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 US Space Force's Satellite Jamming, and Private Wireless Network Evolution: From DAS to 6G, M&A Impacts, Wi-Fi 8 MAPC and More!
Can you imagine a future where you pay to keep your data private? In our latest episode, we unpack Meta's bold new policy in Europe, which allows users to do just that. Join me, Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, as I share how I use old school tech like RSS to stay ahead of the curve with the latest tech news. We then shift our focus to the US Space Force's cutting-edge advancements in satellite jamming—discussing their implications for internet control and national security. The conversation takes a deep dive into what these developments mean for the future of global communication.
But that's not all. We also explore the revolutionary shift from traditional Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) to modern 4G, 5G, and even 6G networks. Learn how companies like Amphenol are making investments in the costly market of DAS and asking if this could lead to make wireless networks more accessible discussing CommScope's decision to sell its outdoor wireless network segment. What does this mean for giants like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon? Are the days of DAS coming to an end? Lastly, help me reach 1,000 YouTube subscribers—your support could make a dream trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a reality. Don't miss this episode packed with insights, updates, and a touch of personal aspiration.
Well, good afternoon. How's it going everybody? It's Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd. Today is July 23rd 2024. Hope everybody's having a great week. What a week.
Speaker 1:A couple things have happened in the last week in the United States. Pretty interesting to see what's going on, but nevertheless also some things have been happening in the wireless industry, so it's a good time to jump into what's new, what's now, what's next, what's happening? So here's. I did something a little bit different and if you're watching on the video, I look off to the to that way, to my right, your left, and that's where I keep my screen, because I haven't invested in the teleprompter yet, keith, sorry, it'll happen eventually, mr Parsons.
Speaker 1:Anyway, and what I do is, throughout the week, throughout the day, whatever it is, I scour all the news sources. I still use a lot of RSS. I use a really cool RSS reader called InnoReader to track everything that I'm looking at, and then I just flag the things I want to talk about, and what I did this week is I just copied them as links instead of putting in the headline or whatever. So I wanted to see if I could catch myself by surprise and talk about the links that I had bookmarked over the last week to talk about. So that's kind of how the process works, right, I find things that are interesting, I flag it and then I say, ooh, I want to talk about that. And you know, if there's any projects or things I'm working on and they apply to this, then I get to work with that also. So let's see what do we got going on. There's been some uh, some interesting news happening this week. You know, one of the things I'm watching it doesn't have anything to do with wireless is what's going on with meta in europe and the way that they are saying well, you don't have to accept our privacy policy, but you got to pay us. And I guess maybe that's not the right way to say what they did, but essentially they had this program where they said look, we won't sell your information to advertisers, we won't process that information in exchange for a subscription or a service to pay to make sure that they don't do that. And they're catching a lot of heat over that. Don't know how well that would work in the US, but you never know. Strange times are here and there's only more strange things coming down the road. So let's see what do we got first off. Oh yeah, here we go. This is exactly what I wanted. Tech spot, uh, first spacecom reported this and then tech spot reported it, and this was. This was a while back.
Speaker 1:Space force tests small satellite jammers to protect against space enabled attacks. A system that could disrupt adversary satellites overhead might be surveilling or targeting us forces on the ground. I found this to be fascinating because I was reading a an article about starshield and the starshield program that spacex has put in place along with starlink, and how StarShield is being used by the government, and then I never thought about the government uses for specifically for Starlink and what they could do with it, not just from the connectivity perspective, but from the ability to use it for national security or for allied security. So I fell down that rabbit hole a little bit. But then this article pops up on spacecom from April 24th, saying that the US Space Force was testing a new ground-based solution for satellite jamming. It's a weapon test work conducted by Starcom. How cool is that? Space Training and Readiness Command, starcom, which is responsible for educating and training the US Space Force personnel? The satellite jammer is known as the Remote Modular Terminal, rmt. Like other jammers, it's designed to deny, degrade or disrupt communications and satellites overhead by overloading specific portions of the electromagnetic spectrum with interference. So that was interesting. Then, all of a sudden, yesterday, the US Space Force is set to install 24 satellite jamming stations capable of disrupting Russian or Chinese communications. So this first article pops up April 24, 2024. This next one is July 22, which was yesterday, 2024.
