I'm speaking of Paul DeBeasi.  He's a serious analyst, and he's serious about Wi-Fi.  He and I usually see things in the same light, and I love working with him. He's written a SMOKIN whitepaper that everyone in Wi-Fi - young and old, newbie and rockstar - should read.  Just get some hot chocolate, sit by the fire (or air conditioner), and read it.  Here's a link:

It covers SCA vs. MCA architectural differences, Air Time Fairness (ATF), all of the types of Beamforming, and lots more.  He spent a number of weeks on this whitepaper, and his hard work shows.  Reading it is time well-spent.

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.

I wrote a product review a few months back about AirMagnet’s new spectrum analysis software, AirMedic.  It is not our custom to use the blog to revisit a product that we’ve already reviewed, but there are special occasions for products and companies that really stand out.  My intent is not to provide any more review of the product, but simply to share with our audience that AirMagnet has made a full-featured copy of AirMedic available to everyone until August 15, free of charge -- the evaluation will end on the 15th, regardless of when you download the software.  The beauty of this offering is that most of you already have the adapter that you need to use it, and for those of you who don’t, you can snag one on eBay for a pittance. 

Dang it's nice to be right every once in while.  If you didn't read my 1.0 version (dated 10-NOV-08), take a peek here.  I'm referring to that last paragraph about RTLS being the end-game.  I believed it then, and I believe it now.  Let's talk about what's changed since my 1.0 post.

This time... Trapeze brought a gun to a knife fight.  They came up with the coolest new authentication technology since PPSK/DPSK.  It's generically called Location Based Access Control (LBAC).  It's the first cousin of, and best friend to Role Based Access Control (RBAC).  RBAC rocks, but with RBAC/LBAC, it's a whole new ballgame.  Welcome to the big leagues folks.

There's a saying that goes, "The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue."  Considering Ruckus's mascot is a dog, I find this fitting for today's blog post.  I received an email from Ruckus's VP of Marketing asking me to review a blog post to make sure it was accurate, with the understanding that it would be changed if I found something that wasn't accurate.  Normally this wouldn't be such a huge deal, but in this case, it was because this particular blog was a comparison between a feature hawked by only Ruckus and Aerohive.  I eagerly read the blog looking for issues, and other than the occassional comma splice, run-on sentence, or reference to 802.1x instead of 802.1X, it was just great.  By "great" I mean, "it was a fair comparison presented in an honorable way."  That's the point of today's blog, in fact.  Ruckus wasn't trying to "flame" Aerohive, but rather to be professionally complimentary.  You can read Ruckus's blog post here.