Waves with Wireless Nerd
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Waves with Wireless Nerd
The Mobility Field Day 11 Wrap-Up: Uncovering the Future of Networking with AI Pioneers and Wireless Giants
Ever wondered how AI is revolutionizing network management right under our noses? Buckle up as we take you on a journey from the buzzing energy of Mobility Field Day 11 to the heart of wireless industry transformations. The wireless community is aflutter with innovation, and we're at the forefront, dissecting the integration of AI into our work lives with a surprising twist—it's enhancing, not overwhelming. We're also talking an incredible talk by Arista Co-Founder Ken Duda, because what's technology without a human touch? And speaking of personal connections, you'll even hear a special shout-out that reminds us why we're all here—family matters, even in the world of tech.
Now, let's talk specifics—Marvis AI's growth in addressing complex network queries is nothing short of impressive, and trust me when I say Juniper's real-time RF information has us all talking. But it doesn't stop there; Fortinet's network-as-a-service model and Celona’s leaps in 4G and 5G deployment are reshaping the way industries connect. The cherry on top? Insights from our conversations with the Hamina team and a peek at Ubiquiti's bold moves into the enterprise market. From the nuances of antenna management with Cisco to the 5G deployment updates from the giants of wireless infrastructure, this episode is your all-access pass to the latest in wireless tech trends.
there we go, everybody. I hope you're having a moment of zen. Good afternoon. It is the week of may 20th 2024 and this is the waves podcast. What's new? What's now? What's next? What's happening in the wireless industry? We've got some great stuff going on. It was a heck of a week. Last week we didn't do the podcast. A lot of us were tuning into Mobility Field Day, so Mobility Field Day 11 happened this past week. What a tremendous time. We were live and direct in a beautiful Bay Area of California. We had such a good time Great vendors, great presentations, great delegates, lots and lots of blogs that are being published right now on on what we did and the good times that we had out there. So that was awesome to see.
Speaker 1:I'm logging in real quick. Just got to make sure that I can see what I'm supposed to be seeing on uh, on the profiles here looking pretty good. Huh, hope everybody's doing well, okay. So I'm going to try something new. I'm going to try and go to my creator studio with uh, with youtube, and I'm gonna try and see if I've got a live chat, because I had such a good time. I was inspired by cody. There we go, whoopsie. I was inspired by cody over at mactelcom where he had his little chat going and people were asking all these q and a's and doing all this great stuff. It was pretty neat. So I'm going to pay attention to that chat and see what pops up. Um, I don't know how to do all this fun stuff yet, but we'll have a good time anyway.
Speaker 1:So it looks like we're good. We're streaming on youtube. Man, it is 102 degrees, let's see. It's 102 degrees outside right now and they say it's going to feel like 114 in Texas, and that's because it's only May. So I see the advertisements for Cisco Live and I see the advertisements for all these other things coming up. It looks like it's going to be a great opportunity to get out of this area and go relax a little bit in maybe somewhat cooler temperatures.
Speaker 1:So if you're listening to this, do me a favor. If you want to, you don't have to. I've got a few on YouTube and a few on x. Uh, head on over to youtube and say hi, oh, look at that, my daughter's in there. She says love you, dad. See, can't get more wholesome than that. That's fantastic. Uh, oh, I was about to say aren't you supposed to be in school but it's four o'clock so she's out of school. Hi, baby girl.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I had a great time. Missed my kids, missed my family, but got to hang out with my other family, my wireless family out in San Jose or Santa Clara area. And what a fantastic time we had at Mobility Field Day. Man, just going around the table, I got to sit next to Ali and I had Mark there. Frenet was there, you know, just overall, it was a great group of people. Got to meet Ron and hang out with him. Uh, now I've got ron gpt, which is the way that I've trained my gpt to be a uh in the voice of an analyst. Hey, mark's on, cool.
