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 Acquisitions and the Changing Face of Wireless Access, PLUS: Your CyberSecurity is up to YOU!
The telecommunications landscape is undergoing a seismic shift as major players consolidate their hold on crucial spectrum assets. AT&T's stunning $23 billion acquisition of Echo Star's spectrum holdings grants them control of valuable 600 MHz low-band frequencies—airwaves that travel farther and penetrate buildings better than higher frequencies. Meanwhile, SpaceX's $17 billion purchase of Echo Star's satellite spectrum dramatically alters the competitive dynamics in space-based internet services, giving Elon Musk unprecedented control over the infrastructure powering global connectivity.
These massive transactions raise critical questions about market competition and consumer choice. With fewer players controlling more spectrum resources, what does this mean for pricing, service quality, and innovation? For rural Americans especially, these consolidations could determine whether they finally gain reliable, affordable broadband access or remain digitally underserved.
Against this backdrop of industry consolidation, the cybersecurity landscape has been rocked by the Salt Typhoon incident—a sophisticated attack that security agencies are calling a "national defense crisis." Chinese state-backed hackers compromised core routers across 80 countries not through advanced zero-day exploits, but by exploiting known vulnerabilities that organizations had simply failed to patch. By enabling SSH listeners on unusual high ports and using basic SPAN port mirroring, the attackers quietly monitored communications for years, harvesting sensitive data from millions of Americans. This breach underscores a critical reality: even sophisticated nation-state attacks often succeed through fundamental security lapses rather than technical brilliance.
The technology landscape continues evolving with innovations like Tarana's G2 multi-frequency panel, offering breakthrough capabilities for rural internet service providers, while Meter's upcoming event brings together industry luminaries including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalf to chart networking's future course.
Join me as we navigate these transformative developments reshaping our connected world. Whether you're a network professional, policy advocate, or technology enthusiast, understanding these shifts is crucial for anticipating how we'll communicate, connect, and secure our digital lives in the years ahead. Have thoughts on spectrum consolidation or network security best practices? Share your perspective—I'd love to hear how these industry changes are affecting your corner of the digital landscape.
Thanks to our sponsors: Helium & meter Networks!
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Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, sending data live, live and direct. Live and direct Scene, Perfect. You know, that's what you do on a Friday afternoon. You just you put the week behind you and you jump up in front of a microphone and you start recording and you hope that everything's working the way that it's supposed to on the back end, and I think it is. You know it, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1:I got the chat going and so today we're broadcasting on YouTube and on LinkedIn and on X, which is normal. Those are the ones I normally do. But we are also on TikTok live and that's different, because I've never really paid attention to the TikTok marketplace or the, I guess, the not marketplace, but the stuff that goes on there, because I didn't really have a lot going on. I've been making some ridiculous videos lately and posting them to the TikToks and it has gotten a few viewers. So if you're watching me on TikTok, that's fantastic and I appreciate it. I appreciate the viewership. The only thing is, I don't know how to log in to see if I'm live or not, or even to see what this looks like on tiktok. So if you could, if you're watching on tiktok, do me a favor, send me a message and let me know what's going on. Anyway, all right, that's looking pretty good. Let me open up the little web browser of justice here and see what's happening. Oh, hope everybody's doing okay. Hope everybody had a fantastic week.
Speaker 1:It has been two weeks, um, since I sat down to cut an episode out, just because there's just so much going on. You know, it's one of those. It's one of those things where things just get like they just catch up to you. You got a, you got a lot happening. You know the stream's going. The stream is live. And am I able to see? Whoa? I don't want to kick feedback back into what I'm doing, but that's pretty awesome. There looks pretty good. Rtmp 1280 by 12, 1920 by 1080. Sweet, let's go ahead and open up that tiktok live monitor. Maybe this is going to show me what I look like anyway. Uh, it says I'm live. So apparently I'm live, which is great. I don't know what that looks like and I don't have any viewers. Oh, oh, I have one. Oh, even better. Anyway, well, hi everybody. Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd.
Speaker 1:Today is September 12th 2025, and it has been a week. There's been lots of stuff happening this week. You know, sometimes the weeks speed up and sometimes they slow down with the amount of activity that's happening, but there's been so much that's happening lately and it just seems like it got all compressed into the last couple of weeks with what's been going on. So last week and this week and even the one previous, there's lots of things happening. I mean, my mind immediately goes to what I've been reading about online and if you're like I am, you've been watching everybody's LinkedIn. You've been seeing that WICO London looked absolutely fantastic.
Speaker 1:I don't get FOMO a lot. Usually I get an opportunity to attend a lot of these events, but when they start happening across the pond and I don't jump over there often it's like, oh man, that's got, it looked awesome. So WICO Austin looked pretty good. That looked like a really good time. I'm not going to lie, I was falling on LinkedIn as much as I could, but I guess they don't broadcast it, they don't stream it, so there was no way for me to see what was going on, except for the pictures that everybody kept posting. So kudos to the team, to Peter and everyone behind WICO, the team that put all of that together. Congratulations on what looked like a tremendously successful event. I'm very, very happy for you.
