Waves with Wireless Nerd
Join me for a weekly look into what's making waves in tech and the wireless industry! What's new? What's now? What's next?
Waves with Wireless Nerd
Exploring Wireless Innovations, Strategic Acquisitions, and the Future of Network Performance from Wireless Global Congress to Cisco Live
Join me, Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, as we dive into the latest from the wireless, Wi-Fi, and tech industries. This episode of Waves kicks off with updates on the Wireless Global Congress by the Wireless Broadband Alliance in Dallas, where an array of brilliant speakers and sessions await. We also spotlight Cisco Live in Las Vegas and Juniper's AI Native Now event, painting a vibrant picture of Las Vegas during Cisco Live week .. is Las Vegas Tech Week going to be a thing? Listen in as we draw parallels to how Miami's Winter Music Conference evolved into a major music event, suggesting a similar trajectory for tech gatherings in Vegas.
From game-changing acquisitions to cutting-edge innovations, this episode covers pivotal moves in the tech and telecom sectors. We'll discuss HPE's strategic divestment of its Communications Technology Group to HCL Tech, and the promise of wireless solutions advocated to overcome the challenges of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program. Plus, get the inside scoop on T-Mobile's $4.4 billion acquisition of US Cellular, signaling a wave of consolidation in the telecom industry. We're also looking forward to significant events like Cisco Live, the Wireless Global Congress, and HPE Discover 2024, which promise to bring even more exciting developments.
Ever wondered about the latest breakthroughs in sound-blocking material or advances in antenna technology? Hear about MIT researchers' revolutionary fabric that could block RF signals, and explore the intriguing advancements showcased at Wi-Fi Now. This episode also brings to light Apple's controversial Wi-Fi positioning system and the alarming use of Wi-Fi jammers by international burglary rings. Finally, join Anil Varanasi as he shares the inspiring journey of building Meter, a company revolutionizing network switching and enhancing network performance and reliability. This episode is packed with insights and innovations that you won't want to miss!
Cool, all right, good afternoon everybody. We're going to try something a little bit different today. I'm going to go ahead and put us on Instagram too, why not? Let's see what happens. Hope everybody is having a wonderful week.
Speaker 1:It's Tuesday, may 28th. Wireless nerd is live. It says very good little chemical barriers. In the background one of my old favorite albums, 1995 exit, planet dust. Just some good old-fashioned old techno man. Anyway, sweet, sweet, sweet. The sweet sounds of the Chemical Brothers, los Hermanos, chemicales. Very fantastic. What's up everybody? It's Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, and this is Waves. What's new? What's now? What's next, what's happening in the wireless industry, the Wi-Fi industry, the tech industry, all that good stuff.
Speaker 1:Today we have a whole bunch of stuff to cover. It seems like it was a really busy week, not so much. I mean, you know, no announcements about new APs or anything like that. But then there's just all this other stuff that was happening this week and it's been fascinating to read just because of the range of all of it, and I'm not really sure how much of it applies to you, how much it doesn't apply to you. But let's dig into it, let's have some fun. First off, it's a. It's a great day in beautiful South Texas I do want to pay attention to. The Wireless Broadband Association has a show coming up next week, I believe. Let me just go ahead and click. I don't want to mess the dates up. That's why you'll see me look off to the side or start typing or banging away on the keyboard. I want to make sure that I don't totally screw up a date. The Wi-Fi Innovation, let's see.
Speaker 1:Wireless Global Congress by the WBA is taking place WGC America's June 10th through 13th in Dallas, texas, at the downtown Marriott. It should be a lot of fun. It just seems like everyone across my LinkedIn and across my newsfeed might be showing up to this event, so it should be really good. Some really cool speakers that are there, a lot of announcements that are coming out online. So if you pay attention to their LinkedIn the Wireless Broadband Alliance you can see some of the speakers that are going to be there. So really neat. Just a great list of people that are going to be there. Some friends, some people that I don't know, some people that I do know. It should be a really good time.
Speaker 1:So if you're in Dallas, if you're in the area, and this is something that you want to attend. Please try and make it out there. Reach out to Tiago online, if you know Tiago, and ask him about how to get registered. I found the registration link but it doesn't show a cost or anything involved. It just shows that you want to be a part of it. So I'm not really sure if there's something that you have to do to get registered for it. But if you visit online wirelessglobalcongresscom, that's where you can find the information about it.
Speaker 1:Wgc America is coming up. The 10th and the 11th of June are the working sessions. The 12th and 13th is the Open Congress again happening in Dallas. Now, that is week after next. Next week, cisco Live. Everybody's going to be at Cisco Live. I will not be at Cisco Live this year, but that's okay, I'll be there in spirit. I won't get to see Elton John in concert, that's all right, but a lot of people are going to be at Cisco Live. So stay tuned for some fun information to come out from that show. It should be pretty good. There's a lot of neat stuff. If you watch their presentation at Mobility Field Day a couple of weeks ago, they had some really cool announcements, so they might be coloring that up a little bit, but overall, it will be good to see the entire ecosystem that surrounds Cisco at Cisco Live.