Speaker 1:Department of Defense says they're responsible weaponry. Responsible weaponry, thanks to military industrial complex upgrades to warfare technologies continued regardless of world events. Russia's reportedly developing a high altitude nuclear device to permanently and indiscriminately knock out enemy communications with an emp. Okay, so imagine, something goes up into space, pow, sends on emp, knocks out everything in the air, in in space, if you will, and it will indiscriminately knock it out. Meanwhile, the US just announced a weapon with similar aim, but with chaotic and irreversible consequences. Oh, sorry, without chaotic and irreversible consequences. The US military is installing their state-of-the-art devices. I wonder if they're the ones that we were just talking about. It doesn't say that the DoD has allocated funds to build 24 remote installations, with 11 scheduled to deploy before the end of the year.
Speaker 1:Now why is this interesting to me? On the Internet side? Because the Internet kill switch if our government has the ability to disrupt communications for satellites, those could affect other satellites as well, and I'm not going to get all weird and conspiracy theory on this at all. What I am going to say, though countries around the world, where, when, when people have started, when there's been uprising or protests or whatever it is, the internet can be widely controlled by the government, and in the united states we've done a lot to get away from that. However, now, if the dod has got these things that can knock out satellite communications and more people that move on to starlink, yada, yada, yada, yada. That's where my mind's going. So why is it? You know just little cards I like to read about and tuck them away and see, see where that, where that goes, space forces rapid capabilities office told bloomberg the terminals are small, transportable and low-cost satellite communication jammers that can be deployed in environments to protect us forces. This is being reported by tech spot. So anyway, um, I just I always think about that star wars program in the 80s with ronnie raygun. Ronnie raygun and his star wars program. I just found that interesting, and then I think of spies like us doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor anyway. So that was the first thing I wanted to talk about. Found that to be fascinating from a wireless perspective, sign Signal jamming devices for space in the year 2000.
Speaker 1:Now, speaking of something that's a little bit more terrestrial, the FCC says this is what caused AT&T's big outage in February. Fierce Network is reporting that the FCC's report on AT&T's major outage was a network update that caused it. The incident lasted 12 hours overall and hit millions of customers. At&t has implemented technical controls in its network and greater peer reviews to ensure it didn't happen. So that article was posted a couple days ago. Then a follow-up article was posted today at 1.46 pm. John Brodkin from Ars Technica posts this update and says the government investigation has revealed more detail on the impact of the outage. It happened on February 22nd 24, blocked over 92 million phone calls and 25,000 attempts to reach 911. And it was happened because they didn't follow procedure and best practices when pushing a network update is described in more detail later in the article. The FCC criticized AT&T for not following best practices, which dictate quote that network changes must be thoroughly tested, reviewed and approved.
Speaker 1:Sound familiar CrowdStrike man. Talk about a talk about a week. I hope everybody got home safely because of that. I hope. I hope it didn't disrupt too many people's lives or have something terrible happen to them. But the crowd strike thing was really, really tough. I'm glad it wasn't a wi-fi thing that happened, um, but you know it's check that code right. And you know I've seen every meme possible. I'm sure you have too, but there's lots of memes talking about people who pushed it or the the, the one about the maintenance guy who walked through and tripped over the cable and he had a cable in his bag but it was too short. That was a pretty funny one. All voice and 5G services from AT&T wireless customers were unavailable, affecting more than 125 million devices. But the 25,000 calls to 911 call centers, that is rough to think about.
Speaker 1:And CrowdStrike, I won't't give it. There's no CrowdStrike update. Y'all know what happened. I mean and and. If you don't know what happened, just look at what happened. Crowdstrike, they pushed an update.
Speaker 1:The thing that I found curious was that it was the. The same guy who was with McAfee when this thing happened with McAfee before is now the CEO of CrowdStrike and the exact same thing happened when he's the ceo of crowd strike. That kind of sucks man. Uh, poor guy. Like, what are you gonna do? What are the chances, unless it just really is bad management. But I don't know, I don't know the guy, I don't know what happened under his watch, but nevertheless that's, that's not a good thing for anybody.
