00:00
This is the art of network engineering,  where technology meets the human side of IT.  Whether you're scaling networks, solving problems, or shaping your career, we've got the insights, stories, and tips to keep you ahead in the ever evolving world of networking. Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering podcast. My name is Andy Lapteff.  Thank you for joining us once again.

00:23
I have one of my favorite nerds on this episode,  Mr. Gregory Grimes. Hi, Greg, how are you? I'm doing good. Glad to be here. How many podcasts have you done? You're like a veteran, right? You've been doing this. You've been around the  whole  one. Counting this one. Yeah, this is Greg's first podcast appearance. So Greg, dude, you're doing it. here. I am, I am. I'm glad to be here.  I'm excited. Yeah, me too, man. I guess we're at a Cisco Live. I think that's when I met you. It's in person. Two years ago? Two years ago, 24. Whatever you were doing was great.

00:53
It was like a hackathon and you're doing all this coding. I'm like, God, this dude's smart. actually won that. Did you? Oh yeah, you did. I did. Did you win like a big Lego set or something? Well, it was a kind of like a home automation kit. The reason I won is it was two people were competing together and they actually won it. But the guy was like, yeah, but that was two people against you.  And I'm like, yeah.

01:18
Oh dude, it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. I know we've been trying to do this for a while, so thanks for hanging in there and being patient with me with the scheduling. So  this episode, we are going to talk about wireless  seven  networking. Yes, we are diving into the, I don't know what else to call it, but the weird world of wireless, right? It's magic. And well, it is magic and we all use it all the time. You can't see it. You can see cables, you can see switches. You can't see what wireless it's, it's invisible. That's, that's true. It's like the wind.

01:48
It is. It's like the wind.  You can see its effects, but you can't see it directly. That's right. We just came up with a beautiful metaphor for the show. So what I thought we'd do  as  I haven't, we were talking before the recording, I haven't done much wireless. I did a little bit as a cable guy and it was really just hanging one access point in the middle of a business or, you know, one home router.

02:11
wireless router in the middle of a home and calling it a day. Most of my experience, and I think most of our listeners, like wireless is a sub-specialty, right? Like there aren't a ton. I feel like it's it's a, like the developers who also know networking, they, they, not a cult, you know, they're the sub-type of networking, right? Like there are, do you do a lot of wireless in your day to day?  Surprisingly I do. And I didn't,  I didn't before I started working where I work now.  Prior to that,  I mean, I was route switch  all the way.

02:40
I ran a MSU's campus network for, for over 16 years, BGP, OSPF, knew it inside and out. I just kind of- Router switches, cables, SFPs, right? Like, yeah. Absolutely. And I would assist the wireless guys. Like I would help out from time to time if they needed something. But- You just said it. The wireless guys, right? Like they're their own- They were their own little, I mean, they were in my group.

03:05
but they were their own little entity. They're in their own segment. They're in a VLAN.  Nobody wants to talk to those guys unless they need them. So let's walk through,  I think some good context for folks. We'll spend just a few brief minutes  walking through  the basics of wireless networking and how wireless compares and contrasts with what we're all used to. And then you were just telling me  earlier all the magic that...

03:30
that is happening in Wi-Fi 7. you I couldn't tell you anything about Wi-Fi 6, let alone 7. And I know 5 is faster than 2.4, but it doesn't go as far and blah, blah. So let me set the context and then you can teach us about all things, I guess, Wi-Fi 7. You know, what do we all come up in? In like, you know, copper cables, let's say, right? Like before fiber.  it's all zeros and ones, right? Binary and the zeros and ones. uh

03:55
in copper get converted to electrical signaling on and off. that's the equivalent of five volts, negative volts, negative five volts. And there's all kinds of magic in there that we could talk about forever, but we won't. know, how do you detect collision and the voltage is changing and they know it's damaged in the frame and all that. So zeros and ones binary on computers, machine language, know, voltage on and off for copper electrical signaling, optical, right? Fiber optics. think it's just on and off pulses, correct?

04:23
you have light or you don't have light. Again, it's super complex  and you could get into it forever. But I think the equivalent is on off. Well, right, right. But let's just say there's one color, one frequency, like keep it simple.  So on and off voltage, on and off light. And then there's the magic of wireless.  And I don't know if there's an equivalent on off. I'll tell you that I've always kind of taken jabs at wireless. I hardwire everything I can in my home and everywhere in my life because I have always

04:52
Understood wireless to be half duplex me know what half duplex if me can have full duplex When they taught me the difference between a hub and a switch. I'm like, I like full duplex. I like dedicated stuff I like to be able to send and receive at the same time and when I do a speed test on wireless even with my fancy  5g 6g whatever I have here at the house 6g even a thing and this is how ignorant I am a while it isn't in China  I mean, I might get a few hundred megs and I got some pretty good equipment here, but man you plugged me into this wall

05:19
We're flying at a gig. We're good, full. So I say all that to say that for me,  I think wireless is better because it or wired is a better, more robust connection because you get the full bandwidth. It's full duplex. It's less susceptible to noise, to ingress. You're not  competing and fighting with other stuff, you know, in the house, like microwaves and you know, old phones, the wireless phones and stuff. My first job as a cable guy for wireless. remember the person called in and said, every time my phone rings, my internet goes out.  I knew from the training we had had.