Speaker 1:I know that there's a whole bunch of people that are even going who are not part of Cisco Live, but they're going in their booking hotel rooms to just go hang out with people. So if you're one of those people, fantastic, it's a great time to be in Vegas. Not only is Cisco doing their thing, but Juniper has. I think they called it AI something or other. Let me see if I can find the details for that real quick with a quick little Google AI Native now Las Vegas, june 5th, from 12 to 5 at the Fontainebleau, which is a great hotel. June 5th, 2024, 12 pm to 5 pm Pacific time. Ai Native now live in Las Vegas. So they're going to be there. They've got a lot of their product managers, marketing managers. The Rivian, vp of enterprise technology, is going to be a speaker there. So if you're out in Vegas for this tech week, how long before it turns into tech week, you remember well maybe you don't remember If you're not in the electronic music scene there's this thing that was called Winter Music Conference.
Speaker 1:That would happen every year at the same time in Miami, and me and an old friend of mine. We used to go and have a fantastic time there, and then it just turned into Miami Music Week, which was basically everyone from the entire dance and electronic music industry was going to be there anyway, and then people started putting together this big show called Ultra and yada, yada, yada. It was a lot of fun, fun. But now that we've got cisco there and now that juniper's showing up, you know, maybe I just need to go do like a wi-fi stand cocktail hour. We're just gonna make this vegas tech week. I'm down, let's rebrand it. You heard it here first breaking news vegas tech week has now been established. Just kidding, maybe not whatever. If I'm there I'll buy you a drink, but I'm not going to be there. Uh, if you don't pay for my plane ticket to fly out there, I'll buy you a drink. That's pretty fair, right?
Speaker 1:Anyway, speaking of Wi-Fi stand, big shout out to Hamina. They introduced a new feature today, talking about AP on a stick AP on a stick surveys in Hamina. And once again, if you didn't know, hamina is the only wireless propagation modeling tool that has a Wi-Fi stand as a mounting option that you can put in their modeling tool. Now, that's very useful. A couple years later they've introduced AP on a stick. But really cool to see that a new feature that they've put in there. So shout out to my buddies at Hamina for always looking out. It's very cool. I like the feature, hamina, but again, I'm totally 100% biased.
Speaker 1:Please buy Wi-Fi stands at Wi-Fi standcom. If you need a free one, call me and you know we can work something out. Maybe not, but if you are looking for a Wi-Fi stand and you haven't used one before and you're interested in what they are, please feel free to reach out and I'll be happy to talk to you a little bit about the product, what it does, how it does it, why we do it, so on and so forth all that good stuff. So let's move on. I'm going to open up the windows here and see what's happening in the wonderful world of wireless. Speaking of planning tools, ekahau AI Pro Online was introduced. Now, shame on me, I haven't watched the webinar yet, but they made an announcement. Maybe someone can color this up in the comments a little bit but they introduced an online version of their tool. Now I don't know if this is the whole Ekahau package online or if this is only a part of the Ekahau package that's now online, that's all browser-based to do renderings and modelings and so on and so forth. But, either way, step in the right direction, especially knowing that Hamino is 100% cloud-based. Seeing where they're going, definitely, I think that that's really cool to see them moving into that. Cool to see them moving into that.
Speaker 1:I will watch the webinar, matt and Mac, and I will absolutely talk about it. You know what? Even better, why don't you come on the show, maybe next week or something? I'll give you a couple minutes, come and tell me what you guys are doing. Oh, next week's going to be hard. Y'all will be at Cisco Live. But I would like to have the team from Ekahau in here talk a little bit about what Ekahau is doing. It's come a long way and Hamina is doing incredible things, but Ekahau has just been slowly going along for the last decade or two trying to figure out how to own that market. So very cool Some new features that were introduced. Please reach out to the Ekahau team if you have any questions about that. But again, I am just not informed because it's been an interesting week and I haven't had time to watch that webinar. So interesting there.
Speaker 1:Another interesting advancement, hpe is divesting their communications technology group to HCL Tech. I thought this was really interesting because it seemed like right now everyone's trying to figure out how to get more, more in, like how can you do more? How can you converge wireless more? How can we take IoT and Wi-Fi and all the Gs and throw them all in a single pane of glass? It seems like that's the trend that people are talking about. But then HPE says that they're HPE to advance a strategy by divesting communications technology group to HCL Tech, meeting customers' needs while advancing our strategy. They acquired three businesses we know this OpsRamp, athernet and Access Security to accelerate the strategy, and now they announced, obviously, the acquisition of Juniper. So that's great, but HP has been transforming our telco solutions into a software-centric growth business in recent years and while CTG is a strong, profitable business driven by talented team members, we believe its model of creating and integrating custom solutions and products will be a better strategic fit with HCL Tech. In HCL Tech we found a partner who understands and appreciates a significant legacy of CTG and what they're doing with it, and it's committed to continued HPE commitment to the telco sector.