Speaker 1:It's great to see the industry just moving around and these little shows that are popping up and gaining more traction. We've got the two big ones coming up in Prague and then we've got WLPC coming up in February also, and I still lay those down as my cornerstones because that feels like those are the touch points for our entire industry. If you're dealing with wireless, those are definitely the spots that you want to be at. So registration is opened up, registration sold out, registration got expanded, the stuff that's happening for papers is coming out or has come out for Phoenix. So, man, it's just there's, there's. It just feels like it's moving so fast and I think the more stuff that pops up, the more events that we have, and the more you know like, the more not just the events, but the more like news that's happening in the industry. It really seems like it. You know it picks up pretty quickly. Let's see. So, yep, I'm still live on TikTok, which is crazy. Can't believe I'm doing that. So where do we start?
Speaker 1:There are a lot of things that are happening in the space, and I say space because I already read one of my headlines out of the corner of my eye here and I think that the first thing that comes to mind is what's going on with Echo Star and or with Echo, you know, dish Network, and that has. That stands out to me as something that has the ability to really change the way that we consume internet access across the country and across the world. So that one's up there. I think you know hpe introducing their new juniper mist, hpe ap36 access points. That really stands out to me, with some of the new things that are coming out, that we're finally starting to see the fruits of what has gone into that HPE Juniper acquisition. That's up there.
Speaker 1:The work that 802.11 Systems is doing in testing out access points inside their Candela containers is really cool to see. It's what I wanted to do with this rig that I have behind me but just honestly haven't had the time to do it. So to see them independently verifying access points that are off the shelf that you can get your hands on is so cool. It's information that usually only the manufacturers have and they can keep to themselves. And now you know Ferris and the team is out there just cranking Jack Ferris out there just cranking it away, putting it out there for everybody to consume. It's really neat to see that way, putting it out there for everybody to consume. It's really neat to see that. Yeah, it's just that.
Speaker 1:And then the WLAN Pi Go, which I haven't read enough about to understand everything that it does. So I'm curious to see the mark that it's going to make in the wireless industry, because everything that those guys do is super impactful. And then into that comes the new edition of the N1 chip and what the N1 chip means, not just for Apple, but what it means for our industry, and what it's going to mean over the course of the next 12 months. Is it going to work the way it's supposed to work right out of the box? I'm assuming Apple did their homework, but what are we going to have to do to make our equipment work with that N1 chip if something doesn't go the way that it's supposed to? And then, what access is that going to give us to one of you know, one of the tools that everybody uses, which is their mobile device? How? How is it going to affect troubleshooting? Are we going to be able to do packet capture? Is it going to be hidden? Is it going to be blocked? Are we going to have access to the chipset, a lot of questions that we don't have all of the clear answers on yet. Luckily, in this industry there's a lot of people that work on those teams, so hopefully, hopefully, a lot of that went into it.
Speaker 1:But where I do want to start is I want to start with the spectrum buyout from echo with at&t. So, first and foremost, at&t and and echo started talking about what they were going to do with spectrum and it wasn't, it wasn't clear echo star. So, like historically, echo stars been buying up all the spectrum. They were like they would enter all these auctions, they'd file the spectrum, they'd get it and they'd grab it and they'd hold onto it and no one really knew what they were going to do with it. And then, you know, they got behind boost and everything that they did started to to to spark that as a different carrier for Boost Mobile. And then, as Spectrum became you know, I don't know what the correct word is you know there was more Spectrum to be had, but then everybody was buying it. And then, you know, the Spectrum thing is weird to watch. But as Spectrum became more scarce, I guess, as a way to say it, echo held onto these assets that were in a very particular space in low and mid-band spectrum of 50 megahertz, of that like a chunk of it just sitting there that they could use but they weren't using. Then they were using a little bit of it, then it was like they were hoarding it. No one really knew what was happening.
Speaker 1:And now, after a $23 billion acquisition, it's going to add 50 megahertz of low band and mid band spectrum to AT&T's holdings, covering virtually every market across the US and positioning AT&T to maintain long-term leadership and advanced connectivity across 5G and fiber. It's a lot. It's a $23 billion acquisition of Spect, of spectrum, and it says it's going to be providing wireless service under the boost mobile brand. So this is at&t's way to get in and and take over that I guess that carrier, if you will, but have a lower offering that they didn't normally have. The acquisition bolsters and expands our spectrum portfolio while enhancing customers 5g, wireless and home internet experience and even more markets.
Speaker 1:John stanky said and you know this is the guy that just got a lot of heat for his memo that he put out telling everyone that they were going to make these bold moves and they were going to move forward and they were going to really take no prisoners and do what they had to do and everyone's like, oh, this memo is kind of like tough on the workforce and whatever. And then bam, 20 billion dollars later they're like we, we're going to open up a new operator called Boost, you know, by using the spectrum from Echo Star. So that was kind of cool. It's AT&T. It says AT&T will acquire approximately 30 megahertz of nationwide 3.45 gig mid-band spectrum and 20 megahertz of nationwide 600 megahertz low-band spectrum.
