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
Wireless Breakthroughs and Cyber Battles: Epiq Solutions' 4G/5G Device, a Big Week for Starlink, HITEC Buzz, and Vulnerability Defenses plus What I Missed at #HPEDiscover
Curious about the latest advancements in wireless technology and cybersecurity? Ever wondered how cutting-edge tools could revolutionize your connectivity experience? Join us as Drew, the Wireless Nerd, takes you on a fascinating exploration of Epiq Solutions' new 4G and 5G signal scanner from iBWave. Hear Drew's excitement as he shares his first-hand experience with this game-changing device, while also reflecting on the buzzworthy updates from the HITEC conference in Charlotte and his missing of major highlights from HPE Discover. Plus, get the scoop on the significant advancements in CBRS 2.0, including updated propagation models and new heartbeat check-in intervals, which are set to reshape the wireless landscape.
But that's not all! We tackle the urgent issue of Microsoft vulnerability CVE-2024-30078, a critical threat affecting all Windows versions. Learn how to protect your devices from this serious risk, especially in public areas like coffee shops and airports. Discover the promising solutions like Passpoint and SignalRoam that ensure your Wi-Fi connections are secure. We also dive into the implications of Apple's iOS 18 MAC randomization on captive portals and can't contain our excitement about the retro-inspired Pocket 386 laptop, a perfect nostalgic gadget for tech enthusiasts. Packed with rich insights, industry updates, and a touch of nostalgia, this episode is a must-listen for anyone passionate about wireless technology and security.
Well, well, well, well, well, well, good afternoon, good afternoon, what's up everybody, hi. How are you? Let's see, streaming sending data. Alright, this is exciting, just playing with a couple of toys here. Let me check, let's see, maybe I should brush my hair first. You know, whatever day in the life of well, good afternoon everybody, hi. I hope you're doing well. It is june 26, 2024.
Speaker 1:This is waves with wireless nerd. I'm drew the wireless nerd and I've been sitting in this room a lot having so much fun, um, just creating stuff and playing with stuff and ripping apart raspberry pies. And I got this new, this new toy this week that I've been playing with. It's a lot of fun. Look at this thing like the epic. Oh, there we go, the epic solutions. Look at this little scanner for 4g and 5g. So, uh, folks that I find find folks at ib wave have sent me their latest device here to to mess with, to do some signal scans and to do some analysis of 4G and 5G. So I'm having a really good time with this. It's always fun to get new toys. It's always good to play with them. So look for a review coming up. It's great packaging. It was sent over in a really cool little hardened case. It comes with a couple of antennas on there and it's got a little sticky, so it sticks right on the back of this tablet that they sent. So good times to come. I'm excited. I think it'll be great.
Speaker 1:Let's see what else we got going on today. I hope everybody's well. I, you know I got a little bit of FOMO. I don't know why. You know I still get FOMO for some trade shows here and there, and this week is the HITECH conference in Charlotte and a lot of people from the hospitality industry are out there. So hello to everybody at high tech. I hope you're having a great time. That's a show that I truly, truly love. I have a great. I always have a great time going out there talking to everyone in the hospitality space who are interested in moving forward with any type of technology, so MDUs and and hotels and people that are, you know, like Airbnb type of people that are looking for, you know, multiple rentals.
Speaker 1:High Tech is such a cool show where they bring together all this great technology. They stick it all under one roof and usually there's some really interesting things that come out of it some nice tidbits of information, if you will. So I'm monitoring it, trying to see what I can find out. I'm just going to do a quick search no-transcript there. Let's see what else we have. A big showing by the OpenWiFi team Saw that that's pretty neat. So anyway, not worldviews there. See those guys Machine Q this tells you what's on my newsfeed, right, it's just it's filled with these guys Fresh Air. I wonder what Fresh Air does. Let's see, does your property pass the sniff test? Ooh, see, you always find the most random things out there. Anyway, hope everyone's having a great time at Hightech.