Speaker 1:I just don't know. I don't know enough about this yet to figure out what that means, but this is the orchestration stuff. Hpe will retain its Telco Solutions Group, which is part of the former CTG unit, focused on operational support, the OSS systems. This group, which sits within HPE Aruba Networking, is a leader in OSS orchestration and assurance, as well as public 5G, sdm and private 5G networking. So I don't know, I don't know what this means. How does this shake out? I think we're going to find out. Hpe Discover is coming up. That's another show that's right around the corner and that one I think there's going to be a lot more to pay attention to there. So we've got Cisco Live this week or next week, and then the following week we've got the Wireless Broadband Alliance, the Wi-Fi Congress, and then the week after that we've got HPE Discover 2024. It will be the first time there will be a keynote live from the sphere. So that's pretty interesting in and of itself. But in the next three weeks there's going to be a lot of interesting things happening. Now I know they probably won't comment on the HPE Juniper acquisition. It would be really cool if they did, but they probably can't for a whole bunch of legal reasons. But I'm still interested to see what that's going to mean overall to everyone in the industry. Like, really, what does that mean? What does this acquisition mean for me, what does it mean for you, what does it mean for the industry, what does it mean for GreenLake, what does it mean for Marvis? Only time will tell, but I thought that that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:Next up we have got let's see the BID director warning that there's not enough capacity already, stressing the telecom sector with construction constraints and permitting requirements for BID. This is interesting. All this BID funding went out. The director, evan Feynman, director of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, said in a webinar on Tuesday that the program has quote tight timeframes paired with quote not enough capacity in the sector to build out all the projects at the same time. So they put out all this funding for people to bridge the digital divide and put everything out there. And now they're like, well, wait a minute, we put out all this funding but there's not enough time to go around to, I guess, to approve them. And the amount of equipment and the amount of boring equipment, long and wide overpasses going over rivers, it's.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because they're saying that there's not enough infrastructure to build out guess what y'all wireless. Hey, just saying, director evan fineman, why don't we throw some more money into wireless, pretty quick to deploy I can get up on a water tower and do it myself. Just saying, man, it's you know, man, you know. I just don't get it. I don't get why more people aren't looking at wireless solutions and saying that's a really great idea, even if it's not the best idea in the long run. At least now we can come down from the top while we figure out where the resources are to build out the fiber. Why not solve the problem today? Why not reach out to Toronto? Why not reach out to Toronto? Why not reach out to Cambium? Why not reach out to Ubiquity? Why not help them, help our entire communities, while we're building on fiber? God, that would be incredible. And then those construction constraints might not be as constraining as possible. But what do I know? Right? I'm just a lonely dude on a microphone in 124 degree heat in South Texas. I'm not like T-Mobile.
Speaker 1:T-mobile acquired US Cellular $4.4 billion deal. Now, this is interesting to me because US Cellular has a lot of rural programs more so, I think, than maybe T-Mobile and so this acquisition might help with that about helping 4G and 5G services get out into more communities that can take advantage of it. T-mobile's announced the $4.4 billion acquisition of US Cellular's wireless operations stores and a significant portion of its spectrum. Aha, aha, the spectrum. T-mobile plans to integrate US Cellular's assets to improve network quality and expand its customer base. All right, the acquisition is expected to be finalized pinning regulatory approvals with T-Mobile, assuring US cellular customers of a smooth transition and the option to either retain the existing plans or switch to the T-Mobile plans without additional fees.
Speaker 1:Speaking of T-Mobile plans, mr Beast man guy handed to Mr Beast what a great commercial he had introduced in one of his videos. I was just watching with my kids where he stopped in the middle of it and talked about T-Mobile Magenta, which I had never heard of. So thanks, beastie. Next time you want to come on the podcast, let me know I'm here. Anyway, what else we got going on in the news today?
Speaker 1:New material developed by MIT researchers has the ability to block out sound entirely. Oh my God, how quickly do you think my wife is going to buy a pair of earmuffs so she doesn't have to listen to me so cool. But my question is does this work? If it works for radio waves, does it work for radio waves, right? Does it work for microwaves? I wonder if this fabric is a good way to block the RF. Maybe not today, but maybe that's something people can look into.
Speaker 1:The fabric can suppress sound by generating sound waves that interfere with an unwanted noise to cancel it out, or or by being held still, to suppress the vibrations that are key to the transmission of sound. Mit researchers have developed a silk fabric which is barely thicker than a human hair that can suppress unwanted noise and reduce noise transmission in a large room. A lot of information about that. Masslivecom has a really cool article about it. These are MIT researchers that worked. They were trying to build a microphone. If I read that correctly, they were trying to build a really cool article about it. These are MIT researchers that worked. They were trying to build a microphone. If I read that correctly, they were trying to build a really cool microphone and they ended up building this awesome fiber made out of silk, canvas and other common materials and it ended up creating this quiet wall. It's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:Yoel Fink, a professor of material science and engineering at MIT, told MassLive fibers are ubiquitous in human life and have been for centuries, but he said most fibers quote pretty much do the same thing, and none of them are technologically advanced. So they sought to change that by combining multiple materials into a fiber, much in the way that almost everything we interact with on a daily basis is made up of more than one material. Fink noted that your smartphone, for example, is just metal and glass. Sound suppression worked and advanced materials published in the online librarywileycom builds on initial efforts of the same group of researchers to create what he called this hypersensitive microphone, and they stumbled across this thing anyway. I wonder where that goes. You know textures and things are really textures or textiles, I'm sorry. Textiles and glass and synthetics are really interesting to follow.
Speaker 1:I still think one of the coolest things that I've ever seen at ces was the year that I spoke to the guy from Metamaterials who ended up being the CEO of Metamaterials Super nice guy and he was showing off the way that they have windows and coverings for windows that can either amplify or block out RF signals and they're completely transparent so you can turn your entire window into this thing. That is not an amplifier but it basically, you know, helps your signal enter the building better and at the same token you can have one that stops all signals from coming into the building. So pretty interesting to see. You know, always keen to find something neat like that. This is, you know, keith Parsons and I just got published on a podcast today I believe, where we talked a little bit about Wi-Fi Now and about some of the antenna technology that we saw at Wi-Fi Now, which doesn't really do anything. There's no radio attached to it, it just re-vibrates, right, or it just takes in the signal and it re-broadcasts the signal the same way that it comes in out where it's supposed to go, and so there's a lot of really neat things, I think, happening in that space, which is always cool to watch. Antenna technology or in this case, maybe not even antenna technology, but technology that can help block things out. Just got a buddy to buy some Wi-Fi stands. Mark, always good to see you on the chat buddy. Always good to see you light up LinkedIn with some chat right there, so appreciate that. Let's see. Thin with some chat right there, so appreciate that, let's see. I thought that was pretty interesting to read about.
