Inside the Ubiquiti UniFi World Conference #UWC: Bridging the Enterprise Gap. Also: Tackling Wireless Devices Security and Jammers

Is one of the top SMB tech brands ready for prime time in the Enterprise market? This episode takes you inside the Ubiquiti UniFi World Conference in Chicago, where I, Wireless Nerd, bring you first-hand insights into Ubiquiti's preparation to leap into the enterprise sphere and their innovative breakthroughs. With the looming presence of illegal signal jammers and the sensational Canadian Flipper device saga, we're unraveling the complex fabric of wireless device security. I'll also recount the startlingly simple ways hotel key cards can be copied, shedding light on the striking security loopholes in places we trust.

Join us as we navigate Ubiquiti's bold stride toward enterprise readiness. Our buddy Tom delivered an engaging rundown on Wi-Fi 7 for newcomers, while we also got a peek ahead to the company's ambitious roadmap ... complete with  11 new access points set to revitalize Ubiquiti's standing in the market in 2024. We'll dissect the technological advancements in their gateway devices, physical security, and customer support, including an AI-driven chatbot that's pushing the boundaries of user assistance. Yet, with Ubiquiti's reluctance to initiate a channel or partner program, we're witnessing the teething problems of a company gearing up for a substantial shift. Expect a narrative intertwined with expert knowledge and raw, unfiltered glimpses into a company on the verge of transformation.

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:31

Well, well, well, I guess we'll go ahead and get started. This is the Waves Podcast. I'm Wireless Nerd and I am sitting in a hotel room in beautiful Chicago, illinois. It's a great day. Outside you can't see A little problem with the camera, but whatever I look good, I guess as good as I can look. And I am sitting here because I got invited to come up to the Ubiquity World Conference. Now the Ubiquity Unified World Conference is an event where Ubiquity showcases everything that's happening in their unified world and they were kind enough to extend an invite, came up here and got to sit today through some amazing sessions, learn a lot about where Ubiquity is headed. I've got some great thoughts, I think, on that, at least what my thoughts are. But I do want to start with what's new, what's now and what's next. Since this is the Waves podcast, I'm going to jump over real quick and make sure that I'm streaming live on all the channels before I go ahead and get too far into it. Got to make sure that everything's ready for the podcast.

Speaker 0: 1:29

The podcast hit a very cool milestone. We had a whole lot of downloads this week, which was fantastic. So I appreciate the support. I appreciate everyone tuning in and downloading the podcast and listening. It's always cool to get such great feedback, and so thank you so much for all of you that are doing that. It looks like I am live, so that's awesome. We can go ahead and start. Yay, what's up everybody. It's Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, and this is the Waves Podcast.

Speaker 0: 1:56

Today it is March 26th, tuesday, march 26th. I'm coming to you from Chicago, illinois. I'm sitting in the Westin Hotel in my nice room overlooking the lake here, and I just got done walking across the street from the Ubiquity Unify World Conference. Lots of really good stuff happening, but first let's dig into what's new, what's now, what's next, what's actually happening in the wireless industry? I've got my notes on my phone, so I'm going to be looking down Instead of launching Google Earth, it would help if I launched the correct thing here. So let's see what we got here.

Speaker 0: 2:26

The first thing I wanted to talk about is very interesting Lots of buzz around illegal signal jammers, and it looks like they're trying to crack down on the sale of illegal signal jammers things that are being sold and marketed on Amazon to take down drones or to do different nefarious things, if you will, using wireless signals, and this is of special interest because of what just happened in Canada a couple months ago, with the flipper being blacklisted in the Canadian market, not being able to buy or sell or use the actual Flipper itself, and so we just got done doing a course on the Flipper WLPC. It's a lot of fun, and I just got back from spring break a couple of weeks ago and I was showing my kid how to clone a hotel room key card not someone else's key card, my own key card. But it's really interesting that I could take a device and quickly and easily use it to dupe a key card and use that to open up the door. Now I think it's great that they're cracking down on it, you know, on Amazon. I just don't want to see it affect what's going on with the Flipper Market, because that is a wireless tool that a lot of us can use and do a lot of really neat things with. Of course, as with any tool, you can always use it in a way that's not supposed to be used. But what's interesting is I'm staying in this hotel and I'm with a friend of mine who's a hotelier and we're walking up and down. We're talking about just how easy it is to take advantage of key cards.

