Wireless 2017: What We Wanted Then, and What We Want Today

As a wireless engineer, we study the 802.11 protocol. We read how the standard is written, study how it is supposed to work and yet seem to spend our time fighting why it doesn’t work.  Tweaking power, channels, datarates, toggling features and code versions in hope that things functions the way we want. I know I’m not the only one who is frustrated with the bugs, the oddities and the constant upgrades in order to make the box on the ceiling work the way we want it to.

Mojo Networks: Driving Value With Open Hardware Standards #MFD2

Wireless has always had somewhat of a vendor lock-in nature.  You buy APs from a vendor, you are likely stuck buying their controller, cloud management, etc.  And if their system doesn’t grow with you, continue to meet your needs or becomes a giant bug model where you just spend all day QAing someone’s code in production, it generally requires a forklift upgrade to another vendor's system.

The challenge here is having that other vendor’s software tied to their hardware platform, necessitating the need to forklift.  The sad part of this with access points is the hardware for APs are probably 90% the same. They likely come from Broadcom, or QCA, and are all based around the same basic technology. 

 

One week to MFD2: What's in store

We are one week away from the kickoff of Mobility Field Day 2, one of those wireless and mobility focused events from the folks over at Gestalt IT and techfieldday.com.

I’m ecstatic about the lineup for MFD2.  It’s a number of folks whom I’m lacking knowledge in, have interesting products and viewpoints and those that I haven’t heard a ton from.  I just want to take a minute to talk about who’s coming and what I’m excited to hear about. 

Overall, MFD has a cloud and data analytics theme this year.   The companies all have cloud focused products and services.  The push to bring data analytics into our wireless solution sets is really becoming noticeable.