Speaker 1:Rexel has reached an agreement to acquire Tally, a distributor of wireless infrastructure products and solutions in the United States. This may not mean a lot to a lot of people, but for all my friends that came from distribution, where I had a really good time working as a product manager for a number of years, seeing that Tally has sold is cool. Man, 300 employees, I think something like that 11 locations, warehouse locations. Rexel is a large electric distributor. They do a bunch of boxes, electrical supply and things like that. This will give Rexel a greater presence in in-building wireless, private LTE and enterprise networks and ongoing network coverage densification. Rexel is a global leader in distribution of electrical supplies and services. There we go, serves three main in-markets industrial, commercial and residential. So now they've got a wireless play to go along with that, which is great. That's what we're seeing right, that consolidation of not just IoT equipment but IoT devices. How are those things coming together?
Speaker 1:So, speaking of things coming together, apple has been in some serious hot water with what they're doing with their Wi-Fi positioning systems, and there were not enough articles Just kidding. There were so many articles talking about what Apple is doing. Apple's Wi-Fi based positioning system can be abused to track the live location of device owners across the globe, including in war zones, like what's happening with Starlink in Ukraine, and researchers are warning this until Apple puts it in place and puts in place more defenses. They say that the system will continue to pose a large-scale privacy threat and safety risk, facilitating mass surveillance, and not just for Apple device users but for any device users, and I'm trying to figure out really how this thing works. So essentially what it does is each of these devices keeps a list of which BSSIDs it sees, and when you query this two University of Maryland researchers reported this problem you can query it for free. It offers overly verbose responses that can be potentially abused by remote attackers to track any device with a BSSID anywhere across the globe. Now with Google, on the other hand, google's WPS returns a single BSS ID in response to a query, but Apple's returns a list of 400. So it's very easy to find out where people are.
Speaker 1:The researchers' proof of concept attacks use fabricated queries to track Apple's WPS into giving extensive information about the BSS IDs that it stored. Applying this technique, over the course of a year, we learned the precise location of over 2 billion BSS IDs around the world, said the reporter's co-authors, eric Rye, a University of Maryland PhD student focused on network security and privacy, and Dave Levin, a computer science professor at the university. The researchers said they didn't study WPS as offered by others, including Google, although they know that Google's is less susceptible to this attack. This is a big deal right, because Apple is the king of security, the king of making sure of privacy, making sure that people aren't able to be found. But now, when you ask it for lists of BSS IDs, it starts to report where they are, and now you can use that as a query to find out where everything is.
Speaker 1:What can be done with this BSS ID cataloging and tracking attack? The researchers point to four strategies WPS service operators limiting access to their APIs, governments passing legislation prohibiting individual devices being used and users not taking their travel modems with them at all. Um, so interesting. They hypothesize that this black hole is likely to do with Chinese laws. There's a whole bunch of information about this in the article and it gets pretty deep, and this is one of those things that the more you think about how people can use this, the more scary it becomes. So definitely be on the lookout to see what Apple is going to do with that. Now. They've got WWDC that was just announced coming up in a couple of weeks, so they probably won't be talking about this, but who knows, maybe they have something new that they're trying to develop that uses this incredibly in. I don't insightful if you will technology.
Speaker 1:Well, whatever, speaking of people doing bad things with good tools international burglary ringers using wi-fi jammers to knock out security systems and I talk about this because we've talked about jammers before, we've talked about Flipper, before We've talked about the. You know, wes showed off the Teradek thing at Mobility Field Day. All these things are available. You can get them online. They're not cheap. But now there's this new fad called burglary tourism. That was the part that caught my eye. All of the men that they busted doing this were coming from Colombia. They traveled into the United States to commit what authorities are calling burglary tourism. So what they do is they use Wi-Fi jammers to knock out either the relay signal or the signal to the Wi-Fi from the ring doorbell and once they knock it out, they can get in and out of the house. They can break in without any cameras seeing them. So this goes back to people are very reliant on their security systems being these new doorbells or being their IP cameras that they have at their house, wi-fi cameras specifically. So things like that can definitely cause a problem, something to think about in the security space.
Speaker 1:And then we talked about Wi-Fi sensing at Wi-Fi Now, and how. Wi-fi sensing is this new technology that's coming about that can leverage the existing Wi-Fi chipsets and a number of different devices to understand when people are where they are, identify different objects that are moving in and out of the room, not just that movement is happening, but who's moving when they're moving, why they're moving. So I'm interested to see how this opens up this big opportunity for Wi-Fi sensing to jump in and say, hey, you know what you can do with Wi-Fi is this? However, are those Wi-Fi sensing technologies susceptible to things like Wi-Fi jammers? That's the question that I have for the Wi-Fi sensing industry, and that is something I would be interested to learn to see if that's the case.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I guess we'll find out. All right, what else we got? Instant messaging program ICQ is finally shutting down after 30 years. I cracked an ICQ joke at Mobility Field Day this year. Nobody laughed. I don't even think people heard me. Mark might have heard me and smirked, but it was funny to say that and now find out that ICQ is retiring after 30 years. It's shutting down, god.