Speaker 1:Hi, mark, dude, it was so much fun hanging out with you last week and your blogs for for the event have been stellar. Um, let me see if I can find them so I can throw a link in the chat. Um, let me see if I can find this because you wrote, you did a such a good write-up of what was going on out there at mobility field day. Yeah, ubiquity goes to enterprise, but what about their cult followers? I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed reading that one because it's true, you were, you were hanging out in the uh. There's the link to the blog. You were hanging out in the discord and I was hanging out on youtube with mac telcom, uh and cody and his crew and there were like 460 people watching there and I don't know how many were paying attention on the discord. But the questions that we got were were really interesting and it was. It was fun to have that level of interactions. You were there for nay was there? Parsons was there. Jen huber was there. Uh, frenet was there. Parsons was there. Jen Huber was there. Sam Clements was there. Who else am I missing? Dev Dev was there. Yeah, that's right. Dev was sitting right beside you guys. It was just a great group of people and we got to ask some really interesting questions and I'll just run down what we learned there because it was interesting.
Speaker 1:I didn't know what my hopes were for this mobility field. I know that we saw that there was gonna be a good vendor lined up lineup and there were a lot of questions that I knew we needed to ask. But I I always like to just sit back and take it all in at first, I think with MFD this year, when I really stop and think about what we learned. You know, I really thought everyone was going to talk about AI, ai, ai, and I was ready to get AI jammed down our throats and have everyone talk about all the neat ways that they're doing AI and what they can do with AI. But instead of that, we got useful AI. We got AI that was running in the background, that it was doing what it was supposed to be doing. That was enabling us to do jobs easier, was enabling engineers to do their jobs easier and maintain and monitor these networks in a better, more sophisticated way by leveraging that data. And so when Cisco came on, juniper was the first one out of the gate.
Speaker 1:When Juniper came on and they started talking about what they were doing. The emphasis wasn't on what Marvis can do and why Marvis ai is the best, and so on and so forth. It was about how they're doing things with their back end and leveraging ai to find answers to problems or to questions and present that to us in a way that was usable. And so it was. It was neat to see, you know, having having west as a presenter. West does such a great job, he always does such a great job, and it's so much fun to just sit back and listen to real world statistics, real world data about adoption of six gigahertz or about adoption of AI, in this case, and how it's helped people, how it's helped to solve problems. So the Juniper presentation was pretty neat.
Speaker 1:If I go back and I think about it, let me load up my Twitter account real quick and see what I can find in there. If I go back and think about what we learned, and again, if you've got questions and stuff, please join in on the chat on youtube, because, uh, it's this thing at obs I haven't figured out the right way to answer all the chats all at the same time. So if you want to chat, jump over youtube. Youtubecom, slash at wireless nerd. You can find me on there. We've got a couple listeners that are listening in right now. So if you want to join us, please jump out. Jump over there. I'd love to hear what your thoughts were about what we were doing.
Speaker 1:And again, if I go back and I look, let me, let me rewind a couple of days. I mean, just because I tweeted so much, or how do you? I don't even know what they call tweets on X anymore, but the quick rundown of it Ooh, I'm almost there. Hold on as I scroll down. Take a drink of this water Again, 109 degrees, make sure if you're in Texas or anywhere it's like 109 degrees Make sure you're hydrating.
Speaker 1:All right, the first thing they said is that they can't talk about the HPE acquisition. I remember that and I really felt like one of us was just going to ask a question just to say, what about the HPE acquisition? But I don't even think that that was the. I think they quickly dismissed that. When Jeff dismissed that, basically it was like, okay, it's done, we're not going to talk about it, let's move on.