Speaker 1:Dude, 600 megahertz is way down there. When you think about the spectrum that you use on your cell phone, you know it's anywhere from 700 to 1900, 2300, 2100, 2300 up in that space. And then you get into wifi 2400, you know 5,000, you know 6,000, you know 2.4, 5, 6 gig. Dude, you're talking 600 megahertz. That is so low, that's. That frequency is like way down in the dirt. I wonder on that, on that frequency, space in 600 megahertz, you know what, what kind of bandwidth? I wonder what let's see if we just ask the internet, what kind of channels are there in 600 megahertz? Because, man, that's like way low.
Speaker 1:Wireless microphones, vhf and uhf, on channels 2 through 36, you know let's see 617 through 652 for wireless microphones. Man, I mean when you talk about throughput, though when you talk about broadband, I wonder what that? I wonder how many bits per hertz you get way down there, and I wonder what those channel sizes look like. It's a lte band 71 for 4g and 5g services. The primary use is, let's see here uh, it was made available by reclaiming over the air from channels 38 to 51. It's got a guard band from 614 to 616, a duplex gap at 653 to 663. It doesn't say what the channel sizes, what the operating channel sizes are in broadband, though, and I wonder what does lte band 71 look like?
Speaker 1:5 megahertz, 10 megahertz, oh, 11, uh, 11 megahertz split usage, 4 megahertz block for license operation. So it's like between 6 and eleven there's there's a six mega channel of four, eleven and a two, and so when you think about what that's going to do from from a nationwide availability perspective, man, that's kind of cool, because at that super low frequency range it's going to give you like huge propagation, like very long propagation. The question is, what kind of throughput are you going to get that? But if you're using it in conjunction with other frequencies and you're doing, you know, and you're doing link aggregation, oh my God, carry aggregation. That's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:So so that happened and it it sparks the debate about how many carriers we have in the United States, and do we have enough? Is it monopolization Cause? Dude, I'll tell you that Verizon service at my house sucks, and if you've ever talked to me on the phone, you know that if I leave my office and I'm a walker, like I'll get up and go walk around when I'm on the phone having a conversation, man, if I walk out of my office it drops because there's this wall here beside me and as soon as I get on the other side of that wall, it's just strong enough for the cell signal to seep into my, into my room, and so my phone's like oh look, 5g, let me attach. And it tries to attach and it kicks the wi-fi network and then it just the call you can't hear me for like a good solid four seconds. And that was an upgrade that they had to have done in the last six months, because it wasn't always like that. And I'm noticing now I'm getting 5g versus only getting lTE. So when I get home I need to set that little command that enables my Wi-Fi only and shuts down my cellular modem, because, man, it's tough. But if you think about more spectrum and making more spectrum available to someone like AT&T now they can reach further into these cracks and crevices of people's houses at longer distances and if it's only those carriers, then what does that say for a marketplace? Because my phone bill is ridiculously expensive. I think everybody's phone bill is probably pretty expensive if you're not on one of the discount plans. I just I hope that my phone bill doesn't go up anymore and I hope that there's an alternative to that coming soon, somehow, some way shape or form, which is a great time for me to talk about one of my sponsors, which is Helium, and you know it just lends itself to the conversation, right? So one of the things that I love about my Helium plan is I've got the Helium Zero plan and it runs on a OnePlus 11 that I have behind me and I can use that phone pretty much anywhere.
Speaker 1:And now helium is available with helium uh ultra, where you can install it by using passpoint on different networks. So if you want more information about that, uh, you can just look it up. Just uh, either you can Google helium or let me see if I can get you a direct link on there. Uh, go to heliumcom, hu-m, heliumcom. You can go there and you can join up and you can convert your existing hardware over to Helium, join the movement. It says Unify, aruba, cisco, meraki, ruckus, fortinet and Xtreme. It's equipment that supports this via Passpoint. So it tells you how to do it online. You jump online, you configure the profile and then, once you do that, if you have a Helium device or a Helium phone, it'll automatically jump up on your network and use it by leveraging Passpoint. So it's pretty neat to see what they're doing there. Helium Plus is definitely really cool coming along. That enables monetization of your Wi-Fi using those existing pieces of equipment. So it's fun.
Speaker 1:If you don't know anything about Helium, visit heliumcom. Give me a call, shoot me a message, let me know if you have any uh questions about it. It's pretty neat to see what they're doing. They're one of the fastest growing networks in the world because what they did is they democratized it right. I started with a cbrs device where I would hang it outside and and cbrs capable you know lte band 48 capable devices could connect to it if they were on one of the shared networks. And and it was. You know it didn't really. I don't know if it really worked out the way everyone thought it was going to work out, but it grew really quickly for CBRS, and now they're doing it over Wi-Fi. So check it out.
Speaker 1:If you don't know anything about Helium, it's a fun way to get involved in telephony and Passpoint over Wi-Fi. So pretty neat, pretty neat there, and I like it because what they're doing is they're showing that you can still have all of these incredible voice services but at a much lower entry cost. And so when you add that to the conversation of how many carriers are out there between AT&T, timo, verizon and now that Boost has been absorbed by AT&T, it feels like you don't have a lot of options, but there are options out there, depending on what you're trying to do with it. It feels like you don't have a lot of options, but there are options out there, depending on what you're trying to do with it. So I thought that was important to talk about, because that was the first acquisition that took place. Well then, all of a sudden, this other one, which I think is more impactful overall, took place, and oh, I can do my little screen share here. Let's see if I can share my screen.