Speaker 1:I can almost remember my number. If I bet it, if I think hard, hard enough, I can find my old ICQ ID. If you don't remember ICQ after AIM and after the CompuServe chat program and Prodigy chat and all the instant messengers that were out there, you know pre-Skyping, you know teams and taking over the world, you had all these different messengers and ICQ was the first allowed you to log in to all of them. Mr House Music, that was my aim name. My aim name, mr House Music, I bet, if I think hard enough, I can't remember my ICQ number. That's hilarious, anyway. So Godspeed, icq and team Good luck and so on and so forth. Anyway, that's all I got today for what's new, what's now, what's next. But I do want to talk about something before I drop, because I have an interview coming up next and I've got an interview with our friends from Meter and I had a great opportunity to sit down, over teleconference if you will, with Anil, one of the co-founders of the company, and just have a really cool, candid conversation with them about what they were doing and why they were doing it and what what meter means to the industry. And and I got to tell you when I went out to mobility field day the Monday that I went out there to San Francisco the Monday before mobility field day started. I was invited to meters headquarters by the team and I rolled in on a Monday and there weren't a lot of people there Mondays are kind of a slow day at their office, from what I remember and I walked in and I drove up to the city, parked my rental car outside, went in and sat down and it was kind of insane what I saw, and I still am having problems processing everything that I saw, so I tried to write it down.
Speaker 1:I have an article that I'm going to post up after today's waves, probably while you're watching the interview with Anil. I'm going to post up my article and it's called what I Didn't See at Meter and it was interesting, to say the least, and I don't want to take away. I'd really love for you to read the article and share it, and I think I did a pretty good job writing it and I used a whole bunch of AI and really fun stuff to make it sound the way that I wanted to sound. It was the first time that I've really really used AI in writing in a way that I feel helped my voice get out. Instead of just like replacing what I was trying to say, I wanted it to be authentic and I think I did a pretty good job. So I would really like your feedback on the article, but I'm going to post it up because it was astounding.
Speaker 1:Man and I mean that as someone who's seen a lot of technology I sat down and I saw a lot of stuff and they were very cool about it and they really just showed me everything and that was weird and surprising and I said this is great. I can't believe how open y'all are being with me with this. And they just laid it all out there and they're like we want to know what you think. And I just kept saying to myself that's a lot, that's a lot, that's a whole lot. There are things that I saw there that I have never imagined seeing when it comes to network administration and network engineering, network deployment, and I don't know how to put in words or in thoughts everything that I saw and where it places them in the industry. What I do know is that if you take the time to listen to their story and understand where they came from and what they've done and what they're doing and then where they're going, it makes way more sense. I have no idea how they're going to take everything and stick it in one packaging. They have an incredible marketing team, so let's see what they do with it, but it was really, really fun.
Speaker 1:So look out for the article what I Didn't See at Meter. I'm going to be posting it on LinkedIn and on my blog here in just a minute, but in the meantime, what I'm going to do is I'm going to roll the interview that I had with Anil a couple of weeks ago and it gives you some really good insight into what they're doing Now. He says a lot of the same things in a lot of the interviews, because it's the story of the company. It's the story of him and his brother. It's the story of what they did. Mine might be a little bit different. It's more catered to you all that are watching this, so I'd appreciate some feedback on there. But either way, thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited to show this interview. Like I said, I had a really good time talking to him. It's a little bit longer On the longer side, it was about 30 minutes and it'll be cut up and posted as a podcast also, but please, you know, stay tuned and all that good stuff, and I look forward to talking to you all next week for some Cisco live coverage. We'll see what's happening, but in the meantime, thanks for listening and please enjoy this interview. Let me make sure that my sound is right.
Speaker 1:Enjoy interview with mr anil from meter. Thanks, see ya, yay, what's up? Nerds, it's drew lintz the Nerd, and this is one of my fun, fun, fun interviews. Today. I have someone sitting behind the screen here that I got to know over the last couple of weeks. So I'm very excited, not just about the product, but about the person behind the product, the team behind the product, and what they've been doing. And it's going to shock you to know that they've been around for about 10 years, but now they're finally jumping into the spotlight. So, mr Anil, I'm going to let you introduce yourself real quick to everyone that's listening. Who are you? What do?
Speaker 2:you do. Thanks, drew, for having me. My name is Anil Varanasi. I'm one of the founders and CEO of Meter. Meter makes it really easy for any business to get internet networking. Wireless security we do it entirely as a service. Wireless security we do it entirely as a service and we build routing, switching, wireless DNS security, sd-wan all built into single pane of glass. Like you said, we've been around a decade relatively quiet, just honing in our product and now talking a bit more about who we are and what we do.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Why in the world would you want to get into this industry? There's so many great solutions already out there. I've had the opportunity to see your product and, for the people that have, there's lots of testimonials. You all have online lots of stuff on LinkedIn, but you as a person I mean it's you and your brother, right, and a great team of people what was the moment where you're like you know what we can change, where this is going, Because it is pretty phenomenal what you're doing? What was that moment of impact for you?
Speaker 2:You know, I think with a lot of these things people want to romanticize how they end up deciding what to work on and they imagine some sort of Newtonian moment where an apple fell on their tree and from that moment on that's what they're working on. I wish I was that embellishing on how we got to it. I studied networking in college. We really care about infrastructure. We really care about networks.