05:49
that the cordless phone, the old school cordless phone and the 2.4 wireless thing. 900 megahertz phone instead of a 2.4. Yeah, they just happen to be occupying the same frequency, so that was kind of neat. would jam each other. so anyway, I say all that to say that that's pretty much all I know about wireless and you are expert. So I know a lot. I won't go say expert. You do. And I want to spend most of the time on seven. Do you think it's helpful to just spend a few minutes?

06:18
Sure. a brief history of like where this started and where we started and where we are? Yeah. It's a, it's an IEEE standard. 802.11 is the body of work that it all falls under. Started with A and B. I think they got ratified 98, 99. That's how long it's been around. We're coming up on 30 years close to it anyway. Do you know what drove the business requirement or the need? Like why did they decide that they need wireless? Like now it's obvious cause everything's wireless, right? But.

06:48
In the nineties, what was driving this? we know? Honestly, I don't, I don't really know. would assume that- I'll Google it. You keep going. I think they were just, they knew that the computer technology was shrinking and becoming portable. Like, luggable computers were a thing in the nineties. know, laptops were becoming a thing. It was probably it, right? The laptops. Yeah. People can move a computer. My very first wireless card was actually a PCMCIA card that slid in and one of those Orinokos.

07:18
back in the early 2000s. And what's interesting, A, it comes before B and it was five gigahertz and B was 2.4 and the five gigahertz, A was 54 megabits was the max. With B it's 11, but 2.4 took off because of money. The 2.4 chipset was much cheaper than the five gigahertz chipset. So therefore they just went with 2.4 instead of the faster five gigahertz.

07:46
I wonder if it's a function of physics. Like, it harder to do five gigs and create that propagated signal and the hardware required? So 2.4 was just easier. Again, we're not electrical engineers, who knows, but because money drives all this, I wonder if it's just... all. Yeah. And then, then GE came out and that, that brought the 2.4 gigahertz back up to 54 megabits. And so still only had three channels, but more and more people had laptops.

08:13
these things started coming out and you know, oh seven that drove the working groups to kind of speed up the number of RPS that they were putting out. those people listening, not watching. said they came up with these things. He held up his, phone, his smartphone, which reminded me I am of a time, which is a nice way of saying how old I am.  I am of a time that  I think my first cell phone didn't have the capability you're speaking of. Like I don't think it could net could.

08:39
I don't think we had the internet at home. know we didn't and we didn't have a wireless signal. So it was, it was all just cellular, you know, like my first cell phone didn't even have wifi. Yikes. Yeah. So then say that out loud. Then we moved into 802.11n and then everybody knows AC, wifi five. That's when the wireless Alliance decided to make it a little easier for people to understand. mean, the layman doesn't understand what 802.11 AC means.

09:06
But they understand Wi-Fi 5. Oh, it's the next generation because 4 was in, right? So when you say 5, you're talking about the 5 GHz? No, no, no. I'm talking about that's just the number. Wi-Fi 5 is 802.11ac and then Wi-Fi 6 is 802.11ax. Gotcha. And then they added 6e, which added the 6 GHz spectrum.

09:29
In most of the world, outside of the United States, they don't have as much spectrum as we do, but we have like 1.2 gigahertz of spectrum in six, which is like double of what five is. And so there's plenty of channels. of fact, most manufacturers default to an 80 megahertz wide channel in the six gigahertz. I discovered recently that wifi six doesn't have six gigahertz. Right. I was shopping for access points and I'm like, why is this one so much more expensive? Like wifi six.

09:58
The six is in the name of the access point, know, something, something six, whatever. like, Oh, no, no, no. Six E is where six. Oh my God. Come on. The naming is, has nothing to do with, guess the. And now we're in this Wi-Fi seven, which doesn't mean seven gigahertz. It's not the spectrum. It's just that'll be seven E. Right. That's right. So before you get into seven, what drove each innovation, I guess, speed, basically the more video came out, the more.

10:28
The more people were attached to the internet, needed more speed. went from cat pictures to video, I guess gaming eventually, right? Like we just needed more and more video streaming. So the more bandwidth you have to use, the less time on the air that you're transmitting, right? Hold on. Say that again. You just broke my brain. The more bandwidth you have, takes less time to transmit and be on the air.

10:54
And so you get off the air faster and more people can be  on. uh yeah. contention because less stuff. Can we talk about contention for a second? with wireless, you know, with a wire and, you know, modern  wiring cables and switches and routers and stuff,  there, aren't collisions, right? Everything's segmented, like it's full duplex. So with wireless up until seven, spoiler alert coming soon, like a

11:18
Big constraint is managing all the collisions because everything's flying everywhere. And I guess when, are they frames that fly through the air? Essentially, yeah. guess they're frames, right? Yeah. So  when two frames collide, which invariably they would, are they destroyed and have to be retransmitted much like a ethernet frame on a wire? Basically what happens is if you hear someone transmitting as soon as you're transmitting.