Speaker 1:Let me open up a little window here and show you what I'm looking at here. Let's see which is this guy right here which is SpaceX buying Echo Star Satellite Spectrum for $17 billion. So Charlie Ergen's got an extra 40B in the bank. It looks like this week A lot going on for him. But this one has, I think, different ram than than at&t making the acquisition that they have, because this one feels like it can affect more people and and in in in a couple of different ways. Right, so they bought the spectrum.
Speaker 1:They agreed on this was uh, this is monday, this is earlier this week. It's going to license this out. Um, it's going to sell its licenses for $17 billion. It's going to close once the FCC figures everything out. And it's AWS for PCS. Pcs H blocks are going to be 50 megahertz again in total for 8.5 billion in cash and 8.5 billion in SpaceX stock. So now we got Charlie Ergen tied to Elon Musk, which is interesting. Spacex will also pay two billion towards existing interest payments okay, so their payments on everything. And it's going to allow this to use the same aws4 airwaves okay, so this is important right in the for device to device.
Speaker 1:So now what you have is there's a bigger conversation that was taking place about who has the ability to operate in space, and before it was like the free the spectrum that was available for leo and for low earth orbiting satellites. It wasn't controlled by one person, it was controlled by multiple entities because the spectrum in the space was there to have it. However, this oh, look here, it is right here. However, now this is showing that what will happen is it's coming under scrutiny, it says, because it's set to decommission its physical network. It subscribes to be connected by AT&T's infrastructure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Hold on, let's see where is it?
Speaker 1:The new hybrid mobile network operating satellite service mechanism is a big unknown. It could regulate, could relegate rural americans to subpar service, because now they're saying this is you have at&t um owning a whole bunch of the spectrum and you have echo star owning a whole bunch of the spectrum, and the spectrum that they use, that they're communicating from space to earth, is now largely controlled by one entity. And you know when you have other groups like amazon, kuiper, and you've got, you know, um hugh, well, hughes. Yet echo star, you've got um. There's a handful of them that are out there. They're operating in space. When you have all these are operating and you only have a couple people that own access to the, to the, to the frequency, then it's kind of it's kind of rough. Look at this. Um, this is from may land must.
Speaker 1:Spacex was misleading federal regulators and access to gain in a bid to gain access to the airways, because they had this big fight. There's a big fcc fight going on between echo not wanting to share the spectrum or user spectrum, and then you know SpaceX saying, hey, we want to be able to use this spectrum, but they're the only license holder. Can we make more available? Now they own all of it. So this goes back to the whole monopolization question. Is it, is it good for a single operator to own as much of the spectrum as SpaceX does and as AT&T does? Is that a good thing for the American consumer and does it limit us from being able to have choice? And I think that's the big question that everybody's asking. You know not to get political, but we are in a spot right now where it feels like the administration that we have isn't necessarily concerned about consumer choice as much as they're very pro-business group that we have in the administration of the FCC right now. So I think that that isn't going to lend itself to value for the end user as much as it is for the people in the marketplace, for the people that are the vendors providing it. So that's interesting.
Speaker 1:So that happened this week in the last couple weeks. Another thing that happened this week. That was horrendous and I hope that everyone that's listening to this is aware of what was going on and what happened with all this. But Salt Typhoon was pretty epic man and if you aren't familiar with what Salt Typhoon was or is, it's important to people that probably listen to this podcast because it's right in our wheelhouse and I'm going to skip through this On the Forbes article. It does a really good job talking about it.
Speaker 1:Fbi and allied intelligence international intelligence agencies have declared that salt typhoon cyber cyber campaign is now a national defense crisis after uncovering widespread infiltration infiltration of global telecommunications networks by chinese state-backed hackers. Now check this out, let's dig into the details and one of the most sweeping espionage operations ever exposed salt typhoon actors compromised core routers and management planes to carry the world's internet traffic. Sensitive data belonging to millions of americans were stolen. So let's let's keep in mind what they did here. They didn't bust into a computer. They didn't bust into a server, they busted into network. And when they busted into those network devices and they did this years ago and they've been sitting on it we just basically found out. It was pretty epic, right? Sensitive data belonging to millions of Americans were stolen, communications were surveilled and the integrity of the global networks was quietly undermined across at least 80 countries. 80 countries how did they do it? Oh my God. It's like I can't even believe how they did it, because it's something that seems like it's so basic that it's like, oh my God, they actually did that and they got away with it. Let's see if they talk about it here.
Speaker 1:They gained access by exploiting widely known vulnerabilities in networking equipment, including Avanti, connect, Secure, palo Alto and Cisco IOS XE. You know none of the major ones, just the absolutely biggest, most major ones. No evidence of zero-day exploits, oh good. The attacker succeeded because organizations failed to patch. Look at that. That's all they did, just failed to patch. Negligence, not novelty, opened the door. And that is such a big deal because it was people who just didn't update their networks. And how did they break into it? Look at this Once inside Salt Typhoon, operators altered ACLs, access access controls list, create privilege accounts and enabled remote management on unusually high ports.
