Waves with Wireless Nerd
Join me for a weekly look into what's making waves in tech and the wireless industry! What's new? What's now? What's next?
Waves with Wireless Nerd
The Dawn of a New Era in Wi-Fi and RF Design Using Tech like Apple's Vision Pro
Are you ready to have your world rocked by the future of Wi-Fi technology? The invisible is about to become visible with Apple's cutting-edge Vision Pro, and we're here to walk you through its revolutionary implications for software propagation, analysis, and modeling. With the power of this tool, engineers, technicians, and troubleshooters will be able to visualize non-visible phenomena like never before, changing the way we use spectrum analyzers and software solutions. Even the humble iPhone, armed with the new iOS 17, holds the potential to detect Wi-Fi signals.
As we peer into the future of Wi-Fi and RF design, we'll explore how the new iteration of Wi-Fi leverages cloud data from access points and sensors. We're also pumped to discuss the upcoming Wireless LAN Professional Conference in Prague and the groundbreaking insights from Analyst Day Qualcomm in San Diego. The exciting new Wi-Fi 7 holds untold potential - from revolutionising the Quality of Experience (QoE) in homes to ushering in a new era of Multi-Link Optimization (MLO) and RF design. Buckle up, because the future of Wi-Fi technology is here, and it's wilder than you ever imagined!
Hey everybody, drew Lins, the wireless nerd here and today I wanna introduce you to Waves. This is gonna be a new segment that I'm putting together every week on Mondays or Tuesdays or Sundays, depending on when I have the time to produce it, but I'm gonna release it every week and I wanna talk about what's going on in the wireless industry from three perspectives what's now, what's new and what's next. And this will be a quick segment, maybe 15, 20 minutes, talking about what's going on in our industry on a week by week basis, because there's a lot happening right now and I think that something like this will lend itself to keeping up with what's going on. Try and keep it short and sweet, to the point, add some perspective for myself, maybe bring some friends on, get to see and understand what they're doing, but talk about what's happening in our industry. So I'm just gonna go ahead and launch.
Speaker 0:I wanna talk about what's happening right now because an article was published and I saw it and I added it on my LinkedIn and I thought it was pretty interesting to read about, and it was talking about the new Vision Pro from Apple, giving you the capability to make the invisible visible for engineers, troubleshooters and technicians and one of the things that they mentioned specifically was Wi-Fi. So they're going after this patent where you can put on this headset and you can be able to see the Wi-Fi and the wireless signals. And if any of you know me or have ever followed me, you know that that's something that I've been pretty passionate about for the last four or five years. I have a background a little bit in working with software propagation, analysis companies, modeling companies, and I've always been fascinated with being able to see the unseen, and so this announcement about the patent coming from Apple really hit home. You know, last year just about this time I was in Madrid showing off this work that I had done with some great friends, had helped put together a software package that had taken and shown en masse to people who could put on a headset and see what the Wi-Fi looked like inside of a hotel room. So, Timo, you know Timo's got some great stuff that he's put out there. He presented at WLPC and showed it off and we figured out a way to commercialize a little bit.
Speaker 0:But you know, there's always been this need to be able to see it and I think that the implications for that are so far reaching that until we really start to use it, we're not really gonna understand how impactful it's gonna be. And I like to think about, you know, taking the software component maybe out of the middle and just pushing it, you know, into that middleware side where someone who's designing a Wi-Fi network can just put on a headset and walk into a building or walk into an open space and have the floor plans brought in and be able to place access points where they need them to be and see where that coverage is. Or, from a troubleshooting perspective, being able to strap one of these headsets on and walk outside and say, you know what, there's no 5G in this area, and I can understand why and calling in and making a modification to a tilt on an antenna and have it, you know, changing that propagation where they can see it in real time. I think when people start to visualize what they can't see today, especially with things like RF, it's really gonna make an impact, especially with people like us in our industry, where we want to make sure that people have the best quality networks that are out there and we want them to be able to do that as easy as possible, right? So something like this, I think will go a long way. It also mentions you know HVAC and being able to see airflow, being able to see where cameras are located, being able to see sound. You know, so you put in a speaker and you can see where that speaker goes.