Speaker 1:It gave us the opportunity to focus on what they were doing, us the opportunity to focus on what they were doing and right out of the gate they talked about the efficacy of Marvis and they showed that beautiful little graph of how Marvis has been able to answer questions over time and I love seeing that graph grow. It starts in May 2018. It goes to January 2024. And it keeps track of every day and all of the efficacy of Marvis since the first day it was launched. I remember seeing it creep up and creep up and creep up and we got to understand how all of the easy questions have basically been answered and now it's time to answer the tough questions. But there's so few and far between and so random and strange that it wasn't easy to answer those. So the efficacy is not taking a hit, but it's not growing as quickly as it was before because the questions have inevitably gotten more difficult, and so you know.
Speaker 1:My question still to Juniper is that's great, and you've enabled AI to read manuals and to go back and look at support and stuff. But when are we going to do something so that there's more interaction with the network using plain language AI? Great comment from Sudhir. He says Marvis is never wrong. You know I would argue that Marvis is never wrong. You know I would argue that marvis is never wrong until marvis is wrong. But I don't know that marvis has been wrong, so I don't want to. I don't want to make anyone juniper mad. You never know. I mean, if it's bad data, right, bad data in, bad data out.
Speaker 1:I got to learn all about missed minis, which I hadn't really learned too much about, considering the last year. I was not doing anything with many other competitors, but Marvis minis were interesting to learn about running microservices on their switches and on their access points and across the network to act as users and to leverage different network resources and look at response time and things like that and then feed that all back into the system. I think it's really cool, I think, when we can start to look at those as standalone devices and capture that from off-network I mean obviously at Cape that's one of the things that we love to do is look at the off-network perspective and how that builds back in. So learning that Juniper is doing that and then feeding that into their continuous learning model was pretty interesting. We got to learn about that 46 gig per second and why it only happens on 16 spatial stream radios. Unfortunately, no vendor gave us a 16 spatial stream radio, but what they did give us was real-time RF information that was imported directly from Juniper into Hamina, and that was really cool to see. Now it's worth noting that this doesn't only work with Juniper. This also works with Cisco and Arista right now. But being able to query the dashboard and get live real-time information, configuration information into Hamina and be able to model that instantly gives you such a cool snapshot view of what's going on on your network that it's something that we hadn't really seen before, and so it's just a different way to visualize that network.
Speaker 1:I had a great conversation with the Hamina team earlier today, so I'll be releasing that as an interview later on, but it was really neat to talk to them about what they're doing, especially when you involve that automated environmental learning. Where are the access points? Where are they located physically? What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they hearing? There was some other stuff that Juniper talked about, but then we moved into Fortinet and had the conversation about security, into insecurity and what's happening from an into insecure perspective. But I feel like it really I lost track of what we were saying when they started talking about fortico coins for the tokens and fortinet as a service and how they can enable that by having this model where you purchase these tokens and these tokens can be used to set up a virtual instance, and they can be set up to or they can be used to manage that virtual instance and essentially all you have to do is just go deploy APs and switches and everything else is managed in the cloud using FortiCoins.
Speaker 1:That to me sounded a lot like Fortinet network as a service, which is okay. I'm not knocking it, I'm just saying that seems to be the trend right. When you've got GreenLake doing all the things I'll never forget, you Green Lake doing all the things I'll never forget. When they said Green Lake is going to give you everything as a service. They're still trying to get there. But seeing that and then seeing different services like Nile and like Meter popping up offering these as-a-service things, it wasn't a far stretch of the imagination to see Fortinet jump into that. I just was not expecting it From all the vendors. I wasn't expecting fortinet to start offering that as a service. So that should be interesting.
Speaker 1:We popped into salona and talked about 4g and 5g deployments. They talked about their deployments and which industries have been very successful for them. It was great I they got into a security conversation with someone from palo alto and I'm not gonna lie, it was. It didn't strike my fancy. So I just I I tried to truck through it, but at three or four o'clock in the afternoon when I haven't had any coffee, it makes it. You know, my memory gets a little fuzzy.
