I just returned from Cisco Live in San Francisco, CA and was able to catch the keynote presentation by John Chambers. If there was a main message to take away, it would be one word – video. Video over the LAN, video over the WAN, video to the home, and yes, video over the WLAN. That reminds me, we need a new acronym. More on that later.

If you look at Cisco’s moves of recent, you can see how this thread continues to echo. The acquisition of Flip (the consumer digital video camera), the telepresence systems (at the high end), TV movie/sitcom product placements, WebEx meetings using PC-based cameras, and of course a myriad of mobile devices accessing video content via every communication medium…well, you get the point.
Sure, video generates a lot of latency-sensitive network workload and therefore should translate into more hardware iron sales. I get that. But, perhaps there is indeed something more to this....

Normally we think of wireless networks hanging off of the wired network.  That's what we've been taught since the beginning of Wi-Fi of course.  Now I'm actually starting to use features of the Wi-Fi network that let Wi-Fi act as the "core" of the network (in a manner of speaking).  The vendor who originally gave us wireless-mesh-as-the-core, Firetide, is still doing just that.  Throw up some mesh nodes, and voila, you have resilient Ethernet everywhere.  Nice.  Now many of the Wi-Fi infrastructure vendors are doing much the same by adding a second Ethernet port to their APs.  This second Ethernet port can be connected to a single device (like a printer or Wi-Fi camera) or an Ethernet switch (so that multiple devices can be connected).  Having this feature is somewhat like rolling Firetide's whole game-plan into your infrastructure.  Aruba, Aerohive, and others (that don't all start with the letter A) do this, and it's very handy in certain odd situations...one of which I ran into this week.