Speaker 0:So it's really cool that this visualization of non-visible phenomena that Apple is going after. It says, for example, a device may detect and or receive information regarding one or more non-visible features within a direct or pass-through field of view of a physical environment and display a visualization of those detected non-visible features at the correct location of those features in the physical environment, sounds extremely familiar to the work that Timo has done, to the work that Kelly started to work on at iBWave a while back, to the work that the EDX technology guys are working on. Lots of really cool things that are happening there and I think it's just the beginning. You know, coming from meta and being able to work with that team over there and understanding you know what their vision of the metaverse was, it really hit home for me in a way that this could be something that could actually use day to day, instead of carrying around a spectrum analyzer or, you know, using a phone to identify what's happening. This gives me a way to really visualize what's going on. And it's crazy, because there's been so much work that's been done in the last couple of years for people to try and bridge that gap. And I look at, you know, even with the new iOS 17 and the work that Adrian's done and you know, all this stuff that's been put out there where you can run the shortcut now to see more Wi-Fi information on your iPhone. It's just another one of those things where people want to be able to see the RF and you know you try everything that you can to see it, and I really feel like we're right on the cusp of being able to visualize it in a way that we've never been able to do before. So I think when that happens, I'm interested to see what happens to those tool sets, what happens to spectrum analyzers, what happens to software solutions, what happens to, you know, the iPhones walking around and, more importantly, what happens to site surveys, and so that's.
Speaker 0:You know that's what I wanted to talk about for the what's now, because that that you know that just happened, that I think that was posted a couple of days ago, so that pattern is going out and you know, it makes me want to buy one of the Apple devices. I'm not going to lie, I think their VR headsets are a little bit more expensive than I was, than I was willing to put into, but if you balance it against the cost of a spectrum analyzer, now you're talking about unlimited functionality compared to what a spec-an can do for a fraction of the cost. So it's kind of interesting to think about. What does that mean? I don't know, you know, I don't know, and I'm instead of talking about what's new. I'll save that one for last but what I do want to talk about is what's next, because this leads into that, and I'm really putting a lot of thought right now into how site surveys are changing and how the work that people have to do to do a Wi-Fi survey is changing.
Speaker 0:I think that we're, you know, as I mentioned, I really feel like we're right on the edge of this new iteration of how we, how we work and being able to visualize the Wi-Fi as something that I think is very important in that. But also I think that there's a lot of tool sets that are available now that we didn't have before. There's a lot of really interesting information that we can gather from access points and from sensors, and then we can take that and really leverage the power of the cloud to smash all that data together and figure out what it's doing. And I don't, I don't foresee a need for some, for for so much activity in the future when there's so many sensors that we can deploy. So I think for me what's next is on, the future of RF design is really starting to leverage the network, and I have a whole talk about this coming up at WLPC in Prague in October.
Speaker 0:You know, 22nd through 27th, I believe, is WLPC in Prague and in Europe. It's going to be so much fun. I hope, you know. I hope to see a lot of people, a lot of friends there. It's an incredible time. If you're, if you're, in Europe, please make a make time to go to it. It's a fantastic event. And don't forget, you know there's also the call for papers coming up for WLPC in Phoenix in February, which you know.
Speaker 0:If you're listening to this and you are not already familiar with the Wireless LAN Professional Conference, I would strongly urge you to go look up WLAN pros and look up the Wireless LAN Professional Conference, because there'll be a lot of talks about. You know similar topics to what we're talking about here what's now, what's new, what's next? At WLPC you get to see a lot of what's new and what's next. You know you probably deal day to day with what's going on right now, but it's always important to keep that vision on what's happening. And so when I my talk in Prague is going to be about that future of RF design and about understanding you know what a site survey looks like today and what a site survey is going to look like a couple of years from now.
Speaker 0:If you start to think about things like being able to integrate sensor components into wireless access points or leverage. You know data sets from different sensors and devices and how you merge all that together to get the data that you need to keep you from having to go out on site. So don't spoil it. But that's the gist of it. I mean, there's really a lot of technology out there today that allows you to do so much with your network, and then, when you add to that, you know this whole VR component of it. Oh man, that's like. Now you have all this crazy stuff going on. So I think that that covers my what's now and what's next what's new?
Speaker 0:I'm going to give it a shout out to my buddy, klaus at Wi-Fi now, because his newsletter keeps me pretty updated on what's going on and he had he published about last week, september 20th. He published how he went down to Qualcomm in San Diego to go to their Analyst Day and he did a really just a great job breaking down what they talked about, and a couple of things caught my attention here, especially coming from the service provider world. So quick background on me is I used to build internet service providers you know, dial up internet service providers, wireless internet service providers and then I had the opportunity for a number of years to work at Comcast, which you know, one of the small national internet service providers, and one of the things that we always struggled with at any of those is understanding what that user experience looks like in their home or in their business. And there's, you know, once you hit that D mark, there's, there's no observability behind that. You can't tell where someone's going to place the access point, you can't tell if it's in a good location, you can't tell if it's in a closet, and so when, when the service doesn't perform the way that a customer expects because the access point isn't where maybe it's it could be best placed. There's no real way to understand how to you know how to help fix that, and so it's the struggle that goes on, with ISPs trying to figure out how do we provide tools and technology to make sure that customers have the best experience with the smallest amount of input or the smallest amount of actually having to to do something so that they can put the AP, you know, wherever it is that they that they see fit, and so Qualcomm announced this thing, that that really got my attention, and Klaus says in his article arguably, this may be as close to the holy grail of residential Wi-Fi QoE management as we have ever seen, and I love that quote because, you know, a lot of us who have been in this industry for a while started off with quality of service and identifying ways for data flows and service flows in order to, you know, make a better phone call, make a video, you know a better video whatever it is.