Speaker 2:It just felt like about 12 to 15 years ago things kind of stalled out and we just extrapolated a few things on what does hardware look like over time? What does software and packet processing look like over time? And what does software to help manage this look like? What does costs and pricing look like over time? And how do we really make sure we push the industry forward? And when we started looking at all of these things just felt like nobody else was doing it. But it wasn't one day that happened, it was just. You just slowly kept thinking about it and you know, just at the end of the day we're like, okay, maybe it's us that should do it, because it seems like nobody else really is.
Speaker 1:And I think you know, with your product, with the life of your product, I mean, how did it? I want to put myself in your head, right, because I've I've tinkered and I've built and and I've done all these little things and software and whatever, but to get it to go from this idea that you can change an entire industry, I mean, yeah, where did you? Did you start with hardware? Did you start with code? I mean, the thought was this grand thought, right, but I'm sure it iterated over. It's not like you had the idea today of what you know 10 years ago. How did that iterate over time? And and we're let me ask you also, what was one of the moments where you're like, oh my gosh, we're on to something like this is the breakthrough we were looking for yeah, so.
Speaker 2:So um, interestingly for us, the documents that people read when they join meter during their onboarding are what we wrote 10 years ago almost nothing's changed.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. We just said this. This is what we're doing. This is what we wrote 10 years ago.
Speaker 2:Almost nothing's changed. That's awesome. We just said this is what we're doing. This is what we're going to go do. So we did start with software first. Okay, and really thinking about underneath how is packet processing changing Now? You've had a lot of great teams over the last couple of decades think about this but particularly in the last 15 years, as you think about software-defined networking what Nick McCohen and Martin Casado's teams over at Stanford did and then building eight at Facebook with Open Compute and other things that I know you were part of too which is just how are we actually doing packet processing from the ground up? So we started with software, but quickly it turned out that to have really great software Alan Kay was right you need really great hardware.
Speaker 2:Yeah great software. Alan Kay was right you need really great hardware. And so then we started iterating on hardware here in San Francisco, where we're based out of, but it was really slow. We designed something send it over, get a PCB.
Speaker 1:Wait a few weeks. Yeah, it was just really slow.
Speaker 2:So, as naive as it sounds, sunil, my brother and I um said let's just go to where it's made, maybe for a couple months. How hard it could really be.
Speaker 1:Thanks, last word this is so great. That's I. I do want to hear that story, like at least a part of it, because I've always, you know I, I'm working on this fun, this is my little. I've got this little baby project I'm working on, you know, tiny little three layerlayer PCB and at some point it's just like I just want to go, because I, you know, even with that, you're like I just want to go over there and be like dude, just turn it around super quick. How did that work out for you? Yeah, I mean, we can go down that rabbit hole it right.
Speaker 2:Um, so there's two places in the world where really hardware is made at scale. Yeah, one is shenzhen. The other one is taiwan. Shenzhen has this incredible history of going from a fishing village that was 30 000 people to 30 million people in 30 years. Yeah, it's crazy, phenomenal place. It's great if you go to wachang bay and other places, that's just literally where hardware is made. So we just went there. That's awesome, and we you know cold emailed folks. People were really gracious. We got a tutor to learn Mandarin and we learned Mandarin while we were there every morning for two, two and a half hours we had a Mandarin tutor and then we just built and it turns out it's a little bit harder than just a couple of months to even get the base stuff to have really great hardware for testing and other things.
Speaker 2:We ended up living there for like a year, year and a half. Our parents were very concerned on what's going on and then, as we iterated, we moved everything to Taiwan once we're thinking about production, quality, security, supply chains, wow and we were lucky enough where we're working with the same manufacturers and factories as every single large networking company. You know that came before us. Great. I just think these other company, these manufacturers, to their credit, ended up seeing what meter could be before anybody else could and they started working with us. So that's why, since day one, we've had such a high quality of hardware and components from Intel to Qualcomm and others, cause some folks I don't know how maybe because they've seen this movie so many times they could tell that we're going to do this for a really long time. So that's how it kind of played out. Today we manufacture all in Taiwan, with all the great, amazing manufacturers in the world that do this for. Pick your vendor. That's the biggest in the world. Yeah, yeah, but that's the biggest in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but that's kind of how it played out, man, but that's, but that's so cool, right, because it's, it's you, you did it like. You went out there and you did it. You focused on you doing instead of, instead of someone else putting it together for you. And I can't, I can't imagine the things that you learn, simple things like the simple things that make huge differences. But then to be able to leverage the experience of these larger man, you know, these larger manufacturing facilities, and go this is what we have like. Oh yeah, we've done this here. Here's how we can make it perfect for you. You know that's so cool and then so then, the whole time you're doing this, you're doing software. Software wasn't in taiwan, though. Software was was started to be done in the bay area.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, yeah, and you guys are an sf proper. So you know that's awesome and, you know, a lot of great networking companies got started here in the Bay Area, so there's a rich bed of talent here. Oh, huge. And super large history of people that help start these companies, invest in these companies, build these companies. Yeah, really, architecture and the other thing is networking is no longer just about networking, that's right.
Speaker 2:Right Networking is about operating systems, distributed systems, apis, front end dashboards, yes, machine learning and everybody's favorite word, ai. Now there's like whole barrier. Has this really rich, better people that you can learn from, recruit to your company and really build something together?