Speaker 0: 3:46

And that brings me to the second topic of today, which was ethical hackers showing off how to open millions of hotel key card locks. And so there was an older system. I guess everything has been replaced now. It says but over 3 million hotel room locks in 13,000 buildings, 131 countries, are vulnerable to an exploit. Let's attackers forge master keys for any door. According to Techspot, the Dormacaba SafeLock electronic door system, these are RFID locks. According to tech spot, the dormicaba safe lock electronic door system, these are rfid locks. Specifically, the system 6000 ambience or community management software is susceptible to uh to this exploit.

Speaker 0: 4:24

Now, this exploit can be done with any android nfc phone, or it can be done with something like the flipper zero, the pricks mark 3 or any nfrelated device. And it says a simple fake card can unlock any door in the hotel that's produced by that original. So apparently you can take even an expired key card and dupe that card and with the correct settings you can turn that into a master key. And that to me is fascinating. But it's not as scary as something as simple as walking by the cleaning person's housekeepings cart and grabbing a quick cart off of there and taking 30 seconds to duplicate a master key using a flipper. So there's really easy ways to do it. There's a little bit more complicated ways to do it, but we're definitely entering a time where people are taking wireless devices and using them as a day-to-day object, either for something security-based or for something non-security-based. Jorge Herrera says I want a Flipper Zero. Yeah, flippers are fun. It's a lot of fun. You can have a lot of fun with those tools, but just be aware that they can be used for something they're not supposed to.

Speaker 0: 5:26

One thing speaking of low-end communications or near-field communications NearLink as opposed to BLE and Wi-Fi the emerging communications technology. Nearlink as opposed to BLE and Wi-Fi the emerging communications technology NearLink is positioning itself as an alternative to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the Chinese market. So Huawei has said that they've got 300 partners for the use of NearLink. So if you're not familiar with NearLink, look for it. If it's anybody else other than Huawei, not sure who else is going to adopt it. They do say they have 300 partners. It's 60% less power consumption, 6 times higher data transmission speed and 1 30th of the latency of BLE. It gives you a 7 dB improvement for anti-interference and a more stable connection with twice the coverage and distance and 10 times more network connections. Now sorry, I fell down the rabbit hole while looking this up Cyclic prefix, orthogonal frequency division, multiplexing, so cyclic prefix, ofdm, and what that does is that helps with the latency issue.

Speaker 0: 6:23

Basically, what they do is they take your data packet that you're sitting across the little radiogram that's going across, and they take the end of it and they take the last component of it and then they use that as a prefix to the packet that they send over. So you get the last part first and then you get the data and then you get the last part again and they use that to make sure that everything from forward error correction, something that they call HARC, which I always mess up the synonym for HARC is Hybrid, automatic Repeat, re-request. So when you combine HARART and you combine that forward error correction that they're using and you combine that with the cyclic prefix OFDM, it makes for a very stable connection at smaller distances not huge distances, but smaller distances. So that's interesting to see what NearLink will do. Everyone's looking for that data, for more data in smaller areas, and so if you think about these signal jammers and you think about Flipper Zero and you think about NFC and RFID, and then you merge that in with NearLink as a new and upcoming technology NearLink, ble and Wi-Fi. It's going to be kind of interesting to see what happens there. So I've got a lot of notes where I really fell down the rabbit hole looking up cyclic prefix, ofdm and Nearlink. But I just wanted to mention those real quick because I thought that those were fascinating to learn about.

Speaker 0: 7:40

But on to what happened today at Ubiquity World Conference. So to start off the day, you know we got a couple of us invited to come out here. We came out, we had a good time. There was about 400 people they said that were registered for it. It was a packed house. I posted some pictures on my Twitter or my ex-account at Wireless Nerd so you can see what was going on. We had a really cool Reddit thread going also, but essentially about 400 people showed up and they were invited to come out and be a part of the Unify World Conference and it was just a run-through of what they're doing with Unify where it's headed.

Speaker 0: 8:10

They started off the day with a keynote from Robert Pera, which is really cool because that's not someone who makes a lot of media appearances. So having him come out was pretty fantastic. You know he's a tall guy as I am, and it was funny. He had two little microphones on the podium. He was like leaning over half the time talking into the podium and then someone walked out with a handheld mic and looks at him and says where'd you guys get that mic? But other than that, no big technical troubles to report, but it was really good. It was great to hear from him and I'll tell you, having having attended HP discover and having attended Cisco live and a lot of these big polished, you know corporate things, the ubiquity one was different. It was refreshingly different.