11:40
You know that there's a collision. So then you do your back off. There's traditional back off like you do with TCP and all of that. Right. But when is that determined when say the wireless router is going to transmit to two different devices, my wife and I,  can that source device, the wireless access pointer router before it transmits, is it checking to see if anything's out there? has to listen first. Right. So it listens and if it's free to send,  it'll send.  it, but could there still be collisions?

12:08
Even though he's doing that checking? Yeah. could. I'm just saying. how busy it is, right? Like if there's a lot of users. And it uses the TCP and UDP mechanisms for determining dropped frames and stuff like that as well on top of the mechanisms inside of wifi to determine those collisions. Well, now you got me thinking about that layer even. So I would assume it's all UDP because it's wireless and it's the Wild West and it's collisions and half duplex and but.

12:36
I guess some transmissions have to be reliable, right? Think of it as it's layer two, right? Well, it's layer one, but the layer two frame  is slightly different than an ethernet frame. There's actually three Mac addresses in there instead of the two.  I'm not going to get too deep into that because this isn't a certification. I'm trying to draw parallels or equivalents between wired and wireless. And if you have two frames that collide and they're damaged and it's TCP, they have to retransmit. Yeah, it's the same thing.

13:05
I guess there's an equivalent in wireless. Somehow they know they're collided and damaged and then they have to resend them. There's back off mechanisms that will let them randomly back off and then try and retransmit and stuff like that. So this all started in the 1990s, but just as a fun fact, if Chad GPT isn't lying to me, Marconi, how do you say his first name? Guglielmo Marconi in 1895 successfully demonstrated long distance radio transmission.

13:30
including the first transatlantic signal. And they were doing like Morris code and stuff like that. But absolutely. First wireless, you know, and then, you know, what's his face Tesla. think he was knocking farce down with whatever he was doing with wireless power transmission. So really smart people have been trying to, guess, figure out wireless transmission for a long time, but that's interesting back in the 1800s. Yeah. I mean, it's all radio. If you're a ham operator, I mean, you understand all the radio stuff way more than I can explain it.

13:57
I'm not a ham operator. Someone like that would definitely be able to explain the intricacies of radio and the physics behind it. And at end of the day, it's all physics. you can't fix it. Like it's,  that's the law and that's the way it is.  You can't break physics. They can't break it. No. So I have two questions.  You can answer one.  Well,  really what I want to ask is why do we need seven or what made us create, develop.

14:26
go after seven, make new hardware, like wasn't six enough. And I'm pretty sure in my home, like, what do I have right now? We're in like a net gear, Nighthawk, whatever it is. Like I know it's a five gigahertz frequency that I use. might be six. don't know, but like who needs seven? Does the nerd at home watching Netflix, playing games need seven, or is this more of like an enterprise, like specialized thing? Yes and no, in my opinion, and this is just Greg talking.

14:54
The home user, they're not going to notice much of a difference between Wi-Fi 5, 6, and 7. However, with Wi-Fi 7, that channel width that I was talking about earlier on the 6 gigahertz spectrum can be up to 320 megahertz wide. So you said it was 80 on 5 gigahertz, right? 80 wide. Is that correct? 80 megabits wide? Am I screwing it up already? 80 megahertz. 80 megahertz wide and 5 gig. So it's 160 with Wi-Fi 6.

15:23
in six gigahertz  and then 80 is definitely the top on the five, if I remember right. Yeah. So it from like 80 to 160 from five to six, right? Am I following you? Yep. I'm trying to get like orders of magnitude or how big they get. like wireless spectrums have to be managed so that like we don't bring down, you know, planes and stuff, I guess, right? Everybody has their own slice of wireless frequencies they can use. Right. It's all unlicensed.  To those bands, I might even be saying this wrong because I'm now getting my gigahertz  mixed up with my protocols, but when we went from five to six,

15:52
The channel bandwidth went from 80 to  160 Hertz. Do I have that correct?  Megahertz. Yeah. Megahertz.  And  why  did we make the band wider? Is it because we can send more  at a time? So then there'll be less contention.  it's with a 160 megahertz wide channel in the, in wifi six, can get up to 9.6 gigabits throughput. If the stars are aligned just right  and the AP has a 10 gigabit connection.

16:22
You can get that sounds like an enormous amount of throughput. That's the theoretical. That's only theoretical. Most people aren't going to that. mean, they probably did it in a lab. Sure. But you can push a lot of data through wireless. What, what I'm sorry. So 2.4, what were the, what was 20 megahertz wide channels and 2.4 megahertz 20 megahertz wide channels. the channels are like the lanes in the highway, right? And the wider the lane, the bigger truck can push through it or the more data, whatever the more throughput and the more you can send at a time, the less frequently you have to send, I think.

