From Fries To Fiber, Dual-Mode APs, Multi-Cloud to WiFi 8, 5G & more!

A week in Vegas turned into a crash course in where networking is headed—starting with a potato-smashing contest at Five Guys and ending with Eero tunnels landing cleanly in AWS. That gut-level, customer-first perspective sets the tone as we dig into real demos, new tools, and the shifting policies that shape what gets built next.

We unpack how a simple site-to-site VPN and a transit gateway can turn small sites into first-class cloud citizens, then jump into Kiro, an AI-driven IDE that makes rapid prototyping feel effortless. A standout moment: teens using microphones and servos to drive a robotic hand that signs in real time, a reminder that accessible AI tooling can move ideas from spark to shipping. We also test the cultural headwinds—why younger folks view AI as wasteful—and explore practical paths toward efficiency, cleaner power, and responsible scaling without losing the productivity gains many of us rely on every day.

On the enterprise front, HPE’s dual‑mode Wi‑Fi 7 access points promise real buyer protection by letting teams pivot between Aruba Central and Juniper Mist without forklift swaps. Meanwhile, BEAD funding loosens letter‑of‑credit rules but collides with a new White House order tying eligibility to state AI policy, adding uncertainty for WISPs, co‑ops, and integrators trying to plan builds. From the show floor, the subtle star was networking: AWS Interconnect’s multi‑cloud links and unified DNS hint at a future where campus Wi‑Fi feeds smart paths into whichever cloud edge hosts your app. Add Ubiquiti’s UniFi 5G Max lineup and 5G becomes a serious primary or failover WAN that still lives inside familiar management. We close by charting Wi‑Fi 8’s coordinated multi‑AP vision—CTDMA, better roaming, and predictable latency—and where it will feel real first.

If this mix of hands-on stories, practical architectures, and straight talk on policy helped, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and leave a quick review. Your take: is dual‑mode Wi‑Fi 7 meaningful buyer protection or just marketing hedge?

Chapters

• 0:00 Vegas Recap And Five Guys Fry Race
• 2:55 Customer Obsession And Hands-On Problem Solving
• 3:25 Eero To AWS Via Transit Gateway
• 5:45 Kiro IDE And AI-Powered Building
• 7:55 Teen Projects And Accessibility Tech
• 10:10 Generational Skepticism And AI’s Resource Costs
• 12:35 AI In Networking Workflows
• 13:50 Wi‑Fi 7 Dual-Mode And Buyer Protection
• 17:42 BEAD Funding Shifts And New Constraints
• 20:37 White House Order Ties AI Policy To BEAD
• 23:32 Multi‑Cloud Networking Moves At AWS
• 26:47 5G As Primary WAN With UniFi 5G Max