Speaker 1:They just went in and they turned on remote management, but they stuck them on a port way up where nobody was looking. Are you ready for this? Look at this. They activated hidden services such as the ios xr ssh listener port on 57722, giving them stealthy long-term access. Dude, an SSH listener cranked open on iOS XR whatever way up high where no one's looking at the ports, oh my God. And then look at this. This is the best.
Speaker 1:The attackers mirrored traffic through SPAN, rspan and IRSPAN to quietly monitor communications. They harvested administrator credentials via tacx plus. They pivoted across provider to provider links and downstream networks, then exfiltrated the data through gre and ipsec tunnels carefully designed to blend with legitimate traffic. They nailed up tunnels and they popped all the traffic out of there. So as a network administrator looks out and they go, oh yeah, dude, dude, there's just some VPN tunnels. They're going across that. You know no big deal. Jerry. Jerry's running fine. Ip sec tunnels are ranked fine, everything looks like it's legit.
Speaker 1:Don't know what's on 57, seven, 22, but I mean whatever. Holy moly, dude, dude, span ports. Are you serious span port? So if you don't know what a span port is. It's basically a mirrored port on your network device. You can take two ports and you can say, hey, port a all the traffic that's coming out of port a. Just mirror it, span it across there, make a part of it. Let's just mirror all the traffic that's going on there. Dude, it's all of the data. It's all of the data. It's not like a subset of the data, it's just all of it. And they were just's all of the data. It's all of the data. It's not like a subset of the data, it's just all of it. And they were just taking all of the data that was coming on a port and they were just piping it out to God knows where, and they were doing it for God knows how long.
Speaker 1:The campaign didn't focus on quick financial gain. Uh-uh, salt Typhoon targeted telecom carriers, government system transportation hubs, lodging networks and even military infrastructure. The goal was clear Enable continuous surveillance of people, communications and movement across the globe. The FBI has notified hundreds of victims. It spans more than 80 countries and they're saying that. Well, how do you look out for it? Look for SSH services ending in 22. Double encoded request targeting Cisco IOS XE Packet captures with names like TACPCAP. Look for redirections of TACX plus traffic.
Speaker 1:The advisory panel is let's see. The advisory provides a robust set of indicators for compromise, including IP addresses dating back to 2021. Name a website that you went to in 2021. Name a website that you went to in 2021, that you don't go to anymore, and think about that. That's data that has been traversing the internet. Think about what you did when you were in a hotel in 2021 and the websites and the credentials and everything that you were using four years ago, and realize that that data was now sucked away and piped out to somebody far, far away. It's pretty insane. What salt typhoon, what salt typhoon did?
Speaker 1:It's a national defense crisis and it's there's a lot that happened with that, and it was all because people didn't patch their equipment. So if you haven't patched your equipment, let this be a clear signal that you need to do it. There's been lots of data breaches lately. There's been lots of data breaches lately. There's been a lowered cybersecurity defense posture in the United States. It's up to individual network administrators, it's up to the people that are listening to this to make sure that your equipment is patched and making sure that your equipment is secure. If there's one thing that we've learned over the last six months is that the administration that's out there right now may be pro-business, but they are not pro-cyber security. It is up to you to make sure that your network doesn't get affected, so please be diligent about updating and upgrading your equipment. That is my spiel on Salt Typhoon.
Speaker 1:Let's see what else is going on back on back on the space front. Lots of stuff happening in space. Amazon kuiper is has announced it. It's going into vietnam. A 570 million dollar investment with more satellites being pushed up there. Um, with kuiper. It doesn't say the numbers that they're at right now with where kuiper is. Wonder how many they have going over there. Uh, starlink is authorized to provide blah, blah, blah, blah 600,000 subs, but no data on the kuiper stuff. So kuiper's coming along. Um, uh, one of the leads of it posted a video on linkedin and showed two gigabit service downlink from kuiper right now and that's really cool. It's neat to watch, uh, the constellation delivering over two gig of access today. Today, now, with these, with the new spectrum acquisition, everything that's going on with with, with spacex and with starlink and with echo star man, I wonder what that's going to look like. Um, that a pretty cool video of their lasers connecting the other day, by the way, which is pretty neat. So it's going to be really cool to see where global connectivity goes in the future.
Speaker 1:Now, something that isn't on there. Let me look this up. Um, this is. I saw this on broadband breakfast.