Speaker 0:But I think now QoE is really the metric right Quality of experience. What does that experience look like and what can we do to make sure that it's a strong experience? So Qualcomm has introduced a service, defined Wi-Fi which looks like. Basically, you can push down different types of service flows depending on what type of traffic is coming across that network video, voice, vr, whatever it is and being able to do that when you understand what the traffic is, prioritizing and qualifying that service within the home so that you can give better data flows to individual devices or individual services to make sure that the stuff that you want to happen is happening independent of you know whatever else is happening on the network, I think is really cool, especially when you combine it with MLO, because I think MLO, coming in Wi-Fi 7 multi-link operation, is going to add a lot of really important functionality.
Speaker 0:I think that's one of my you know it's one of my favorite things with Wi-Fi 7 is the ability to use, you know, one radio one radio for your upload and one radio for your download and aggregate those together right, so that you're no longer just constrained to you know your phone or your device communicating with the wireless access point in a single radio. Now you can leverage that Five gig for download or you know, five gig for upload, six gig for download, two, four for you know clicks and keyboard strokes and six gig for high speed downloads. I think MLO is going to be exceptionally awesome when it comes to what technology. You know the way that Wi-Fi works with whatever technology you're using, so I think that that's really cool. I'm glad that Klaus covered that, you know, in his report. He also talks about high band simultaneous multi-device scenarios and this is pretty cool for Wi-Fi 7. And also Qualcomm was showcasing this where you basically have your device and your device is communicating with Wi-Fi to the access point, but it's also communicating with Wi-Fi to the VR headset, so you're no longer constrained to whatever you know, from your phone to your AP, to your headset and back and forth.
Speaker 0:Now you can really leverage MLO in a different way and I hadn't really thought about that. To be honest. I thought about, you know, it's great for my device to a router, to, you know, a Wi-Fi access point, whatever it is, but I never thought about how I could connect multiple Wi-Fi devices together using multi-link optimization or aggregation. So I think that there's a lot of really neat things you know, and I think that that's really what's new. I think that's where I'm getting excited with Wi-Fi 7, you know not just the 6 gigahertz component of it, but how that 6 gig is going to be used, especially with regards to MLO, and then breaking it down into service flows to handle that QoE at the end user level.
Speaker 0:I think that that's really neat, especially when you talk about, you know, the Apple headset right, or the Meta headset or whatever it is. Now that headset has the opportunity to process a lot more data faster because of that optimized Wi-Fi connection to the device that's doing the processing, whether it's a phone or a tablet or, you know, a laptop, whatever it is. Now it's got the ability to do that while still giving you the capability to process all your data using a different service flow in Wi-Fi 7. And again, I think that that definitely all leads into where we're going from an RF design perspective, and I think that RF design has never been more important, especially when you start to talk about this. You know, I love the idea that you can just put stuff out there and it'll optimize itself and figure out where it needs to be and figure out what channel to use and how much bandwidth to consume. But I think that RF design is always going to be needed in some way, shape or form. So I think that this is a great way to level up where RF design is going.
Speaker 0:Anyway, I hope that you had fun listening to this. Like I said, I'm gonna try and keep it short and sweet. You know, I think anywhere between 12 and 18 minutes and then I lose my. You know, I lose my train of thought too. So thanks for listening to this first edition.
Speaker 0:I'm wireless nerd and this is Waves, and please look for me at Future Event. You'll see me out there. I'll be doing some impromptu recording and I do also wanna take this opportunity to just absolutely put it out there that part of this is understanding what's new and what's next is working with vendors. So if you're a vendor and you want me to showcase something or you want me to look at something and take a look at a technology, please feel free to reach out. I will absolutely be available for sponsorship as well. So if you wanna sponsor an episode, be my guest. I'm happy to have you.
Speaker 0:Follow me at Wireless Nerd on X. Follow me at Wireless Nerd on Instagram on threads Wireless Nerdnet. That's where to find me. And again, thanks for listening and appreciate it, and I'm looking forward to this. I will be posting this as a podcast as well, so be on the lookout for it on Apple Podcasts, spotify, anywhere you can get a good podcast. So that wraps up my first edition, right on the Cuspier of, I think, 15 minutes. Enjoy your week and I will talk to you next week from our HQ down here in beautiful South Texas. Have a wonderful week and I'll see ya.
