Wi-Fi Mobility Symposium - a recap

Andrew vonNagy and Marcus Burton

Today I attended the first Wi-Fi Mobility Symposium. The event was a gathering of panelists from key Wi-Fi companies and it was moderated by Andrew vonNagy (Revolution Wi-Fi), Marcus Burton (CWNP) and Stephen Foskett (Pack Rat). During this event, the attendees, panelists and moderators discussed the current state of Mobile Devices & BYOD, Hotspot 2.0 and the future of Gigabit Wi-Fi. It was very interesting to see the different opinions on how to handle the BYOD movement. I took a lot of notes on the opinions of the panelists, and I've paraphrased their presentations and discussions in the paragraphs below.

Devin Akin, Carlos Gomez, Paul Congdon

Carlos Gomez, Paul Gongdon, GT Hill

Carlos Gomez 
Product Manager for Network Services
Aruba networks

To recap the presentation by Carlos Gomez, in his opinion the education vertical has been doing BYOD for years. They have always had lots of devices to manage, diverse device set. Think college students and the types of wireless devices they bring to a campus scenario. End users demand simplicity and don't care how the connection is secured. Using a security method that involves certificates becomes problematic when you're revoking certificates on a per device basis. You can have issues because the certificate is often tied to a single user account. Device authentication/association can be done via an over the air profile delivery, based on the Apple style of device/user authentication without a client/agent on the device. (unique, per device credential, one for each type of device - can generate a unique per-device configuration file).

The challenges with Mobile Device Management (MDM) is that there are multiple devices, multiple operating systems, new/old software versions and remote wipe enforcement is difficult to carry out as a result. There are multiple points where the connectivity policy can be enforced,  indoor, outdoor etc.

Implementing BYOD is not just putting different users in different vlans, doing packet inspection and firewalling at the edge. BYOD is an evolution of Guest Access & the wireless vendors have led the push for security & role based access to WLANs. (802.1x example)
The BYOD portion of WLAN should still be seperate from the controller for a security perspective. The thought behind keeping them physically separate is for security reasons, but it does add another level of complexity to the association/authentication process.

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Paul Congdon
Fellow
HP Research Labs

HP describes the holy grail of wireless connectivity as a single computing device always connected... They see cloud services as what supports all the diverse mobility devices.
The problem is with how to identify the traffic coming from the device towards work or personal, and direct the traffic to the correct network destination. Using Wi-Fi from cell operators is easier via HotSpot 2.0 and it may be possible to bring hotspot 2.0 into the enterprise, and outsource the enterprise WLAN to the cell providers.

High speed wireless moving us closer to an all wireless edge where we can achieve a mobile personal grid in lieu of the holy grail. The idea is to create a digital avatar to know about your mobile devices and connect them to one another in order to create sharing among your mobile devices without the need for you to configure the interconnectivity.  The idea is that a persistent digital presence that preserves your privacy, but you need basic network connectivity to create useful and effortless connectivity.

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GT Hill
Technical Marketing Director
Ruckus

In the BYOD scenario, the problem is the device. Can you support 2-3 devices per person per room? Readying the physical RF layer to support BYOD is the first step in the process. Per GT, offloading cellular data to wifi networks is the answer. Predicts 80% of the population will use wifi as the first access, not cellular. There's not enough spectrum to serve everyone.

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Devin Akin
Chief Wi-Fi Architect
AeroHive

Aerohive has moved routers into the access point at  the remote edge. They use one OS on the ap and the router, and the same OS is running in the cloud at VPN gateway. AeroHive uses standard protocols, and per Devin, "Protocols are what's going to take over." His take is that the future of wifi lives in protocols & the architecture must become internet-like.

The biggest thing of today's BYOD discussion that struck me was the concept of a Personal Connectivity Assistant (PCA), and creating a persistent digital presence to preserve your privacy. I'm not comfortable with the idea of letting someone or something in the "cloud" have access to all my digital information, location data, email, internet history, phone call history and that this PCA could have read/write access to all the devices I've allowed the PCA to manage. I selectively allow location data to applications on the iPhone that require location data to be enabled in order for the application to function. I deny all other apps to this data of mine. I would be more likely to accept a PCA that allowed me to manage and host this virtual assistant on a computer system that I managed and controlled. I can only hope that the PCA scenario is a blue sky "what if" system and that it will be a long time before this idea becomes a reality.

Wi-Fi Mobility Symposium – Live January 25th 2012!

'anticipation' - photo by SFoskett

Coming very soon is an event unlike any other webinar, presentation or end-user conference you've ever attended. The first ever Wi-Fi Symposium will be held January 25th in San Jose, CA.

This event will bring together the industry leaders of wireless innovation to discuss the current state of Mobile Devices & BYOD, Hotspot 2.0 and the future of Gigabit Wi-Fi. It will be streamed online at TechFieldDay.com

Andrew vonNagy has written an in depth post about the Symposium event, and he and Marcus Burton will be the Symposium hosts. Check out Andrew's post for all the nitty gritty event details. If you're going to be in San Jose on January 25th, you can get tickets to attend the event in person from the Wi-Fi Mobility Symposium Eventbrite website.