Speaker 0: 8:48

Lots of candid conversation instead of saying, you know, instead of the marketing hype of this is what we do and how we do it. There was a lot of our stuff's pretty good, it's working the way that we expected it to. We've had some hiccups. He even made one comment about you know how a certain product had taken years off of his life. There was lots of fun banter back and forth about what the company is doing and where they're going and where they're going, the vision that was set was definitely in the enterprise space, definitely coming after enterprise from a product perspective, from a software perspective, from a support perspective, there's a lot of moves that they're making.

Speaker 0: 9:20

Some new products were announced. We were asked not to talk about them and definitely don't photograph them. I did get permission to take photographs. That was pretty cool, but I don't want to talk about them. We'll let those come out. Q3, some of those products are going to come out, so we're going to come out in the next two weeks, which is pretty cool, but lots of really cool products that they're coming out with to push into the enterprise market, which is good, and then they drilled down into that.

Speaker 0: 9:42

So then we had Tom come out and a lot of y'all met Tom at WLPC when Ubiquity was out there. So he came out and gave a rundown of Wi-Fi 7, but basically explained what Wi-Fi 7 was to a group of people that weren't familiar with Wi-Fi. So I was hoping that that was recorded, because he did a really, really good job of breaking down some of the most basic and common things in Wi-Fi 7 and why it makes a difference overall for businesses. So that was really good to hear. Talked about some new product lines, talked about launching 10 or 11, I can't remember if it was 10 or 11, I think it was 11 new access points in 2024. Is 10 or 11, I think it was 11 new access points in 2024. That's pretty cool. There's a lot there it talked about you know.

Speaker 0: 10:20

Then they moved in and they talked about the gateway devices, the unified gateway devices. They talked about what they're doing for enterprise there, because they basically had the UDM that sits in the middle. They needed something a little bit lower end, and then they definitely needed something higher end, if that's where the aspirations were to go into. Enterprise Moved on to talk about physical security. They talked about their security camera systems, their identity systems. Then they went in and they talked about the support and the structure for pre-sale support, all the tools that are currently available, including their chat, gpt, clone, unified GPT, and then they went on to talk about the post support, some of the new things that were just announced about after the install is done. How do you make sure that? If you need that higher level of support, how is that done?

Speaker 0: 11:02

The one thing that they didn't touch on was the channel model, and that was important to me because, as much as they talked about all the products being enterprise ready, which it seems like they are third generation on APs, or fourth generation APs, third generation on switching, you know, second generation on gateways. They're really moving forward. They've learned a lot of lessons, knowing I mean, they were quite bluntly honest about knowing where those pitfalls were, but moving into where they are now and getting the equipment at a place where they feel like it's enterprise ready, I think that's where they're standing. They're standing right on the edge of that. And now it's how do they make the organization more enterprise ready? We didn't hear a lot about that. When asked if there was, you know, if there's going to be a partner program or a channel program, they said yeah, we've heard the feedback that that's something that people want, but it's not something we're discussing right now. That was like a kick in the pants for everyone who was sitting in there, who was from a VAR, from a disty Lots of VARs, lots of distys, lots of end users here. So when you have 400 people who represent every group that you can possibly imagine, hearing that was a little bit of like oh okay, you're not ready.

Speaker 0: 12:04

So that's what led me to say earlier, and I'll say it again is that I think that, from a product perspective, they are getting enterprise ready. They are making those moves. We've seen their marketing uptick with those hilarious videos that they're posting. We're seeing more engagement that they have. Now we're seeing them going out on a road show with the Ubiquity World Conference and they're going to be taking that in April to a whole bunch of different countries. We're seeing this movement to build momentum to get them enterprise ready.

Speaker 0: 12:29

But it still feels like there's something lacking. So it still feels like within the organization that maybe they're not enterprise ready yet from a corporate perspective. And I say that because there still is no established channel. There still is no Sparing Depot program. There still is no partner program in place. There's lots of training and they've got a lot of really cool call center things going on. But I think over the next six to 12 months we might start to see that change a little bit and that's when they're going to start really making that push.