Speaker 1:Um, what else is happening in the news? Let's see, see. Oh, check this out. This is pretty crazy. This is from four days ago Debt ridden Comscope. According to Fierce Network, debt ridden Comscope sells off outdoor network unit to Amphenol. So I see the headline come across and I go, oh my God, they finally sold Ruckus, because, if you don't know, ruckus has been on the sales blog for quite some time. Comscope is definitely trying to divest themselves of a lot of these things and it's well known. I mean, this isn't breaking news. This is in the industry everyone was talking about. I mean, everyone's been talking about it. So I thought, oh my God, they finally found a buyer for Ruckus. No, no such luck. Dead Ring Comscope has sung off its outdoor network business to amphanol interesting ethanol by the outdoor 5g and das business for 2.1 billion dollars in cash, which is crazy. I mean it's comscope always let like they were so strong. I was comscope certified for das for a long time and they did. I mean, they did great stuff and now they're dumping it to Amphenol.
Speaker 1:But a sign of the times, man, I mean DAS, dead, dead antenna systems. I think you know there's so many different solutions now where DAS used to be the only way to get something done, so expensive, so difficult to put in, not knocking that market too much. Obviously it'll be around for a while as people start to transition over. But there's so many other easier, cheaper, more cost-effective ways to get this done. And you look at private 5g and private 4g and private 6g coming and you look at network in a box and you look at all these things that make that accessible. Then you you turn and look at old school desks and you're like why would I want to buy that? I mean, it's so expensive. So hopefully there'll be some, hopefully this could could help that out. You know, maybe Amphenol figure out a way to make it more cost effective for people so they can take advantage of DAS. But DAS is such an expensive, expensive, expensive solution but well needed, I guess. I mean look at well, I don't know. I mean look at what the the at&t outage, that a dash system wouldn't solve that problem that was. That was a bigger issue overall. So I don't know man getting rid of their dash solution is going to be skinnier for comscope for sure.
Speaker 1:At&t team mobile and verizon have been amongst the customers of the outdoor networking group. Comscope is selling it off for 2.1 billion dollars in cash to amphenol amphenol pay cash for the comscope. It's anticipated to close the first half of 2025. The outdoor wireless network segment's antennas and site solutions have been used in some 5G rollouts, asad Khan, research director at 5G, said. However, the segment has been struggling due to high customer inventories and lower demand. Please see comment earlier. Drew says Vodafone, at&t, verizon and T-Mobile are among the outdoor wireless network segment's largest mobile operators. Yeah, the outdoor wireless network sector represented 15.9% of ComScope's business.
Speaker 1:Doesn't say anything in there at all about about ruckus? Comscope stock is trading down 1.11 at 1.73 at time of publication. Don't, please don't get me wrong. That's not. I'm not trying to take a dig at ruckus. Uh, I've got a lot of friends that work at ruckus and I've had a lot of people that have worked at ruckus. That's a fun product and you know, it was really neat to see them. A little fire was lit, I think, this year at wlpc in fe February where they won the product of the year and you know Jim and John won the podcast deal. It was pretty cool. It was really really good to see. So you know it almost felt like for a hot minute there was going to be a big CommScope ruckus revival. And I'm not saying it doesn't feel like that anymore. I mean, the more I see Bart talk, the more you go. Oh, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:The AI story that they have is different. You know, I would love to see it in action and see what they do. So, regardless if Ruckus stays with CommScope or they spin off to someone else looking forward to them, you know, hey, by the way. So I wonder if I can find it and post a link somewhere. I'm going to repost it on LinkedIn. Somewhere on LinkedIn someone posted an article that was talking about BeamFlex. Let me see if I can find it and it was like look, dude, beamflex is different than package steering or whatever it was. And it was a breakdown about BeamFlex that I hadn't seen in so long. Because I think, here we go.
Speaker 1:Dane Conner, dana, dane. Dane Conner, system engineer at Ruckus Networks, posted on LinkedIn a day ago and he said beamforming is not big letters, is not beamflex. Dane Conner is a system engineer at Ruckus Networks. I do not know Mr Dane, and here's I'm going to read this real quick. I found this fascinating. He says I hear a lot of people saying beam form I don't know what his voice sounds like, by the way, so maybe that's not an accurate description. But Dane says I hear a lot of people saying beam forming and beam flex are the same thing. I guess because they both have beam in them, it couldn't be further from the wireless certification standards. So having beamforming as well, but beamflex is its own functionality and advantage.