Speaker 1:I think there is some back and forth about uh, let me see here, see if I can find it some back and forth about changing the, the description of what broadband means in the United States. Let me see if I can find it. Fcc may increase broadband speed benchmark. No, that's not it. Fcc to eliminate Spiegel, that's not it. There was something that came up with the FCC where they were debating changing. Here it is. Yep, it was on broadband breakfast. Let me share this out real quick. Let's see. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Fcc proposal to scale back broadband standards draws fire. As it prepares to enter its broadband deployment report, the FCC is confronting sharp divisions over where to scale back long-term gigabit standards. Chairman Braden Carr's proposal narrowed the scope of its Section 706 inquiry, scrapping affordability and adoption measures and rolling back the 1 gig per second, 500 meg per second long-term broadband benchmark set in 2024. They're saying, well, maybe we're not going to hit it Now rural cooperatives and equity groups have countered, telling the fcc it should raise, not lower, its standards, with some pressing for symmetrical 100 by 100 uh, upload, uh versus download benchmark for fixed broadband to support economic development in rural regions. So they're saying well, maybe we need to drop it down from uh, our long-term, long-term goal of 100 of down, 500 up. Let's go with symmetrical 100 by 100. So lots of talk going on there and how that affects internet service providers is really key, because if they don't have the equipment to deliver these services, then they're technically not delivering broadband services, they don't qualify for grants, they don't qualify for state funding. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't happen In other news alongside that, oh that, oh man, look at this.
Speaker 1:If you were tuned into the internet this past week, I hope you were able to see what tarana. Tarana introduced their new g2, which is their um multi-frequency panel, and it supports non-line of sight, near line of sight and line of sight communications. It's backwards compatible, compatible with their g1 stuff. So if you're an internet service provider and you have a whole bunch of subscribers out there and they're already using the old remote node, you don't have to go upgrade those just yet. You can swap the panels and it'll work with it and allow you to add and continue and upgrade them when you need to.
Speaker 1:What's really, really great about this panel is where it pushes the boundaries in rural connectivity. Because when you think about what's happening in rural connectivity, it's not just the Echo stuff that's happening with SpaceX, it's not just Kuiper, it's not just all the low-Earth orbiting satellite stuff. It's also about traditional terrestrial microwave and how people can consume that. Because from a cost perspective from an operator's side, operators can do this. You can still set up a WISP. You can still set up your local internet service provider and provide access in your area.
Speaker 1:Now is Starlink going to take away from that? I think that's still yet to be seen. I don't know how many operators are feeling the pinch from Starlink. It's probably a lot. Starlink keeps amassing these huge numbers that are coming out there, but then the one thing that you hear is that the speeds aren't what the speeds used to be. So are they going to continue to flip-flop on their speeds? Are they going to allow for true growth in people to consume it, especially if the FCC is sitting here moving the goalposts on what broadband quote-unquote constitutes? So what makes this great is this is still a product that's absolutely viable.
Speaker 1:This is something that people can deploy as an operator, that they can put out there and use 6.4 gig of capacity on the base node, right Up to 2,048 customers per site, 512 per sector on a single installation, 160 megahertz and four separable carriers across unlicensed and licensed band. Now what that means is they've got three and a half gig at CBRS, they've got five gig and they've got six gig and they can combine multiple carriers from multiple frequencies to provide better access and a better user experience at that remote node, which is really awesome. Distributive, massive MIMO architecture. I think these are six, I think it was like six by six and the joke was that they had to add two more. It was four by four, then they had to add two more into it.
Speaker 1:It was a great presentation and if you've ever had a chance to listen to Basil from Tarana, it's so much fun to just watch him on stage Not someone I've gotten the chance to hang out with yet, but hopefully someday in the future I'll get to kick it with him. His stage presence is so cool and the way that he talks about his product. You should really go listen to it. Tarana does a really good job of just being honest and up front and bold and blunt about what they're doing, and they don't sugarcoat it and they don't make shit up. They just tell you what it is, how it works, why it works and what it's going to do for you.
Speaker 1:Now it's expensive as hell. It's like 30 grand for their new panel compared to you know, buying a freaking ubiquity. You know whatever that you stick up on a tower, but it delivers incredible results. So if you get a chance, go watch. You go to toronto wireless t-a-r-a-n-a wirelesscom and go look up their g2 product line and see what it does. It's's really really neat and they've got you know as if you're watching on the on the webcast here. They've got you know testimonials from everybody, from everybody. Everybody who's one of these larger wireless ISPs has either tested this out or know someone who's tested this out, because it is a revolutionary thing when it comes to terrestrial wireless. So kudos to the team at Toronto for getting that out there and getting that product out in the market. It's really really neat to see. Oh man, what else do we have?
Speaker 1:Mwc25 is coming up in Las Vegas. It's Mobile World Congress that is coming up here pretty soon. It says MWC25, delivered in partnership with CTIA, meets this pressing need head on for tech leaders that aren't just looking for inspiration, they're looking for expertise content, according to rcr wireless um 2025 themes, from text vision to execution. Connected industries with 5g and iot, ai plus how is ai helping everything? Connected enablers with api, cloud native infrastructure. Mcp I wonder if mcps can be talked about in there at all.