Speaker 0: 12:59

I think, being a technically oriented company, an engineering strong company, that came through. We joked, we were sitting there and it was like there were a lot of great presenters that were on the stage, but what you didn't have was that polished corporate event feel, which was good, but also, at the same time, it left something to be wanted, something to be desired, right when it was. Like you're used to seeing that and this was, you know. Granted, this is their first event, so I'm not being hard on them at all. I think that they're that they've got a lot of ways to move into that and I think that it's going to be really, really cool to see them move into that, especially with everything that's going on the turmoil in the marketplace right now, layoffs at Cisco and Aruba and Juniper getting together and not knowing which direction wireless is going left or right, or who's really taking the reins. And then here comes Ubiquiti, up from the bottom, going, hey, we're gonna make a strong push into enterprise. It's gonna be really interesting to see how the market reacts to that, especially when I don't know that everyone's. They did, speaking of getting it in people's hands and showing them that they're enterprise ready. They gave everybody a U7 Pro to show off some of new SKUs that they're going to come out with over the next. You know, over the next year are going to be.

Speaker 0: 14:30

The customer support on the forums is not the best. That's what Jorge says over there. You know, on X he's commenting. They mentioned that, you know. Someone from the crowd said yeah, you know, when I want support I've got to go to the forums. And if I go to the forums, well, sometimes it takes a while for someone to respond, which they were shocked to hear, which was interesting, because I really I feel like that's kind of commonplace. Anyway, I think that's all I really got on what's going on. It was a good day. I'm trying to collect my thoughts, to do a write-up and see, you know, to really put down what I think overall of what's going on. But I think the short hot take, as Keith Townsend would say, the hot take is that while Ubiquity is getting ready to present themselves as an enterprise-ready competitor from a hardware perspective, the organization still needs a little bit of work to instill that faith in the industry that they are enterprise ready. I think that about sums it up.

Speaker 0: 15:27

Now they did have some really neat stuff that showed off some deeper, not necessarily packet inspection, but SSL inspection. If you're familiar with Gigamon, they talked about some new features. They're very Gigamon-like where they break the SSL so you can see all those search queries and everything else that are going on. These are new features that they hinted at becoming available, but only once that new hardware is available, if you like, their camera systems and their identity stuff. There was lots of talk there, lots of movement there, lots of applause surrounding that. They talked about some new NVR features and some new ways that they can aggregate storage across multiple sites to like. Thunderous applause, lots of people.

Speaker 0: 16:06

It seems that there are a lot more people here interested in the cameras and the NVR than specifically they were in the wireless or you know, or on the on the gateway side. But it really did feel like they were. They were getting poised to really enter the like, taking seriously their entrance into the enterprise market. So I'll be interested to see what they do over the next six to 12 months. It's going to be. It's going to be interesting. I'll also be interested to see what they do over the next month and a half, as they do more of these ubiquity world conferences. So I appreciate them extending the invite to me to come out and see what what's going on. You know, uh, it's always great to to be around. Fellow nerd, saw some people from wlpc here, saw some faces I hadn't seen in a while. If you ever get a chance to, you know, to be invited to something like this, don't ever pass it up. It's always more fun to participate. That being said, that wraps it up for the week. I've got dinner to get to tonight. I'm gonna go enjoy chicago here for a minute before I get back home and I look forward to seeing you next week. If you have any questions about any of this stuff, just feel free to drop me a line, ask me anything, and myself, daryl DeRogia, sean Bender, my buddy Herschel we were all here sitting in the audience, so there's some resources too. Go look at the thread on Reddit. There were some questions that were answered on there, but if you have questions about it, please let us know. We'll be happy to communicate that back. Anyhow, that does it for this week's Waves.

Speaker 0: 17:27

With Wireless Nerd, we have some really cool stuff coming up. I've been doing some interviews with other people, so be on the lookout. What I'm going to start doing is not just this, but I mentioned before, I'm going to crank out a Patreon and throw some of the stuff behind a paywall. Hopefully it'll help me out and maybe I can buy a new lens or a better camera or some better lighting or something. But I'm gonna be doing that and then I'm gonna be appending some of those interviews as we move forward. I had a really cool time two days ago standing on rooftops doing some private LTE. I'll be talking more about that in the future with some of the sponsors that are on there. So if you want to sponsor, please drop me a line, also trueatruelenscom, or hit me up at Wireless Nerd. Anyway, you all have a wonderful week. We'll see you next week, see you later.