Speaker 1:No big revelations that I've heard of yet from the hospitality industry as of today, but you know, I guess the day is still early. So let's see what happens over the course of high tech and let's see what what ends up becoming newsworthy, if you will. So that's what's going on this week. Still lots of fun stuff from cisco Live. Congratulations to everybody. They got the Distinguished Speaker and Distinguished Presenter Awards. A lot of 4.8s and 4.9s I saw posted. I even saw 5, which was really cool. So congrats to everyone who was out there putting in work at Cisco Live giving their presentations. It was fantastic to see those get turned around.
Speaker 1:What are we talking about this week. Let's see what's new. What's now, what's next? What is CBRS 2.0? We touched on this a little when the announcements first went out, but CBRS 2.0 is what's being heralded. Basically, they changed the way that they do propagation for CBRS and it ended up opening up a lot of space for about 72 million different users who could be affected by this. By the end of 2023, there were 370,000 active CBRS devices, or referred to as CBSDs, transmitting in the United States, with more than 1,000 entities operating CBRS networks. So it's great to see those grow.
Speaker 1:But now newly proposed changes to the aggregated interference model on which CBRS is based, the sharing of it is based. It's expected to enable CBRS spectrum access system administrators to provide uninterrupted access to approximately 72 million more people than they do now. So it's not shrinking the zones of coverage, but what it's doing is it's changing the way that the propagation looks, and one of the things that they're doing I think I read is they're doing like high and low. So they're doing the CBRS if CBRS is being used on the ground versus up in the air and the way that that signal would propagate and the way that that would look and how that's going to change it. So CBRS 2.0 is being heralded for that. But the other thing that it's adding is the heartbeat, the CBRD heartbeat, or how the frequency or how frequently the CBRS devices have to check in with their spectrum allocation service to reauthorize has been considerably lengthened. Some CBSDs this is according to RCR Wireless, one of my favorite wireless news sources some CBSDs went from having to check in every five minutes to once every 24 hours, even within protected zones, depending on which part of the band they were operating in. An enormous dynamic protection area that extends nearly 300 kilometers from Nevada to the Pacific Ocean and included cities such as LA and Vegas. And Bakersfield was split into two, one for the air and one for the ground, in order to reduce the CBRS preemption for users on the ground. So that's kind of cool. So you've got a couple of DPAs that have changed, you've got the CBRRD heartbeat, you've got the way the propagation was done. All in all, I don't think I'm missing anything there. All in all, cbrs 2.0, that's what that is. So pretty cool. I like CBRS, big fan of CBRS, whether we're using outdoor to aggregate data from Wi-Fi nodes, like we do in the city of McAllen, or using CBRS to do cell phone carryover service, private cellular. So still lots of fun stuff happening in that space.
Speaker 1:No big announcements from HPE. I was dude, I'll say it. I was expecting more from HPE Discover. I was expecting more talk about private 5G and I didn't even see a whole lot of information tweeted and talked about from the event itself and, since none of it's live streamed, I couldn't watch see a whole lot of information tweeted and talked about from the event itself and since none of it's live streamed, I couldn't watch any of it.
Speaker 1:I saw the keynote, which was pretty cool. I mean, dude, the thing in the sphere looked insane. That keynote looked awesome and it was great to have the entire focus on the CEO, on Antonio, the whole time talking about where they're going. But talk about an environment, man, holy moly, I can't imagine what that looked like. I would love for the next people to do a keynote in there to make that thing in VR. I would have loved to have grabbed my Quest Pro and put it on my head and looked around and felt like I was in that moment. So good job to the team over at HPE. But next year, make it in VR, man, that would be so dope.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I really was a little disappointed with the coverage that I saw from HP Discover. I didn't see any of the things that I wanted to hear about Storage and processors and NVIDIA and AI, ai, ai and all that stuff was great to hear about, but I was more interested in the future of HP Aruba networking, like what's happening there, not even about the Juniper acquisition. I mean, we all know they can't talk about that, but I really wanted to hear more about their private 5G stuff. I wanted to see pictures of it. I wanted to see. You know one person I think it was Ali posted some stuff of you know a picture of their equipment. But I wanted to see more. I wanted to hear more. I wanted to know more.