Speaker 1:But this used to be dude. I used to love going to CTIA. Ctia was one of my favorite shows to go to man. You would see everything there. I was talking to my wife the other day. I was talking about the first blog that I ever put up such a long time ago, long, long time ago. And it was right at the time that Richard Branson was giving a keynote at CTIA. He talked about this plan to go to Mars and everyone was like, oh, is he kidding, is he not kidding? And everyone just wrote it off as an April Fool's joke. And it ends up obviously he wasn't kidding, with Virgin Galactic coming afterwards and then SpaceX and then all the other things. But that used to be such a fun, big, big event. And you know, mobile World Congress happeningolona every year is the big one for mobile there, but it's been a while since I've been to mwc uh in the americas. So, um, I wonder I wonder if that one is is going to be mobile world congress las vegas? It's. It was a fun one when I used to go. I'm just super calm.
Speaker 1:What's your favorite show? I'm trying to think if you had to think your favorite trade show man comdex, right, uh, what was your favorite show that you've ever been to? What was your favorite trade show? I gotta think on that one, because there were some really good ones. Man interop used to be so great when you had everybody working together. Isp summit was another good one. Broadband wireless world was great when that industry and ymax was just coming, coming up and LTE those are good shows. But I still got to hand it to WLPC. But even though WLPC isn't a trade show, it's a, it's a meeting. You know it's a meeting place. I don't know what my favorite trade show is, but CES. I guess I'm going to stick with CES. I go to it every year. I, you go. This year we're going to be doing some pretty awesome stuff there, but with the crew that I'm working with, um, that's a great show.
Speaker 1:What's your favorite show? I don't know. Answer in the comments. What's up chat? Answer in the chat. Oh, that's about. I mean, when I think about what's going on, those are the things that are top of mind for me. Um, hpe junipers, or hpe juniper, he says um, their new line of access points let's see if I can dig this up their self-driving network operations, dude, these are the things that that, when they first talked about it, when they first talked about green lake and what it could do and about how we were on our way to self-driving access points or self-driving networks via the access points, was like, yeah, someday we'll get there. And now they're sitting here talking about a genetic AI. They're talking about Marvis minis. They're talking about, uh, the missed capabilities and what they're doing with Marvis.
Speaker 1:Actions. Dashboard now supports autonomous remediation of net, of more network issues, including misconfigured ports, capacity issues and non-compliant hardware, with full it oversight. So it gives you the ability to watch it drive. Um, it's it's incredible to think that that's where they are. They're finally at a point where they're allowing those actions to take place and those actions to, to, to affect your network in real time, and it's it's neat to see. It's already been proven that this stuff works.
Speaker 1:But you know, at larger, at this scale it at hpe scale, it's pretty cool to see what they're doing. They do have some new APs that are out there. Let's see if I can dig up that. Um, let's see if we can dig up those new uh, uh, hpe Aruba was, it was, oh, it's the mist 36. I think that's what it was. They've got a new one that's out there. That's pretty cool looking. Someone did a comparison online. Anyway, if you want to take a look, uh, please take a look at that and go see what they're up to. Just because it's, it's, it's neat. I mean, it's neat what they're doing. They're coming along, they're coming along nicely.
Speaker 1:But I gotta say you knew this was coming. I gotta say, if you want to see something that's really pushing the edge and really pushing the envelope, um, I still have such a soft spot for meter man, you know, and, and, granted, I do appreciate meter doing all the things that they do. Meter is a wonderful sponsor of the waves podcast. They've stuck with me through thick and thin on this thing and they've given me access to just about everything that I need in order to understand what they do and how they do it and what they continue to do is just incredible, incredible. I mean, look at this right.
Speaker 1:If you're looking at the screen right here, this is you know it's their dashboard where they say create an SSID named Globex, assign it to VLAN, private, enable WPA2, and limit bandwidth to 100 megabit on the primary network. And you click a button and it does it. You know, canvas is such an incredible thing. Command powered by Canvas is such an incredible thing. You know they've got here on their website. They're showing their installations everywhere. It's just really great.
Speaker 1:What they're bringing to oh, I didn't punch that what they're bringing to the industry. And if you want to see it, they have an event that's coming up and I have a code that I can't remember. I think it's like waves or wireless nerd or something. Just text me if you want to code. Uh, that that knocks your price to free, so it saves you a whole bunch of money. But meter up is coming metercom slash meter up. And they've added some new feature speakers since the last time we talked. So if you're looking at the screen, you can see that satya nadela is their ceo and chairman of microsoft. Sanjay bizwas, from ceo and co-founder of samsara and also former ceo co-founder maraki. Kate johnson, ceo of lumen, and now bob metcalf, the inventor of ethernet. Is there? Um, what dude like what? What is this lineup of speakers at meter up? This is going to be pretty nuts, man. The ticket price right now is 349. Hit me up if you want that offer code. I'll be happy to share it with you. It's november 18th. That's happening in san francisco. If you can get out there, get out there for meter up.
Speaker 1:You have a lot to listen to from some of the people that helped establish what we're doing today and the people that are taking it forward, and it's going to be an interesting event to learn about the insights that these people bring to the table. This group of people is bringing something to the table that they're going to talk about the future of networking. They're going to talk about the future of networking. They're going to talk about the future of the internet. At MeterUp, you're going to learn about where this is all going and why it's going there and how it's going there, and it's not just Meter that's going there.