Speaker 1:And that's where I was going to go. Right. Is that now you're doing software in, arguably the software capital of the world, right, doing these incredible things and the talent that you're pulling into this because you're a new company, because you're coming into something is you get to leverage the experience of all these people who've been doing this at different organizations? That now, when you're launching it, talk, I mean, now you can, you can interact with other pieces of equipment or machinery or whatever, because you have the same group. They're going, hey, this is new and fascinating. I want to be a part of this. So then you start to build your team and your team is nothing to shake a stick at, man, I mean how? I don't even want to know how you recruited, but you've got some serious talent over there. What did you I mean? So your hardware is coming up to speed, your software is coming up to speed. You've got this idea that you're going to change networking and one of the things not to fast forward all the way.
Speaker 1:But you talked to me about not coming to market until you knew you were ready, and you knew that you were completely ready. Talk to whoever's listening about that, because that, to me, is. It's like the biggest question. Oh, you've been around for 10 years, why have I never heard of you? That's what everybody wants to know and you have such a cool answer for that. So what is it? Why haven't we?
Speaker 2:heard about you, and I think it's a fair question, by the way, right, and folks in this industry should be skeptical because there have been so many companies that have come and gone hundreds and thousands of times. Yeah, yeah, and what we wanted to be careful about is not just being another statistic, if you will. Framing for us is pretty simple that we are in a very established industry, yeah, with incredible companies that have built great products and really great teams over the last two, three, four, I guess now almost five decades yeah, decades, not years.
Speaker 1:Decades, yeah, so when they love change, right, they love, yes, well, but but hold on. I mean, even at right to jump in is, I feel like the other larger organizations have done a really good job of making people not want to change, like no, don't worry, you shouldn't have to go over there.
Speaker 1:We'll do everything for you. You want to attack on phones, you want to attack on video. You want to attack on everything else? Well, you want to. You want to attack on phones, you want to attack on video, you want to attack on everything else. All these organizations have done a have done a good job of you know, making you not want to look elsewhere, but it did get stagnant. Right, it did get stagnant so, so, so so.
Speaker 2:I think that's exactly right too. So the usual pitch from incumbents and legacy ones is some new company comes along. The biggest thing they'll point out is two One is that it's an incomplete solution, and two, it's not a mature product line.
Speaker 1:That's right, you don't have everything.
Speaker 2:Those are the two. Those are the two things. Yeah, now we knew we were going to work on this for decades. Yeah, so there's zero doubt in my mind that my brother and I, and a lot of the folks here, will be here for decades at Meter, building this into what we hope to be an impactful business for our customers and others. Now, if we knew that we just wanted to work backwards from that. So what we did is we said okay, established industry, really good products. We believe things have gotten stagnant. We have opinions on how it could be better. Let's show rather than tell. Oh, that's awesome, and showing is always harder and takes longer than telling.
Speaker 1:Ain't that the truth? But slowly along the way, you started to collect talent. I mean, you're recruiting some really good names from some really great companies.
Speaker 1:You've got people that are very interested in what you're doing. There's one that you nailed it on the headlines by getting investment backed by someone. We won't even talk about him until later, but it's been so cool to learn your story and how you got to where you are. And so then you get to this point and you say we've got the product. We think we're ready to go. We've got the software solution. Pretty sure we're ready to go. You're standing at the edge of it and in my mind you're just standing there going okay, when's the right time to jump into this market?
Speaker 2:And lo and behold, wouldn't you know, turmoil happens in the industry and you get all these vendors.
Speaker 1:You've got one who's trying to figure out how to combine two companies into one and get products that are out there and then going through the layoffs that they have. And then you have another that's acquiring a competitive company and then trying to smash these things together like a really dysfunctional-looking logo's, like you have. All these things are just happening in the industry and it seems like the timing here is yeah, and I asked you this. You don't even you know. I asked you this at wi-fi. Now I was like, dude, were you planning on coming into the market, right?
Speaker 2:now, or did the?
Speaker 1:opportunity just present itself. But I, you know, I feel like your answer was it was a little bit of both to give it away, but I think it was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we talked, we did get lucky.
Speaker 1:We got lucky too right, yeah, when everyone starts, when you know, when everyone's fighting around you and you get customers going dude, we just came out of the the chipset shortage, we just cut him out of hardware shortage, and now these companies don't know what they're doing, they don't know which way is up, and and you're standing there going hey, I got this full solution that completely revolutionizes everything that you're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we hear this from customers and partners all the time, right, yeah, especially, as you know, the large customers and the large partners have a full purview into all these businesses. Yeah, now, some of the things I'm learning through them. Even I'm surprised at like having the same piece of hardware boot into two separate OSs, tacking on a two-by-two PCD, another two-by-two to make it four-by-four all these different things that I'm learning about that some of these legacy providers are doing, and we really just think about what are we building that's going to solve a customer's problem?
Speaker 1:yeah, because it doesn't. I don't get, I mean, and call me naive, uh, but I don't get the vibe from you that you're out there to like take over the industry and dominate. I mean, yeah, you want to, you want market share, but you're not trying to be tricky or crafty about it. You're looking at this going. That's great that you guys are fighting with each other. I'm making a product that I'm putting everything into, that. I'm making the best product, regardless of what's going on in the industry, that'll stand the test of everything that's happening. It just happens to be coming to market at a time when people are looking around, going, you know, maybe it is time for a new solution and I know you hear it I mean it's the elephant in the room in every conversation you know, you know.