Speaker 1:If I was at that show, that would have been the only thing that I would have been focused on, because that, to me, is what I find most interesting. But nary a word was said about private 5G, about Athonet, about the single pane of glass and the future use cases of 5G combined with Wi-Fi. And if it was said, it wasn't on my newsfeed and it wasn't on anywhere that I was looking. I was trying diligently to follow the hashtag because it was keenly, keenly interested in this, so hopefully there'll be some write-ups that come out of it. Hopefully there'll be some more information that comes out of Discover. But dang it, man. I really wanted to. I wanted something to get excited about and I didn't see that. But again, very niche, right? This isn't a podcast for everybody in the tech industry. This is just for the people that care about all the wirelesses. So that was interesting.
Speaker 1:The other thing that popped up was Starlink Mini was announced and we talked about this, I think, last week where there was an FCC filing, where there was a tiny little device. Well, spacex officially has started selling Starlink Mini. Saw your Merit. On Twitter broke a really cool post, a really cool story on the post, saying early Starlink customers are being invited to purchase the Starlink Mini for $599 and bundle the mini-roam service with their existing residential service plan for an additional $30 a month. Now, it doesn't say if you can get it on its own, it just says the mini-roam service is an additional $30 a month. Now, it doesn't say if you can get it on its own, it just says the mini room service is an additional $30 a month for 50 gig of mobile data that can be used anywhere in the United States, elon took to Twitter and posted a message using his mini Starlink, which was pretty neat. You know it's great. It's great. I think that this is really cool.
Speaker 1:I think being able to carry around something about this you know the width and length of a piece of paper and the depth of you know a pack of playing cards and have you connected to space is insanely incredible. I'm trying to figure out what the use cases are for this at that cost, right? I would love for every student in America to have one of these, but at $5.99, that's a chunk of change, right? So I don't know what the end game is for this and it does. Those cards haven't been shown yet, but it really was something like this. I can only imagine where this is going to go when you have someone who's literally changing the entire internet access game single-handedly. It's pretty neat Speaking of big announcement from Comcast this week on On the other side of that, comcast announcing at Comcast Business the first corporate partnership that they have with Starlink to start to provide places in difficult-to-reach areas or out-of-market areas with Starlink services in combination with Comcast Business.
Speaker 1:No-transcript, I think we're at a point where using low-Earth orbiting satellites as a backup to your Internet service is going to be the norm, and I think it's a great norm to have. I don't know how far we are away from it being primary, but kudos to Comcast Business and SpaceX for tying that together. I think it's going to be great for their customers, I think it's going to be great for everybody. So when you have that conversation along with Miniroam, you can see SpaceX is doing a whole lot. They're still going.
Speaker 1:You know, I, I look at the grand scheme of things, right, I look at the entire market and I say, okay, you know, coming from the point to multi-point world and coming from the world where we did a lot of this outdoor access, it was, you know, we were the only ones that could provide internet access in a lot of these spaces. How varion was, you know, big player in that, cambium, big player in that? Toronto is now a huge player in that also. And you have these places that couldn't, didn't have connectivity and the problem was how do we get everybody connected? And even in meta it's like how do you get the next three billion people connected? The problem is is that now dude starlink mini out there at 599? Now? It's just an affordability issue? It's not, it's not, it's. Can they afford? And you know project hyper launching and doing their stuff. Tell us that doing their stuff? He's doing their stuff, starlink mini doing their stuff. Now you have this coverage model that represents the entire United States.