Speaker 1:But day two turned around with arista kicking off and I gotta tell y'all that was. I would really recommend that you go back and you watch the video from ken at arista, their co -founder and cTO. Because, aside from all the technical stuff and aside from everything that we learned at Mobility Field Day and everything that we learned from a technology perspective, listening to Ken talk about the ethics and the culture at Arista really put that company in a different light for me. I always knew that they made these big badass switches, they pass lots of data and there's all this stuff you could do with it. I never took the time to learn about the people that started the company. I just took it as it's a company and they're doing stuff and moving forward. When they had the acquisition of Mojo, I know that for the most part, that acquisition went great for the people that were on both sides.
Speaker 1:It was good to see got a glimpse into that with Ken's conversation, where his quotes the three quotes that stood out to me is the culture of quality is paramount at Arista, because quality to me is an ethical issue, he said. He said it's wrong to ship stuff that doesn't work. Didn't your mother teach you anything? What a quote, man. What a great thing to say. And in the context of all of it, really I said this in my blog everyone just stopped. We stopped clicking, we stopped tapping, we stopped drinking coffee. He had our complete and full attention. So anyone who's going to be a presenter at Mobility Field Day or Tech Field Day, or anywhere in technology for that matter take note of that conversation that he had with us because it was really really good, even though he doesn't know anything about wireless. That's what he his words. He said we didn't know anything about wireless, we're a bunch of data center people. Even though that was the case, his his story on what arista does and how they do it was tremendous, which led into their team just dropping bombs after bombs of demos, man, spectrum view of str, mlmr and emlsr and showing preamble puncturing and showing all this stuff live. They pre-recorded some of their demos just in case they broke and what was so cool is they started to play one. But then they just went ahead and did it live and it was just really informative for a group of people to be able to see what that looks like on a spectrum analyzer, mlo working in real time, preamble puncturing working in real time and understanding the impact that this is going to have on our networks. It was just such a great, just a great nerdy demo, but Arista does just a spectacular job at that. So kudos hats off to them for really bringing the content and bringing the people.
Speaker 1:Cisco followed talking about down tilt angle in their access points. They talked about what a difference makes with low power clients and standard power clients, how those two, how it's super important to understand the difference between LPI and SP clients and how to identify those and understanding which APs and which radios they can talk to. They talked a lot about and their version, what they're doing with AI in the back end and what they're doing. The automated packet capture component that Minsei showed off was just so cool and if you've never seen Minsei Kim speak, he's one of my favorite favorite people. He's the reason I went to Cisco in the first place a year and a half ago. Just so much fun to listen to and to be a part of, and his energy and his excitement and his passion for doing it just came across in his whole presentation.
Speaker 1:If you get a chance, go watch that that mobility field day presentation by mince where he talked about taking these packet captures, being proactive about it, taking them and running them immediately through root cause analysis and presenting that information to you and easy to read and easy to digest format was just one of those enhancements that Meraki does. It's just one of those things that makes their dashboard as popular and significant as it is. And then they moved in to talk about AIRM and how radio resource management is now not just leveraging the information that they have from Meraki, but how it's using both the data lakes from Catalyst and from Meraki 40 million APs, 20 million APs whatever it is out in the cloud that they can get information from to help with insights and run AIRM. That was pretty awesome to see. It was. Overall. It was just so good. Cisco just always does a bang-up job. Dave came in and talked about some of the new controllers. Tawny came in for the first time. Tawny Odeo was a speaker at Mobility Field Day talking about network health, health and how there's new assurance demo that's available. Hit my Twitter at Wireless Nerd. You can see the QR code to scan to be a part of the new assurance overview beta program, which is very, very cool. Adds a lot of functionality to the Meraki dashboard, especially when you talk about the context of what they're doing with Thousand Eyes and all that. Just a really good story overall.
Speaker 1:Paymon from I I know who you've heard on the waves podcast, did a dog and pony show for us, showed us this product and I my hat goes off to him. He sat in front of the firing squad and took a lot of questions from every different angle about the product and it was great. It was great to see, great to understand more about the product. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they're going to do in the future. I really like that they use land use and land clutter data in their application. When you're doing out, you know outdoor signal planning and stuff. It's very, very cool.