16:51
is the theory. Correct. And the less frequently you're sending, the less likelihood there is of contention, collisions. And the more devices you can have on the air. And the more devices you can have, right? When I first started in my career over 20 years ago, if you had 20 people on an AP, that AP was struggling. You can nowadays comfortably put 250 devices on an access point. It's a big jump. Yep. And is that a function of everything we talked about? mean, hardware,

17:21
the wider channels, like just all of it. Yeah, there and there's some other techniques inside of protocols. OFDMA comes to mind, resource units and Wi-Fi 6. What does OFDMA stand for? Is that an acronym? It is an acronym and I'm going to screw it up. It's orthogonal, frequency, dynamic, something or another. We can define some of these terms if we want. Like I know I've heard of like MIMO and beamforming. Like, can we talk about some of this stuff? Yeah, we can. So MIMO and

17:50
M-U-MIMO that's  beamforming that came out with Wi-Fi 5. That's all gotten  better with 6 and 7. It was like directing a signal at an endpoint, right? As opposed to just spraying it in a sphere. Using two different radios, you can adjust the frequencies such that the peak,  you know, it's all radio waves, right? So as the wave  meets at a certain point, it's going to be stronger as they combine, correct?  Yes.

18:18
physics as waves combine or cancel each other out. That's how the beamforming works.  The biggest thing was six is the OFDMA, which is on steroids  in wifi seven. Like say it's an 80 megahertz wide channel. There's like little resource units inside of that channel. The AP assigns  one resource unit to Andy and one resource unit to  Greg. So you can start scheduling when those resource units are available.

18:47
which then starts making wifi deterministic more like a switch,  which increases throughput. You see where I'm going? Meaning there's like a time offset between sends so that,  is it again about managing the chance of collisions and  trisming at the same time and all that? Yeah. Wifi7 has made it  so that wireless can be more deterministic, like a switch versus.

19:10
where it's just the wild wild west as people transmitting here and there. One of my superpowers is I'm not embarrassed to ask the dumb question. When I was a kid, I never raised my hand in class because I thought everybody knew what they were talking about. So when I hear deterministic, I don't really  know what that means.  I hear it all the time. So what do you mean by that? It just means that you can determine what the system's going to do.  So you can then start planning, right? If it's the wild wild west, you can't, and it's chaos, which is that, that's what wireless has been for so long. It's just chaos.

19:40
radio waves going here and there and people transmitting whenever they want to. But with wifi six, they started  with the resource units and they, they put it on steroids and uh wifi seven. Say you're using a lot more bandwidth than I am. So you might need more resource units. So they can give you two resource units. I get one.  And because it's deterministic and that you know when you can transmit and when you can't  that

20:06
reduces the collisions, that reduces the back off, that means that the airwaves are being utilized more  and more efficiently,  More efficiently, absolutely. That's crazy, man. Who create, like, you know, to understand this stuff enough to be able to pass like...

20:21
tests and certs and then deploy it successfully is hard enough. But then when I learned this stuff, I'm like, somebody invented this.  You know what mean? Like who are the... Was it just one person? Well, right, right. But still. Like how brilliant do you have to be?  very. It makes so much sense now, like you're saying. you're really just so like when I was a cable guy, they taught us about breaking up frequencies into lanes to be able to send multiple traffic over multiple lanes. And they call it frequency division multiplexing, which just they were changing the frequency of the signals so that they could send more

20:51
It's how you get like 800 channels through the cable box, right? Like it be chaos otherwise. So that's kind of what this reminds me of is they create all these sub units or sub allocations of... That's exactly what it is. You know, it reminds me of Russ White. He likes to say like, you know, there's only four problems in networking that you have to solve. And I'm like, dude, that sounds way oversimplified. But I just had a Russ White moment, I think, because I can see how dividing the frequencies in the cable plant and dividing the frequencies up into resource units and wireless, it's the same idea, right? So they just apply one to another context.

21:21
That's correct. I looked up OFDMA just so that we get some street cred. So  OFDMA stands for orthogonal frequency division, multiple access.  And that's a long way of saying,  I guess it's a way to let multiple devices transmit at the same time, which I think is kind of what you were  talking about. They're splitting the peaks, I guess, of the different signals. That's correct. Wow, man, this is... You get a portion of the lane. Right.

21:47
So  it's a, it's a really large lane that you're in, but you've got multiple cars on it. like legacy, was one lane, everybody fought over maybe. Right. then, and then there was multiple lanes, but there was only one car per lane. And now there's multiple cars per lane, multiple cars, multiple lanes are scheduling it  and doing time offsets to reduce the chance of mathematical, you know, like, so let's get into seven. Like what's the magic of seven? You said something earlier that, that blew my mind. I love to bust on.

22:15
wireless because it's half duplex and me no one half duplex. That's why me wire everything. Me want full duplex. Did you say seven is full duplex? It kind of is. It's not, not a sit in. Okay. So it's not full duplex, like one wire. Can you send and receive at the same time?  Yes ish.  Right.  It depends.  It depends. It depends. That's the best line. Yes.  So your phone, your phone is not going to be able to do that. Okay. Because there's not multiple radios.