Speaker 1:So I'm I'm eager to see what's going to happen in the wireless ISP, wireless ISP space. What's the differentiator between a wireless ISP and Starlink? And I think that if you take all the cards off the table and you just look at connectivity, if people are just trying to get connected, there's a way for them to get connected using satellite versus using terrestrial microwave. But then, at the same time, there's the customer service aspect, there's the maintenance aspect, there's the hand-holding aspect, and one of the statistics I love to see is when you have wireless ISPs that are playing with incumbent carriers or incumbent providers. In rural, not rural areas, in downtown areas, wireless ISPs hold their own. So there's still a market out there for it. It's still very much a big market for it and I'm interested to see how much something like this is going to affect. We knew it was going to have some effect on it, but I'm interested to see over time how that's working out. So kudos to SpaceX for doing that. So I think it's cool, man. I mean from a connectivity perspective, from a humanity perspective, I think it's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:Speaking of awesome stuff, not awesome stuff Microsoft Critical's Vulnerability CVE 2024-30078. This was an interesting one. If you have not updated windows, if you still use windows, make sure you update windows. Microsoft has issued a warning about critical wifi vulnerability affecting all windows versions, which allows attackers to gain remote control of their devices without physical access, using wifi. How does it work? Well, you can send a packet to I'm trying to get the deets down here but basically you send a. The attacker doesn't require any special permissions to access the device's settings or files. Being in the proximity of the targeted devices is enough to exploit this. This is a pretty big deal that can affect all Windows PCs.
Speaker 1:Let me see people talk about coffee shops, hotels or even workplacesplaces. As long as you're connected to the same wi-fi network in places like airports, coffee shops or hotels, from there, hackers remotely run commands and gain access to a system, all without any interaction. This is the company's second highest severity rating for security vulnerabilities, so make sure that this is covered. Now this all plays into a bigger conversation. This security. Vulnerability is something that's happening while you're connected to the same network, while you have visibility to the devices that you're connected to on the same wireless network. In an open network environment, this can create some serious havoc coffee shops, public areas, airports but if you're secured and you're authenticated, you don't have that visibility between clients and you're authenticated, you don't have that visibility between clients.
Speaker 1:This is what we were talking about last week, two weeks ago, at the WBA Wireless Global Congress. We were talking about the need for secure connectivity for clients. Let's move away from open Wi-Fi networks. Let's move into secured Wi-Fi networks where people can quickly authenticate, quickly get online, seamlessly, they can do what they need to do by walking in. And this is such a great case study for Passpoint, for open roaming and for the Signal Roam product that you'll hear me talk a lot about in the future.
Speaker 1:Signal Roam is a new endeavor that I'm working on that takes an existing wireless network, existing Wi-Fi network, and allows you to use it to extend your cell phone coverage into the building. You don't need a data system, you don't need repeaters. All you need to do is put in about 20 minutes worth of work, add an SSID to your network. Let us help you tie it together and now your Wi-Fi network will be enabled using Passpoint for anyone that's using a service in the United States a carrier service like AT&T or T-Mobile right now. They can jump on. They'll immediately jump on. They'll immediately get authenticated. This is a quick and easy and secure way to get people online effectively without having to worry about open networks. So think about this like Passpoint and Open Roaming, but tied into the carrier so that the beaconing comes with the little carrier's name on it. It's pretty awesome. Learn more at SignalRoamcom. That website is not up yet, but it will be up soon.