Speaker 1:And then and then he says it was the moment that a lot of people were waiting for ubiquity for the first time at a tech field day event and I think it was the first time of them ever doing any type of streaming product information. It seems like it's the first. Tom and Craig and Andrew got up and just did a stellar job talking about the new U7 Pro Max with the scanning radio now built into a Ubiquiti access point, increased number of spatial streams on that U7 Pro Max. They talked about their deployment at the FedEx Forum they talked about the new enterprise fortress gateway. What a what a product man. It looks like it's a beefy little little sucker. So their foray into enterprise is happening now. Are they ready for it? I think they're. They're sounding like they're getting more and more prepared. They did have a sneak announcement about a partner program for their enterprise equipment. That's going to be beginning in the next quarter or two, which was great to hear. So I'm curious to see how that pans out, curious to see what the Ubiquity Enterprise Partner Program looks like. But overall it's going to be really neat to see.
Speaker 1:They handed us a bunch of equipment, said have a nice day. Mob mobility field day wrapped up. I got to eat it, hello guys. So I'm happy we got some great food. It was just a really good. It was just a really good event and I know I've talked for 20 minutes about it, but it's worth it. Mobility field is just such a great event and if you'd like to register to be a candidate, visit techfielddaycom and there's a little link up there where you can fill out the form if you'd like to apply to become a delegate, and I would strongly suggest it. It's just such a such a cool thing to be a part of.
Speaker 1:So while that was going on, connect x was happening on the other side of the united states and there were a couple key things that I saw that I was trying to monitor what was going on. So if I missed some of the news from there I apologize. My head was was pretty wrapped up with with mobility field day. But it connect x. Some interesting things of note. American tower corporation and crown castle reported only half of their structures currently support 5g equipment and they're expecting significant growth. So I flipped on over to my favorite news outlets rcr, fierce wireless some of these you know, you know who you are. There was, uh, some great coverage, some great articles put out about that and I thought that that was interesting because you know everyone keeps talking about the 5G effect and is 5G going to deploy as quickly as everyone thought it was? And the numbers just aren't there to support that. It's growing as fast as everyone thought it would be. So now they're starting to look at why and what does that look like in the future? Is anything happening in the future? And at least the view from the top was the name of the session, wireless infrastructure association's view from the top. They said that they're excited, that they're excited about where the growth is going. So that's good, because their jobs depend on it, not mine. So either they're they're all enlightened in some way or they're all just as screwed as each other. But we'll see what happens. Um, really cool.
Speaker 1:Bill Baker from NextLink Internet got out on the floor and talked about fixed wireless and fiber deployment side by side. You know, I did a show a while back where I worked with VTX Broadband and it was the same story it's fiber where fiber works, it's wireless where fiber doesn't work and wireless where wireless is the best answer. But he got up on stage and he talked about fixed wireless and fiber deployment, saying Tarana has really moved the needle when it comes to fixed wireless. What a great thing for Tarana. Man, like the product, don't like the product, know the company, don't know the company, whatever. When you get a customer who's willing to get up there and say things like that, they have such a cool following of customers that really like their product. So it was really nice to see fiber and fixed wireless being talked about in the same conversation. Now that goes into this other thing.