Speaker 1:And then he like drills down and to talk about. You know how it works and what it does, and it was cool to see. And even mr martin erickson cwnd number 148 with the first comment, says very helpful. Um god, I remember when beamflex first started. It was pretty interesting. So look, if you, if you get a chance, reach out to old dane connor in his fancy suit and tie and uh, and ask him if you have any questions about beamflex and about comscope, ruckus, so, and and them not selling to amphenol. There you go.
Speaker 1:What else we got going on today? Oh, the broadband in a box. Broadband in a box, stuff is coming up. So Bolden Networks. Here's another thing. So Europe Olympics, all the stuff that's going on in Paris huge, huge network requirements for what they're doing. And Bolden Networks is now saying neutral host shared RAN is way ahead in Europe. And I don't know how much of this has to do with the Olympics.
Speaker 1:But if you look at neutral host private radio access networks as private radio access networks are starting to make their way into the United States, right, das is going out, private RAN is coming in P4, you know, private cellular in the 4G variant, the 5G variant or in the 6G variant these neutral host radio networks are starting to pop up. And what do I mean by that? Like, if you think about what I talked about last week with open access, think about that where you have a radio access network, a neutral host network, where you're broadcasting from multiple carriers across a single radio access network. So you don't have to install infrastructure for everybody, you just have to install one set of infrastructure and everyone can use that as a neutral host. And Europe is really embracing this right. But it's starting to pop up in the states and along the lines of open access for fiber and open access for municipal networks and the way that you can do slicing to allocate resources. Now you start to talk about private radio access networks. So, according to Bolden Networks who should know something about this Bolden deploys a lot of these things and if you don't know who Bolden is, look them up.
Speaker 1:B-o-l-d-y-n is how you spell their name. Bolden Networks ran this article. Did they run this article? Let's see. This is Dan Jones over at Fierce Network published this article. He says an office building or a factory or a virtualized environment, or you can do the Moken thing multi-operator core network. That's what Moken stands for, so you can support multiple mobile network operators using Moken.
Speaker 1:Neutralhost is critical for us globally, says Andy Penley, group CTO at Bolden. He told Fierce this week he highlighted Roma 5G Project as the largest neutral host project for Bolden and this would be preparing for a project in Rome for the influx of visitors expected for the Pope's Jubilee in 2025, sprucing up communications infrastructure. Check this out. It will deploy public 4G and 5G in 83 metro stations, public Wi-Fi and small cells all across the city 2,200 small cells and 1,800 IoT sensors On the DAS and small cells. It will all be neutral host. It's all neutral host. Now this, if I remember correctly, from Wi-Fi. Now this is also a CommScope network on the Wi-Fi side. If I have to go back and rack my brain, so I guess CommScope Ruckus is the name of the game on this show of, on this episode of Waves. Anyway, take a look at that. It's, you know, the idea that you can deploy once and use for multiple operators, I think is really it's catching fire right, and it's great to see this happening in Europe, but I would love to see this happening more in the States. Obviously, if we can figure out ways to have that shared infrastructure, if the cost of shared infrastructure can be offset either by federal funding or by grants or by sponsors or whatever it is, then that just enables more connectivity for everybody all around. So really, really neat to see that.
Speaker 1:What else did we talk about? Wi-fi 8. Okay, let's go, let's talk about it. Let's talk about wi-fi 8. What are the two things that drew is excited about wi-fi 8 so excited? First off, to see rcr wireless news, one of my favorite news sources intelligence on all things wireless. It says covering a millimeter wave.
Speaker 1:In wi-fi 8 they published an article talking about um, the, the whole uh millimeter spectrum, you know, 60 gigahertz. Was it like 40 gig, 60 gig, any of that stuff and being able to use that in addition to 6, 5, and 2 gig in Wi-Fi 8, and the amount of bandwidth that it enables for 802.11b in or Wi-Fi 8. That is, that's really cool. I love the idea that it can move into that 60 gig spectrum, into that millimeter spectrum, granted it's. If you think about anything in that space, that's going to be direct line of sight. That's going to be like controllers to gaming consoles. That's going to be very, very direct line of sight in your living room only or in a specific room at a time, not going out through your entire house or going out through your entire business, just in one room at one time. That millimeter wave, you could take advantage of that. But that's really neat.