22:45
on your phone, really. I didn't know what phone  I got. didn't give me the multiple radios in this new expensive thing. This is preposterous. it's one radio that usually, so there's three different phases of what's called MLO,  multiple link operations. But the one that's the most exciting, the most people talk about is that you can send and receive  on different channels.  Oh. Different frequencies even. You can have, say you're receiving on six and sending on five.

23:14
So that's even another way to subdivide and partition out. So again, I'm coming back to like,  I'm drawing a parallel to the old school. So when we went from hub to switch,  when your cable plugged into a hub, everything went everywhere and there was no segmentation. But then when we got to switches,  you plug the cable in and  only frames were constrained to that port and they wouldn't bump into other.

23:39
You know, it wasn't like a big wire on the back of the switch, like a hub. It wasn't a frame collision. Right. And then we carved them into VLAN. So then each logical lane on the thing. Your broadcast domain got smaller.  It's kind of what this is.  I'm sorry. Go ahead.  It kind of is. The, what you're going to see  most frequently, I think is the phase of, of MLO. You set up that you're using channel one and six gigahertz and say channel 44 and the five gigahertz.

24:08
And when you go to transmit, you see that six is less congested or whatever, vice versa, and you transmit over that one versus the other one. Dude, hold on man. My brain, my brain is exploding. So MLO is multi-link operation. I'm looking it up here. It's a key feature of wifi seven. allows a device to use multiple wifi bands or channels at the same time as one logical connection. So I'm just going to keep drawing parallels to things I know for context.

24:35
old school copper landlines, you picked up that phone, it was one circuit that was connected. So that was it. You had one band, one circuit, one conversation back and forth. That was it. This would be equivalent to you pick up that phone and you have  one  highway  from your house  to the other side, taking your voice to them. But then their voice coming back to you takes different wires in a different height, right? Like that's  kind of what Wi-Fi 7 is doing, which is

25:04
Bonkers  asynchronous route, right? Wow. Oh my god,  that breaks that breaks firewalls. You can't do that You can't have asynchronous, right?  I'm not a firewall guy But I remember that was always a problem when we had asynchronous routing like oh no the send me the receiver coming in two different places Like take it easy buddy. Wow. Where does this all happen? Is this in the brains  of like the controller or like how is this happening? My device isn't doing it right?  Your device is doing some It's listening mostly the

25:33
The APs are doing the coordination mostly, right? Cause they're the ones that are  setting, saying that, that Andy gets  two resource units and Greg gets one resource unit. Here's a timing for Greg and here's a timing for Andy. you know, here's a, and so  it's mainly the APs that are doing the orchestration for their frequencies that they're on for their channels that they're there. And of course then the other AP next door.

26:02
that someone else is connected to, that AP is managing theirs. So it's at the AP level. So at home on a wired connection, if my kid is gaming, hugging up all the bandwidth, and I'm just sending some emails through work, I hardly need any bandwidth. The only way I know how to manage that on wires is with the quality of service, right? I'd have to like put him in a class and allocate him only so much. Again, just trying to draw parallels or equivalents. So this is kind of, you know, how do it know? Like I'm amazed that it can see my kid gaming and me doing not much.

26:30
It can see the bandwidth that we're using or requesting, assign some type of traffic class. I know not what it's doing. It's like the cost thing, but oh, okay. This kid needs more bandwidth. He needs more resource units because he's doing this crazy gaming that needs a lot of bandwidth where this other guy's just doing emails. He doesn't need as much. And then I guess if I were to ramp up my use and maybe me start to stream a video that gives me more RUs with the thing and right. And I guess it's a balancing act.

26:57
And this is all Wi-Fi 7? this some of the magic of 7? Wi-Fi 7. Now Wi-Fi 6 has some of this. That's why you can get 9.6 gigs on Wi-Fi 6. And I'm going to blow your mind and tell you the theoretical Fi rate for Wi-Fi 7. Can you take a guess? So what is it for sexy? 9.6? 9.6 giga hits. Giga hits. my God. Giga hits. Yeah. I've been out of production too long. I'm doing giga hits now. Part of it is.

27:29
9.6 gigabits per second is what Wi-Fi 6E can transmit theoretically. I mean, I want to be ridiculous and sell like a terabit a second, but that can't be possible. know. I got to swing. I got to, you know, what if I nailed it? That would have been so cool. I would have looked so smart. That would have been cool. But it's physics. So what is it? 46 gigs. Whoa. How is this not giving us brain cancer? So that's using a 320.

