have our website. Tom and I, uh, usually co-host what's called the 5G Factor, so please, uh, bookmark that on our website. But also in terms of X Twitter, I'm at Ron Westphal dx and I'm also on LinkedIn.

Awesome. com and click on the link for Mobility Field Day 11. It is our upcoming mobility focused event is gonna have conversations around a lot of these topics and many more.

com/tech field day for lots of great mobility action. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. If you do enjoy this discussion, please make sure that you subscribe to our YouTube channel and you leave a rating and a comment so that everyone knows what we're all about here.

Um, this episode was brought to you by Tech Field Day, which is a part of the Futureum Group. We are excited to bring you more great conversations like this on a weekly basis. com/podcast for the latest episode.

Until then, we hope that you have a great day and we look forward to having more great conversations in the future.