Speaker 1:The AT&T CEO, john Stanky from AT&T, had this whole spiel about convergence. Converged is now the opportunity. He said it's going to be one of the key areas for AT&T to get 40% or 50% market share. He said this is such a cool quote I had to mention. He said I actually think if you walked in and said, hey, my job is to keep you on the internet wherever you go, that's a fairly compelling value proposition and I think that that's where a lot of us are finding ourselves in our careers is we're moving into this place where it doesn't matter if it's 4G, 5g, wi, wi-fi, whatever it is, use all of the tools and use them at the best of their abilities, because our job is to keep people connected to the Internet wherever they go. And it is a compelling value proposition. And to know that the CEO of AT&T is trying to figure that one out so that they can gain market share, that really signals that that's going to fall in the laps of the people, like you, dear listener, to make that happen In the end. John Stanky said it will even include aspects like non-terrestrial networks. He says quote why last week did we announce and do what we're doing in the satellite space? I think customers don't want to drive off of a network. Yeah, man, full converged coverage of wireless Definitely something that's going to happen, speaking of Wi-Fi and 5G and 4G and 6G and all the Gs, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration I thought it was Infrastructure Administration.
Speaker 1:Wow, I must have got that wrong. They've kicked off a formal public comment period where they're looking for information on the current state of development as of the yet unstandardized 6G wireless systems to guide executive branch policy decisions. So the NTIA is looking for public comment on 6G. Now they're not talking about spectrum. Let me go back and read this. They're not talking about spectrum. Let me go back and read this. They're not talking about spectrum. What they're looking for is a timing of 6G lab and field trials, commercial availability, how the US government can ensure all segments of society benefit from 6G and how 6G might be able to improve network resiliency during natural and or man-made disasters that impact network performance or availability. The comments gathered through the RFC will be used to put together a report and inform the US policy on 6G. Comments are due within 90 days of the publication of the RFC in the federal registration. You can Google that and find more information at ntiagov if you have comments on 6G.
Speaker 1:So I don't want to take up your whole chit-chat time. I don't know what you're doing. You're getting on a plane or you're going to the bathroom, or you're running a marathon or whatever you're doing. Either way, I do appreciate you listening to the Waves podcast. I wanted to cover MFD this week. I didn't see many other announcements. If I missed something, please feel free to drop me a line. Let me know what I missed. Let me know what I should be talking. I do appreciate it. I crossed 500 subscribers. I'm at 541 on YouTube now, which means I'm only 469 away from my wife taking me to Mexico. So if you'd like me to go to Mexico just kidding, I appreciate everything that y'all are doing. I appreciate y'all listening and for this week, that's going to wrap it. If I find any more information, I'll do a little uh, a little pop-in later on, but right now I think that's where my head's at, still trying to get over mfd. It's going to be a good week.
Speaker 1:We've got some good events coming up. Cisco live is coming up. High tech is coming up uh, the wba is coming up also. Don't let me leave without mentioning this the WBA Wi-Fi birthday Right now. There is the WFA is happening in Austin right now with the Wireless Alliance. They're having their stakeholders meeting. But Wireless Broadband Alliance is proud to present Wireless Global Congress.
Speaker 1:Wgc 2024 is happening June 10th through 13th. It's in Dallas. It's right up the road from me. Well, I'm going to say that it's an hour and a half flight, or a nine-hour drive up the road from me. 1,500 attendees, 100-plus global operators, 50% CXOs, over 100 speakers from 93 countries. Register now. Wirelessglobalcongresscom is part of the wba. It's going to be a great event and I'm looking forward to it. It's happening in dallas at the marriott downtown. 10th and the 11th they're working sessions for members of the wba, and the 12th and 13th it's an open congress. So they've got over 200 members. They're doing a lot of fun pr talking about how wireless has has grown in age.
Speaker 1:So take a look at, go to wbaalliancecom to learn more and maybe, just maybe, I will see you at the show in june. So there you go, make plans to go to that. But I mean, that's like a busy calendar though, because you've got live and then you've got this, and then you've got high tech, and then you've got I don't even know so many different things. But it's good. It's trade show season and it's also not 109 degrees, wherever that is. So maybe I'll see you there just to get some air conditioning, I don't know. Mexico yes, let's go to mexico anyway. All right, y'all, thanks for listening to waves. We will talk to you next week. Have a fantastic day, see ya.