27:54
20 megahertz channel with all 16 spatial streams, your 4096 qualms. How many? 320 megahertz channels? Yes, 320 megahertz wide. Is that just one channel? Do they bond them? Can you make use of multiple channels? Well, mean, that's essentially what you're doing is bonding all those 20 megahertz channels into one. So in Wi-Fi 6, God, I can't keep track of it all. So when we went from 20 to 80 megahertz wide channels,

28:23
They're just adding up 20s like is 20 the base unit? Basically. Okay. Wow. Yeah. 300 and how many, how wide? Three six or three 20. Sorry. Three 20. Have you deployed any of this? Is it brand new? Like when did this all happen? I've deployed some wifi seven, but I won't put anybody on 320 megahertz. I mean, if I was at my house, sure. But so the wider it is, I thought the better, but I guess not. you had said not to keep giving spoilers of what we're talking about before we recorded, but you had said that wifi seven is like really great for

28:52
very dense high density. like what I don't know, a college campus, a sports stadium, like things like that. So. Absolutely. Large classrooms, auditoriums. Okay. So, would you want very wide channels? No. And why I thought the wider was the better because you could push more and there's less contention, but I guess you have to segment it up for all those people, right? You're going to need more APs, right? I said there's 200, you can put

29:20
comfortably about 250 devices on an access point.  On a wifi seven? And wifi six even too. So you didn't get like orders of magnitude more devices per AP in seven. Like it's not like, oh, now you can do 10,000. No, no, not really. mean, it's probably a little more, but I mean, you want to stay conservative, especially in a high density. You want more AP servicing the clients than  not, right? Yeah. Which means you need.

29:45
more frequencies because you can't have overlapping frequencies because then you get co-channel interference and then that's a poor experience for the user. So you got 350 megahertz wide channel in Wi-Fi 7. You got 250 users per access point. So for easy math for me, let's just say it's a 250 megahertz wide channel, 250 users. So each person gets a megahertz. I'm trying to like, you know, I'm wondering how the math would like break it out to like,

30:14
give each person their RUs and their lanes and all that stuff. So does this change design? know, when you go into a stadium and design it, like, is it just like, oh yeah, it's 250 per access point. We know how far we got to put them. Kind of. You want to make sure, especially in stadiums, it's all directional as much as possible, right? So you're pointing an AP at a certain section of people and you're trying to only cover that little section of people with that particular AP.

30:41
So they don't broadcast in like a sphere, right? Not with directional, no.  Like  I don't even know what I have at home. I know my Netgear is like a sphere where it's just woof, right? Yeah, it's an Omni. I have an unnamed vendor's  wireless system here. It's cloud-based and I don't even know if they're Omni. I think when I it up,  so they go in a sphere, right? Because the way they made it sound when I read the documentation, it's mostly like down and out. So it'll cover the floor, but it won't go up. More like a donut. Yeah. Think of it more like a donut.

31:11
So it's more like a donut going wide then, you know, up and down like round like a sphere would be. So on the sevens, is it the same kind of thing? Oh no, no, Omni is a donut, directional is like a wedge. is that just the antennas in the thing? Like it's just a type of antenna. Okay. That's antennas. And that's been throughout the history of, of wifi. You have Omni and directional antennas. Is seven crazy expensive? Like, is it a huge upgrade to like go seven?

31:40
Like, oh my God. Like, why would you go 7? So, you know, you have...  Also depends on the vendor too, right?  The vendor I deploy mostly, you can actually get Wi-Fi 7 APs  cheaper than Wi-Fi 6E. Really?

31:55
Two questions.  One,  if I just spent, I don't know, half a million dollars building out my huge facility with Wi-Fi 6 or  6E, you know, a year or two ago, like when is it worth it to rip all that out and go seven? It's probably not. maybe Probably not. Now, if you've got  a Wi-Fi 6 or 6E deployment- You're probably good. You're probably good. Wait for Wi-Fi 8 to come out. But maybe if you're on five,  I guess it's always-

32:23
Like, you this stuff goes into life. Again, I'm just going back to like my, you know, enterprise, like wired kind of analogies. mean, you have gear that goes into life, I don't know, five years. So like maybe at the end of whatever the cycle of these things are, like the vendor stopped supporting them at some point. Maybe that's when it makes most sense. Like, oh, they're to go out of support in a year. We got all the emails. Maybe we should start looking. Because what's driving that question, the question behind the question is, you know, when you said that my device, I have a...

32:48
the newest iPhone you can have the cute little orange thing, right? And like, if I'm not getting a noticeable difference  as a user with wifi  seven, then I don't know why as an organization I would invest in that technology and that system and that infrastructure. If my users aren't going to notice it, why would I invest in that? Like, is it good enough? know what mean? That's a really good question. And  as a  employee of Avar, you always want the latest and greatest. Well, right.

33:17
Yeah, I you can charge for that and bill it and right. Like I get it. Well, I always want the latest and greatest. Like I didn't necessarily need this phone, but you know, our kid wanted a phone. I'm like, all right, let me just get one. We'll do the pass down thing. We've got my wife, mine. He can have hers. And, but you know, you get a new phone every year. You can't really tell a difference.  It's nice to have. think the camera's better, but like it's the same darn thing. It's just less buggy because the battery's better and it's less old. Right. So like, I guess as a bar, so that's an interesting, if we can talk about business for a second, like, sure. Are you involved at all in?