Speaker 1:All the organizations are falling into place behind what this vision is, and it's incredible to see the lineup of people there, from the CEO of Microsoft, the CEO and co-founder of Samsara, who started Meraki, to Bob Metcalf and then to Kate, on how all of this is going to move and what's going to happen as these networks grow. It's going to be an incredible event and there's going to be some really cool learning, and you're going to walk away inspired by what you see, and it doesn't matter if you work for a different vendor and it doesn't matter if you work in a different place of the industry. What matters is that this is going to be a glimpse into the roadmap of the future, and it just might so happen that these guys are doing that, or maybe they're not even doing it yet, but it is incredible to be in the room where it happens. To quote Hamilton, you want to be in the room where it happens, and if you're sitting in the room, even if you're not part of the organization that's hosting the event, even if you don't work for them, even if you work for someone else, this is guaranteed to spark interest in what the future of our entire industry is, and that's why I'm stoked about MeterUp. That's why I don't mind talking about it. It's incredible to have all of this conversation happen in one place at one time. That one place is at MeterUp. That one time is November 18th in San Francisco. Hit me up for a discount, because I'll be happy to share that with you. So I really look forward to seeing you there. All of the people on my newsfeed are going to be there. So for me it's great because I can see all my friends Now. If I could just keep quiet the whole time, that's even better, because last year I was just like raising my hand. I wasn't even raising my hand, I was just blurting out questions. But I get a little excited and I hope that. I hope that you can understand my enthusiasm for what's going to happen there. So, that being said, I think I'm going to go ahead and wrap this for the day.
Speaker 1:For the week, I've got a lot of travel coming up. I'm going to try and cut some live shows this week. I'm going to try and do some neat stuff. I am headed out tomorrow, which is totally weird because I don't dude, I don't travel on weekends. I've got this deal with my wife where I don't travel on weekends unless there's something, unless it's important, unless there's something really happening, and then if I have to travel, I bring her with me. I burn miles, I burn, you know. I do what. I do what I need to do to get my wife out there with me so that as soon as the conference is done, as soon as the show's done, as soon as the conference is done, as soon as the show's done, as soon as the meeting's done, I can go have a moment with her. But our work schedules I live in a house where both of us travel a lot for work. So she's out right now. Actually, her plane lands in like an hour. I got to go pick her up at the airport and then I'm out tomorrow. But this week, so Saturday night, sunday, monday and Tuesday morning, I'm going to be in Orlando at the Gaylord Palms at FSTech.
Speaker 1:Now, fstech is the Food Service Industry Technology Conference, food Service Tech and Food Service Innovation. No-transcript. Get to experience it and it gets to affect your daily life every day, because it's the stuff that you interact with the food service, the retail, whatever it is. It's the stuff where technology has to work in order, order for people to make money. So fs tech is a pretty big one when it comes to this. It's gonna be pretty neat. It shows that there's, they've got, you know. A whole bunch of attendees are showing up, lots of sponsors and exhibits, um, lots of speakers that are out there also, y'all this is, uh in a, just from a registration side. I'm not gonna lie, this was expensive to get into. It was five grand for the registration fee, which is kind of nuts. I've been to a lot of trade shows and this one was pricey man, but to have that many attendees spending that much money to go to this event, that's saying something.
Speaker 1:So if you happen to be at FSTech, give me a shout man, let me know. I would love to learn from other people who are embedded in the space of some of the things that they're seeing, and I'd love to learn more about the technology and what's happening from the eyes of other people other than me, because I've got my camera lens. But I don't want to just focus on the things I do, I want to learn from other people. So please, if you're going to be at FSTech, reach out to me and it's going to be really neat to see what technology, what innovation, what people are talking about, what all the buzz is at food service. So that's happening.
Speaker 1:I'll be there for the next couple of days and then I've got a couple of meetings and then next week, on the 19th, I'm going to West Texas. I'm disappearing, I'm out of here. On the 19th, I'm going to West Texas, I'm disappearing, I'm out of here. It's my birthday on the 21st. I'm ditching everything and I'm going to go cruise around West Texas because that's my happy place. If you happen to be in West Texas, give me a call, join me for a beer at Brick Vault Barbecue in Marathon, texas.
Speaker 1:Anyway, until then, I hope to see you all at some shows. I've got some other events that are coming up that I'll start talking about later. All at some shows. I've got some other events that are coming up that I'll start talking about later, but you know, right now I'm not going to be at WLPC Prague. I really wish I was going to be there.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to be able to make it this year, unfortunately, but I'm really looking forward to seeing the content that comes out of there, and I would also gladly pay for a live streaming option. Keith, just so you know, I would love a live streaming option for some money. I'll be happy to pay for it, just so I can not get the FOMO that I got watching Michael London happen. Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful week. Thank you for listening to the waves podcast, as always. Thank you again to our sponsors, helium, and to our sponsors over at meter, and to our buddies over at net ally who are always giving me some neat stuff to talk about, friends over at CEDOS who are always supportive of the show. Thank you for listening and I will catch you all next week, where I think I'm just going to do a live session from FSTech and see how that goes. Anyway, until then, have a wonderful week, take care and enjoy your weekend, see ya.