Speaker 1:We're working on the final finishing touches of it. It's going to be very cool. We're having a really good time introducing this product into the market with some of our partners, so excited to see where we go with that. But things like this point out the need for it. You talk about the security vulnerability that Microsoft is issuing and the way that it takes effect is people are connected to open Wi-Fi networks. Let's get away from those open Wi-Fi networks. Using something like Passpoint, using something like Signal Roam, they can authenticate based on the carrier, sim authenticate based on a credential, based on an 802.1X certificate. That's the way to move forward with this. Make sure people have secure, seamless connections to your wireless networks that you can find using Open Roaming or products like Signal Roam. So it's going to be really neat to see where this goes, especially with that nasty evil introduction of Apple's iOS 18 Mac randomization. I hope there's a lot of talk about that at Hitech this week. What are people going to do? What are you going to do when you can't use captive portals anymore? Oh heavens to Betsy, we might actually lose captive portals for once. You know there's a need for some type of user authentication and understanding who people are and what they're doing in some of those spaces. I guess I mean that's the argument. But there's really cool ways to do that where people can use the app, download the 802.1X certificate, immediately connect using whoever the app is of, the carrier that they're working with or the hospitality provider. So I'm interested to see what comes out of high tech because of that. What else is going on? This was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Ars Technica had a feature a $200-ish laptop with a 386 and eight megs of ram. It's a modern take on windows 3.1. It's called the pocket 386. It supports external accessories and it will just barely, just barely run windows 95. So the pocket 386 aliexpress has it up there. Uh, if you look it up I'm trying to find it right now, I don't know if there's a good link that has this, but if you look it up, I'm trying to find it right now I don't know if there's a good link that has this, but if you look at Ars Technica and look up the $200-ish 386 with 8 mega RAM, I kind of want to get one I'm not going to lie and see if I can run Windows 3.11, windows 3.10 on it. It's got an ISA 16-bit port and an ISA 8-bit port. It's got ps2 vga and an isa gpo. It's got support for a cf card, usb and even a parallel port. Very cool.
Speaker 1:If anybody buys one of these, let me know. That sounds like a lot of fun. Uh, I just want to play that little skiing, that little downhill skiing game. I don't know, something in me always makes me want to go back to windows 3.1 and just have a machine running that all the time. What a world, I don't know. You know, using a dial-up modem, I guess, using a banyan vines ether, not even ethernet banyan vines card. It's awesome. Uh, what else do we have the starlink connection? I already talked about that. Oh, this one was, uh was crazy.
Speaker 1:The uk heat wave could spark broadband and wi-fi blackouts across england. So this from the birmingham mail a heat wave could spark broadband and Wi-Fi blackouts across England. So this from the Birmingham Mail A heat wave could trigger broadband blackouts, with UK households warned to take action to avoid losing your Wi-Fi as temperatures rise. I was you know clickbait Drew's curious enough to click on that. Telecom expert Simrat Sharma told GB News that higher temperatures could have a detrimental impact on household gadgets like your Wi-Fi router. Okay, ms Sharma, who works for Broadband Comparison Service, you need to be very wary of overheating gadgets any time temperatures climb around 30 C.
Speaker 1:So for us in the United States let me make sure I don't mess this up 30 C in Fahrenheit is 86 degrees. I live in South Texas Ms, I didn't get her last name and it is usually over 86 degrees at any given moment. As a matter of fact, let's do a wonderful check of the weather here it is 96 degrees and mostly sunny. My heat index has me at about 112 today, which is okay. Usually it's about 124. But you know, I've never worried about the health of my Wi-Fi router going bad, but then again I have air conditioning, so I guess that helps out right. So what are you gonna do? Anyway, I think that's about all I got today, y'all.
Speaker 1:I wanted to make this a little short and sweet and just chit chat about some of the things that are going on. I hope you're having a great week. I hope somebody got something out of HPE Discover that they were looking for. If you found anything that they were talking about with Athonet and with Private 5G, please let me know, point me to an article or a press release or whatever it is. I really wanted to learn more about it and I wanted to see more chit-chat about it. I think there were some things that were talked about on a stage, but again, no live streaming, no way for anyone to know, and I wasn't there, so I'll just have to wait for people to report it to me. Anyhow, I hope you have a fantastic week. I think that's all I got.
Speaker 1:Let me know if you guys have any questions or if there's anything you want me to talk about next week. I've got some new product showcases coming up. I already mentioned one of them Epic Solutions. This is the RF analysis and scanner that IB Wave uses, and I get a package coming in the mail some new toys that are coming in. Some of you may have seen it, some of you may have not, but nevertheless I get to play with some new stuff in the next couple weeks. I'm very excited about that. No big plans coming up for trips other than I'm going on a on a vacay. I'm going to go up to the Pacific Northwest. If you're in the Seattle Portland area let me know. I'll stop by and say hi, but otherwise I hope you all have a wonderful week. I will talk to you next week. Let me know if you have any questions Until then. See you later, alligator.