I strongly encourage you to tune in when the streaming goes live, and it would be great to see you there if you're in the neighborhood!

For a little background on what the Symposium event will be like, check out the archived video from the OpenFlow Symposium.

Vintage Terrwave Battery With A Bad Fuse

If you find yourself surveying with a very old version of this Terrawave battery pack and it is suddenly not charging, or only works when it is connected to the wall charger, the fuse in it may have gone bad.

Remove the main unit cover, and you will see a plastic housing with a glass fuse in it.  The glass fuse was broken, so I replaced it with a fuse I purchased from RadioShack (4/$2.00).  After replacing the fuse, the battery took a charge, and worked properly after obtaining a full charge overnight.

The symptoms I had were that the battery did not take a charge from the wall wart, and the wall wart did not show that there was a load on it.  The light stayed green - indicating the battery pack was not charging.

The battery pack would not power on an attached access point unless the battery pack was connected to wall power.

White Spaces - new wireless space launched

Remember the death of analog TV? Those unused analog TV channels are now approved for use as wireless White Spaces. White spaces operate at lower frequencies, and are able to travel great distances just as analog TV signals did when they were in use. Supporters of white spaces say that use of these regions of  licensed spectrum offer the same benefits of WiFi spectrum with the added advantages of the signals traveling greater distances, and the ability to assign spectrum to avoid wireless interference.


Spectrum Bridge has been been given the green light to become the database administrator for all allocated white spaces.

KTS Wireless is the first manufacturer of a wireless device to take advantage of the white spaces spectrum re-allocation for wireless communications. They have participated in city wide trials of white space usage in Claudeville, VA and Wilmington, NC.






It will be interesting to see how usage of the white space advances. Currently, the FCC is working through how to address the issues of wireless microphones using the same frequencies as white spaces. Once those issues are resolved, the nationwide roll out of white space usage will be possible.

Technology crops up in the strangest places

Recently I've come across a lot of great out of print or public domain Film Noir movies shared on YouTube. Being able to watch these films is great in itself, but I really love it when technology figures into a critical character development or plot twist in a new way than in any of the other films I've seen.

The plot of 711 Ocean Drive (1950) had a considerable amount of technology featured in it, and many of the scenarios are still relevant today even though our technology has improved vastly since 1950. The main character Mal Granger works for the phone company, and he's a pretty smart cookie.

He sets up an analog multicast delivery system to improve the efficiency of the bookie's business transactions:

He rigs up a contraption to use a chain link fence as an aerial antenna to transmit racing scores:

He gets a big idea to hold the network hostage so he can get a bigger cut of the bookie's business:

(sound familiar?)

Finally he stages a Man-in-the-middle attack on a horse race in order to win big:

One other great bit of technology cropped up in The Mob (1951). The police rigged up a contraption to fit under the wheel well of the suspect's car. The contraption produced drops a liquid that glowed when exposed to ultraviolet light at regular intervals onto the rear tire of the car. In order for the cops to find the suspect's car, they just had to shine a UV spotlight on the ground and follow the dotted line.

Using Adobe Acrobat to Find the Square Footage of a Floor Plan

I made this recording back in 2009 to show how you could use Adobe Acrobat Pro to scale a floor plan, and ultimately find the square footage of a given area.

More often than not, I'm faced with figuring out the square footage of a building layout with no scale indicated on the drawing. Adobe Acrobat Pro has a measuring tool built into the application. You can take any image file, find the scale ratio of the drawing, set the scale, then calculate the square footage of the floor area.

The measurement tool line in newer versions of Adobe Acrobat Pro is a red line, instead of black, and it is easier to see the perimeter area you're drawing. Other than that, the video should help you get more out of an application you already have, but maybe weren't using for this task.

Wireless Field Day II

I'm very excited to inform you (if you haven't already heard) of the second Wireless Field Day that'll be taking place in San Jose on January 25th - 27th 2012. Assuming that the Mayans are wrong, we will be gathering in San Jose to hear presentation from a great group of wireless companies.

The majority of my career I've been focused on Cisco's wireless hardware line, so I'm looking forward to hearing about the wireless solutions offered by Aruba, Meraki, Ruckus and refreshing my knowledge of AeroHive. I've used troubleshooting tools by MetaGeek and Ekahau, but I'm sure I'll still learn lots from their presentations.

The final list of delegates are: Daniel Cybulskie, Sam Clements, Rocky Gregory, Andrew vonNagy, Chris Lyttle, me, Tom Hollingsworth, Matthew Norwood, Blake Krone, Marcus Burton, George Stefanik and Jeremy Gaddis!

Since the last Wireless Field Day I've gone pro on Flickr & Vimeo, so there's no limits to how much digital content I can record and upload. Consider this fair warning.