33:47
selling to your customers and how would you direct one of your customers or prospects that has some wireless coming? Maybe not into life because then it makes it easy, but who do you steer into Wi-Fi 7 is the question. How do you determine if what you have is good enough? Because if you come to me and say, dude, you got to have the latest and greatest. Here's the 15 reasons you should have the latest and greatest. You can future proof yourself. Look at all this stuff. Oh my God. Look at all these are using. And then I ask you the question, OK, well, 46 gigabits per second sounds great, but

34:18
If any of my users  are sending, you know, tens of gigs over my network, like I have problems with what the hell are they doing? Are they mining crypto? like, what is my business use case  to invest in this? It depends on the business, right? If you're a medical school, the latest and greatest right now  is augmented reality with the cadaver or whatever, right? Where you've got virtual reality or augmented reality that takes a lot of bandwidth.

34:45
There's a business case there  to go with with Wi-Fi 7  in that case. So if you have like a virtual reality headset, like a VR headset, and you're doing some kind of medical study, like you're saying, and you need crazy, because I'm thinking of folks we just had on the show that do these huge file transfers and they need gigantic pipes and they would be crazy to try it on wireless. Very good point you make that in a classroom environment with VR headsets  that are training the future doctors  of the world.

35:13
You can't plug an ethernet into the VR headset. So they would need an enormous amount. Yeah. there's, yeah. Especially if you want more than one, right? If it's just one, I mean, but if you're trying to like do a whole classroom with there's like 10, 12, 24 med students or whatever medical research, like intense, hardcore, like important stuff. would give you a, Hey, you probably should look at this for just because it's a, it's going to help you in the long

35:42
right, to increase your bandwidth to have the latest technology. And you can see what's on their technology roadmap. Like they might have big bandwidth requirements stuff coming up for wireless stuff they're going to try to do in education. So very good question to have as a sales type person to talk to you, you know,  what do you have coming  when you're selling future stuff? Like, do you need 46 gig throughput? Maybe not today, but you could find out in 18 months.

36:05
They're investing in some insane quantum something or another that requires, you know, 46 gigabits over the air for some weird reason to go. Guess what? We got a thing for that.  From a business case scenario, what I deal with the most in the state of Mississippi  is e-rate.  I do an awful lot of e-rate. And if you're not familiar with e-rate, it's a federally funded  way for K through 12 and libraries to obtain networking equipment  and services.

36:34
They only have to pay like 15 % of the bill where the federal government pays the other 85. Very attractive in the state of Mississippi, since we're a poor state. So I do with that a lot. So what do I see a lot because of that? I see really old equipment that needs to be replaced. I've got a school system right now. I'm about to replace 35 60s and 29 60s.

37:00
This is all in my home lab, by the way. No shade on these devices.  From a support perspective, right? This is a school that they, and they need it to be working. What if it fails? It's not under support anymore.  So that's how the vendors get you.  That's right. a support perspective, I would push them into the latest and greatest switch  and then wifi seven APs  so that

37:24
They're future looking, right? I won't say future proof. I'll say future oriented or they're looking towards the future and they have a longevity on those APs or devices in their network. Because a lot of these places I've seen, know, their switches are 15 years old and they're running them because they just don't have the money. I I've got the school system talking about there's 1600 kids in an entire system. It's a county. That's the entire county. They've got 1600 kids.

37:51
You know, so that's very small school system. They don't have a lot of money. We can get them a good deal on the latest and greatest Wi-Fi 7 APs. So let's, let's do that. You know, that type stuff. Greg, this has been  enormously  informative. Anytime I'm talking about technology that I'm not familiar with and my curiosity, spidey senses get all tingly. It's very fun. And even just looking up some of this stuff, you know, this feels like one of those topics that we could.

38:16
do multiple episodes on really dive in deep. Like I wanted to ask you about wireless planning and  there's a lot more technology I wanted to get into as well. I mean, there's whole wireless. So  there's a whole wireless podcast out there. There's a couple of them probably, but what's Rowell's is it clear to send? Clear to send. We miss you. Wish you were here. I know. Shout out to Rowell. Rowell from clear to send had planned to join us tonight and something came up a lot more interesting. Well, something came up and he couldn't have, but you know, we are not a wireless show.

38:46
I think we did pretty good at covering  some of this stuff. Maybe we have  you back on and we can bring OL in and maybe we can get a little more into the nerdy  stuff. We didn't talk about preamble puncturing. didn't talk about time system networking.  There's so much more with Wi-Fi. Preamble puncturing? That sounds unconstitutional.  It almost is. I'll  leave that for the next one. Yeah. So let's do that because you know, I know what my strengths are. Wireless isn't one of them.

39:15
And that's why I like to have these conversations to try to learn and to touch on all things networking. But for a wireless practitioner like yourself to come here and listen to this, this might have been  more on the basics foundational side as opposed to someone who does this day in and day out. And again, they're probably listening to clear to send. But  if you found us because you saw a wireless episode and we helped you, yay. Where can folks find you, Greg, if they want to ask you more nerdery questions about Wi-Fi 7? I'm on LinkedIn and  formerly known as Twitter.