Speaker 1:But the other thing I'm telling you you know we're just now starting to see how mlo is acting and what it's doing and and multi-link optimization is working and that aggregation of signals where you can you use two, four for your upstream and use five gig for your downstream, or your bond five and six to come down now in wi--Fi 8, my favorite thing MAPC. I don't know how they're going to say it M-A-P-C multi-access point coordination. Now you're not just using 2, 4 and 5 gig and 6 gig, and now you know, say, 60 gig, now you're doing it through multiple access points. So one access point is doing your uplink, your downlink is coming on 5 gig from another AP, another ap and six gig from another ap, and then you're combining all that back at your at your ue or your station. That's so cool, because now you've got, now you're, you're really leveraging your network to get everything in there and I really the you know the more that, the more that this comes up, this is more like speakers and this is more like light bulbs and you know all those, all those analogies still apply, because if you've got multiple speakers, you're hearing some from one and some from another all at the same time and you're aggregating that all that in your noggin.
Speaker 1:You know, I think that wi-fi aid is going to do some really cool stuff. What does that mean for us from a troubleshooting perspective, or or from a network identification perspective? That's going to be. That's going to be tough, because now you're not just looking at what one client device is doing on one frequency with one AP. Now you're looking with MLO. It's like one client device, multiple frequencies, single AP. Let's extend that into one client device. Multiple frequencies, multiple APs how do we even begin to troubleshoot that? And this is where all the AI stuff comes in. And if history teaches us anything, it's that if we start talking about it long enough, uc will have an update on Hamina very soon on how to model for it. So, uc, I know you're listening, I don't even have to ask you more and I appreciate you listening very, very much. My friend, I'm looking for that Wi-Fi 8 feature set. Soon enough, my friends, soon enough.
Speaker 1:Well, that's all I got going on this week. As I mentioned before, we've got some great projects coming up. We've got some really fun stuff, some field work that's happening. I've gotten more involved with a couple field opportunities. It's fun. It's going to be fun to get my hands dirty, get some calluses, climb up on some stuff, take some cool pictures. I'm really excited about that opportunity. So we have some really cool things coming up on that side that I get to share.
Speaker 1:The podcast will still be coming to you from strange locations, if you will. I probably won't do the podcast next week. Fair warning I'm going to be out of town and I'm going to be out. I'm going on a little family trip. We try and go on one big one national park every year, and this year we're going to Olympic national parks outside of Seattle. If you have any tips for me to go, we're already going to do the rainforest, we're going to hike, we're going to go out to Ruby things that are happening. We do have some shows coming up. We don't forget.
Speaker 1:We've got the wi-fi now world congress in in europe we also have. There's a wireless, there's a working group. I can't remember which working group is coming up. It's not the wi-fi, it might be a wba working group, the one ones happening over in Europe. Also, we've got WLPC Prague coming up in September. We've got WLPC Mexico coming up. Lots of things are happening, but we're still in July.
Speaker 1:I know everyone's wrapping up their vacays, people are getting ready to start sending kids back to school, so just keep it on your calendar. And also time to start making plans, I think. Registration I don't know if registration came out yet or not, but registration I don't know if registration came out yet or not, but time to start making plans for CES. If you don't go to CES, I would encourage you to go CES. It's where the rubber meets the road with all these wireless things that we talk about. So if you're going to go, let me know. I'll be out there. We'll be having some fun and that's about it.
Speaker 1:I hope you all have a wonderful week. Enjoy your week. I'm going to go have some dinner and relax a little bit and watch some rainstorms coming in, and I hope you have a chill evening as well. That being said, have a great week. Thanks for listening. I do appreciate you listening. Share it with your friends. Have a good time. I still need 1,000 subs on my YouTube, so if you're hearing this and you haven't subscribed to my YouTube, please go subscribe. As soon as I hit 1,000 subscribers, my wife said she will take me to Mexico, and I would love to go to Mexico, to San Miguel de Allende, one of my favorite places in the world. So please go subscribe and whatnot. Anyway, have a great week. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.