Speaker 2:the other thing, I think, is just land really needs love, yeah yes, and we think it's not. What's out there today we refuse to believe is the best version of what's possible.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a big statement, man, because you're right, land does need love. I mean, switches are switches. Everyone just said, oh, it's just a switch, right. And one of the most transformative things that's happened in the last decade or two decades in switching was Ubiquity. Put little LED lights behind their switch and like, if that's all, that was this, what a what a sign of the times. And switching where it's like that's the feat, like that's what we have as an industry. Of course, speeds are going up and you know whatever, but it's like that's the thing that people are getting side by as you can light up the led port, that you know that really, that tells you that switching is.
Speaker 1:Is it a part where it needs some love? And and not only that? You know, with with some of the other companies focusing their AI, starting in the wireless side, then moving into the switching side, or starting in the switching side, you're starting to see more of the love for switching. But one of the things with you all is you do have I'm looking behind you, right, you do have the full suite of things, and this obviously probably wireless. People are listening to this. I'm at least hoping a few of them are. But but you know, on the wireless side I don't want to dig into it yet, but I do want to talk a little bit. A larger picture.
Speaker 1:When you got to each one of these individual components, you didn't just look at a switch as a. You're like oh, I just need a switch, just whatever. Put some ports on there and make it happen. You really reimagine the way that network switching happens in a in, in a way that would feed the network better data and more information. Talk to me about that, because I think that you don't want to overlook. It's not just a switch. What makes a meter switch different than just an off-the-shelf switch.
Speaker 2:So I think there's two big things that happen anytime you're building something new what are the architecture choices you're making, and what are your incentives for making them and incentives really matter in building products and building companies.
Speaker 2:What are our incentives? We're not just trying to build the piece of hardware and then sell it for a margin on top of it. That's not what we're trying to do, and we never sell individual pieces of hardware. We provide a service for networking and IT teams so that they can do more high leverage work and they can have really great networks for their customers. Now that's our incentive, right? We get paid only if we provide a good network.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Otherwise meter gets nothing.
Speaker 1:Imagine a world where that is pervasive. I mean, I know you are imagining that world, but imagine, stop and think about that as a service, not just you're paying the whole network as a service thing, and see campus, networking and service and the different acronyms for it. It's this idea that you're going, you know the whole network is a service thing and and see, you know campus, networking and service and and the different acronyms for it. It's this, it's this idea that you're going to pay for that service. But a lot of people are just thinking about that like you're renting the equipment, you know or whatever, but I think your take on it is a little bit different.
Speaker 1:So expand on that you it's. This is. This isn't just network as a service. This is what is meter. Why the name meter it folds right into it, you know yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So so I think, because you have those incentives and you have architecture choices, so where it's just renting and what people kind of really are making up a lot of things for network as a service, is that they just take a bunch of hardware and they're attacking financing on top. Yeah, and that's not what we're trying to do, right, right, because of the choices we make, and the architecture leads itself to be that way. So, from how our hardware is designed, how it interconnects between security, appliances, switches, access points, how the operating systems are written, how there's a unified firmware image, how is the metrics pipeline built? That's real-time from the ground up. Then, how is all this taken to the backend?
Speaker 2:In the backend, we've virtualized every piece of our hardware and every single port and I know the term, like digital twin, is starting to get too much play these days but really imagining a full virtual network on the backend as well, and then real-time data that flows to it for configuration, for validation, for scalability. Now we're able to do this from the ground up. Even how we do packet processing is different, and I know everybody's architecture and I know what we do and I know the performance we can get. I know the reliability we can get. But we're able to do that because of those choices, and the choices lead to exactly what you were asking on simple question of like, even where the name comes from. But I'll pause there if there are questions.
Speaker 1:No, I know it's, it's, it's, this is, you know it?
Speaker 1:Wi-fi now, and some of these are conferences and stuff where we talk about being able to leverage the full power of the network. The one theme that keeps coming out is exactly and you hit the nail on the head right, this isn't taking a bunch of different pieces of equipment and packaging together and financing them. This is taking a system and putting it out there and leveraging it from top to bottom. Right, because unless you can understand the way that that packet traverses the network from start to finish, there's not a lot you can do with it, because you've got breakpoints that happen over and over. But if you're able to control the entire path, all the way through, of how every single packet is happening on your network, there's a lot of different things you can do with that. We don't even have to talk about the AI stuff, because once you control that network from end to end, now it's like okay, now I can make a better user experience overall, and I feel like that's part of the secret sauce that you guys have right is it's, it's all or nothing?
Speaker 1:we're not just going to send you some aps, we're not just going to see some switches, you know, and I think, conversely, if I think about the rest of the industry, you know, rest of the industry is like, yeah, you can buy our aps and buy someone else's switches and it's a good story, right? Even open Wi-Fi I mean, you know how much a fan of open Wi-Fi I am Even open Wi-Fi, it's like. But if you don't control the handoffs on either side, then really what can you do and what can you process? So then well, let me ask you, what benefit do you see there, what benefit as a customer, if I have a full stack deployed from meter? What are the benefits? Is it just I don't want to say speed, but the term that I'm loving is QOE quality of experience.
Speaker 2:I mean, can you offer a better experience by doing that viably? Yeah, so I think I know most of your listeners are engineers. So if we break down experience for an end user, what is it composed of? There's three things. Yeah, so performance is really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:From how are you actually processing packets from a security layer, from an appliance, to the switch to the AP? Then you have reliability, and reliability comes from how does a packet traverse through each layer? That's right. Then you have security.