39:44
I'm on there. I'm easily found. You can just Google my name. Thank you for still calling it Twitter. I refuse to call it X. And of course I'm on, it's all about the journey. Yes. I love that place. It's a great place, isn't it? It is. You've been on there forever, right? Probably from like the beginning. I did. So I started listening to y'all summer of 2020, right? Y'all hadn't been going very long. I actually went, I was like,

40:08
I started listening and I went back and started listening to the very first episodes and listened all the way through. And I've listened to you ever since. And then of course I hopped on. all about the journey shortly after that. I forgot you've been around since the beginning. So  I'm thinking about the history of the show and because you've been there forever. And I just, kind of want to ask you,  you know, what's your favorite moment or what does it mean to you? And this isn't the topic, but today I had an experience where  I'm speaking at the USNUA's PA NUG next month and we needed one more panelist and someone. m

40:36
knows this guy Danny Finan and said, Hey, you know, I know this guy and he said he would come on. Danny was our first guest on the art of network engineering. And I think him and AJ might've worked together. I think it was an AJ connection. how that worked. Yeah. Yeah. But I had to go back and I think it was like Harry Potter and something, something was like, it was episode five. was our first guest, but it got me nostalgic because you know, I'm looking, sometimes I'll go back to like the first couple of episodes enlisted. And I mean, for me, it's just been such a meaningful

41:04
I don't want to call it a journey, even though like all about the journey, which is our discord server. But you know, I, listened back and I listened to like how just nervous we were and stochastic speaking and not that polished. And you know, we had Aaron there and you know, we've got different people come and go. I miss Timbertino to death. It's just been such a cool kind of, know, Lexi was on, she,  you know, she guests, she comes in and guests sometimes, which is great. Just reminded me, you've been there from the beginning. Like,  do you have any favorite?

41:30
Like if anything stood out to you about the show and about the discord, like, or what do you love about it? Like if nobody's ever listened to the show and they talked to Greg, who's been here from the beginning, why would you tell anyone to check out the show and the discord server? Because this is my job in the rap. So now I'm giving you a job because I usually say, go to our link tree, check out the discord, blah, blah, blah. As a guy who's been there from the beginning, why would you tell someone to check us out? It's the people. It's all about the people. The people that show up and they're willing to help.

42:00
Nick, Kevin Myers,  like just all these people that are on there, they're willing to, cause you constantly get people come in, Hey, I'm new to the show. I'm listening to the show and people just like, Hey, you know, welcome.  it's, just a very welcoming community. Um, there's a mentorship,  uh, channel in there that gets used pretty regularly. I don't know. It's just the people that are in there that are just really good. love that answer.

42:27
That's my favorite part of it as well. And you're very active in there, thank you for that.  It's so nice to see. I've said it a million times and more in the beginning, I guess, when we started this up, but I didn't feel like I had a community when I started on this journey, trying to get into tech, to IT, to networking. And to be able to look back and see  the thousands of people that are in there and the new people coming in and people like yourself and  Tim and just again, Kevin, all the nameless.  There's too many names to mention, but there's so many people in there that are just...

42:56
genuinely interested, wanting to help saying hi. I've said it before, Luis Nexacuizzi, he has been just pinging me and saying hi. Me too, on the daily forever. And I told him not too long ago, know, man, like, there were days that  I was not having a great day and just hearing from you and you saying hi pulled me out of whatever was going on in my head long enough to like give me relief and make me remember like, oh yeah, hi Luis, how you doing?  You know.

43:25
We all suffer from self, right? And just to have people out there that can pull you out is just so nice. So thank you for sharing that. If you don't have a community, you can check out the community we're talking about called, it's all about the journey, a Discord server. You can find that in all things Art of NetEng at our link tree, forward slash art of net eng. If you don't have a community and you're either trying to get into tech or you've worked in tech and you're just this, you know, lonely person who feels like they don't have anybody and you're just grinding away at your keyboard. And it's such a pleasure to have.

43:55
people along that journey with you. And I can't just say enough about and again, it's just because I spent years trying to break in feeling like I had no one to talk to about any of this. And now I'm surrounded by just, you know, it seems like an innumerable, is that even a word? An endless number of people that are just always there. so,

44:16
So anyway, ah this has been a great conversation. Thank you. Let's get you back on with Rowell and we'll dive deep into the weeds and get super nerdy out. Once again, for all things, Art of Net Ends, check out our link tree,  linktree forward slash art of net ends. There's some new March up there. have a YouTube channel you can hit from there, our discord server, all the socials.  It's great to see you, Greg. It's been so great to talk about some nerd stuff and learn some new things for everybody out there. Thanks so much for listening and watching, and we'll catch you next time on the Art of Network Engineering podcast.

44:48
Hey folks, if you like what you heard today, please subscribe to our podcast and your favorite pod catcher. You can find us on socials at Art of NetEng, and you can visit linktree.com slash art of net eng for links to all of our content, including the A1 merch store and our virtual community on Discord called It's All About the Journey. You can see our pretty faces on our YouTube channel named the Art of Network Engineering. That's youtube.com forward slash art of net eng. Thanks for listening.