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:00

What's up, everybody? It's Drew Lentz, the Wireless Nerd, and it is December 2025. I just got back from a week out in Las Vegas at AWS reInvent. What an incredible show. You know, I got to work on some really fun projects, obviously showcasing the five guys' burger joint that was out there. Posted some really cool videos on LinkedIn. One of the things that just made me feel really awesome was as soon as I walked in on Monday morning to start to get ready to set up our demo for AWS reInvent. Ed, the franchisee, walked out and said, Drew, are you ready to make an ass out of yourself? And I am always ready to make an ass out of myself, just so you know. It just depends on what level we're talking about. And in this case, he wanted me to compete against one of his employees and go head to head to see who could smash a 50-pound bag of potatoes into French fries faster, myself or Mikey? Mikey won, no shocker there. But you know, what really felt good was being a part of his team. I put on the hat, I put on the shirt, I smashed some potatoes. It was a really good time. And, you know, being customer-centric and customer obsessed and customer driven and all those other things is something that I feel like comes maybe a little bit naturally to me. I love to get knee deep. I live to get in the weeds, learn about people's projects, learn about their businesses, and really have a good time experiencing what they experience so that way I can craft a solution for them that works at every level of what they need it to. So that was really fun. I'm glad that I got a chance to go out there and do that. Okay, so all that being said, you know, we showed off a really cool thing. I gave a little bit of a preview of it last week, and that was the ability to connect Eero directly to AWS using site to site VPN and using the gateway, the transit gateway to connect different sites into AWS Cloud. It was really neat because I don't come from the AWS cloud background. I come from the Wi-Fi background. So learning a little bit about AWS networking and the way the transit gateway works and the way that site-to-site VPN works was really neat and a lot of fun. And I know a lot of you are AWS nerds, so it's fantastic to dip my toes into your part of the world. And I had a really good time doing it. ReInvent was great. I got to walk around the show floor, got to meet the team from Leo and see what they were doing with satellite services. I had a really, a really fun time. One of the things that I did that I absolutely loved was I got the chance to go sit down for about two hours on Monday morning, and I got to get pretty heavy into Kiro. And Kiro is an IDE for programming that brings together all these amazing AI tools into one spot, and it helps you develop things without really having to know a lot of the language behind it. Now, obviously, super helpful if you've got a background in programming and design, but what it allowed me to do was quickly iterate, quickly make, quickly design, and do the whole vibe coding thing at a level I had never seen before. So shout out to the Kiro team for the tool that they've put together. It was so much fun. And I walked away just like a kid in a candy store. It was it was awesome. I just I had such a good time doing it. So if you get a chance to use some of these tools, I mean there's a lot of really cool AI programming tools that are out there, and Kiro was really, really fun to interface with. So I went from doing that to a little area that they had at reInvent, which I thought was really cool, which is where they took students who had no background in programming or development, and they asked them to come up with an idea or an app or an application of some sort that they could use to, you know, to express themselves or change the world or whatever. And there was this really neat display of all these different things that had built by that had been built by teenagers. And the one that I liked the most was they had this robotic hand, and what it did is in real time, it took it basically transcribe I don't even I don't think transcribed is the right word, but it it would listen with a microphone, and in real time it would translate that to sign language using a robotic hand. And I thought that was so cool that you could, you know, take a kid who doesn't know anything about development, anything about programming, but they know that robotic hands exist and they know that they can use AI to build these tools, and they cobbled those two things together and they made this really impactful product. So that was really neat to see. But overall, I mean the idea that that the cloud, quote unquote, that big cloud thing in the, you know, in the ether, is going to enable so much uh innovative creativity by giving people the ability to harness AI at these huge levels is pretty insane. Now, I gotta say, you know, it's having these conversations with my daughter, she's 13, is always fascinating because I feel like her generation and the generation that's in middle school going into high school right now is really not a fan of AI. They, you know, nothing good to say. I think about something that she, I don't know where she got the quote, but she always talks about two bottles of water that every time you use AI, it consumes two bottles of water. And I've, you know, it sticks in my head. So every time I try like fire up perplexity or fire up Claude or whatever it is, I think about two bottles of water. Now I don't know if that's true or not. Maybe someone can fact check that, but it's the idea and the sentiment that AI is being looked at from different generations as a negative to so many things. And I just I understand the land stuff and I understand what's happening in Louisiana and the data centers and all these things that are consuming all of the things. And I just have faith that maybe now that's what's happening, but in the future we're gonna find different and better and more efficient ways to power, to operate, to run these data centers so that AI becomes better and less straining on you know on all the natural resources around it. But either way, I gotta say I'm a fan. I mean, some a lot of the stuff that I do every day, I rely on AI tools to work with, and it's so much fun. So if you haven't, you know, drank the Kool-Aid yet and you haven't gotten involved in doing some some programming, some vibe coding, you know, whatever it is, whether it's using Adobe Lightroom or whether it's using vibe coding or Kiro or you know, autofocus on cameras, like I, you know, whatever it is, there's so much AI that's happening right now, and the way that that works its way into our industry in the wireless and networking space, I think is fascinating. That's you know, meter up had their whole thing about what they're doing, and now there's a lot of stuff that's happening that people are gonna see surfaced as the way that AI is working into networking. So, anyway, that's my AI rant for the day. I hate to sound like you know, the person says that that buzzword over and over and over again, but I just I'm increasingly getting more impressed every day with what's going on, and I'm not on the side that's a hater, and I'm not on the side that's a super fanboy. I'm in the middle from the usability perspective. So I thought I'd shed some light on that. This week's Waves theme is Wi-Fi is getting more dual, more AI driven, and more funded. If you can navigate the shifting rules that decide who is actually getting those B dollars, lots of things that are happening there. So let's start off with the HPE dual mode Wi-Fi 7 APs. This is Mist and Central coming together on the same hardware. HPE used its Discover announcements to roll out Wi-Fi 7 access points that can be onboarded into either HPE Ruba Networking Central or into the Juniper Mist Cloud with the same hardware able to flip between control planes as customer strategy changes. This pitch is labeled as quote unquote buyer protection. Invest once in Wi-Fi 7 radios and AI ready silicone, then decide later whether your long-term home is Aruba Central stack or Miss Marvice driven AI ops instead of being locked into one controller ecosystem. From an enterprise and MSP perspective, this directly attacks one of the biggest barriers to switching vendors, which is the cost of forklift AP swaps just to change management platforms. It also signals how serious HPE is about integrating Juniper Mist acquisition and making that happen quickly, with plans to move Mist's AI large experience model and Marvus Assistant into HP Networking Central while pushing Aruba AI features into Mist over the next year. My take on this is that this is the first credible dual mode AP story at scale, and it's going to show up in RFPs as a hedge against buyer's remorse. I mean, a lot of people have been wondering how this is going to work. Should they buy HPE? Should they buy Aruba? Should they buy Juniper? Should they buy Cisco? Should they buy Eero? Should they buy, you know, everyone's trying to question what it is that they're buying. And at least for this story between Juniper Mist and HPE Aruba and whatever the name of all of that is, this is an interesting time. This, the the interesting tension is going to be how channel partners position this when each side, Aruba, you know, versus Mist, still want to own the account relationship long term. I wonder what that's gonna look like. I got dogs park in the background. That's okay. We're just gonna keep rolling. So it's fascinating to think about how this is going to affect not just the channel, but the end users as well. All right, let's talk about Bede funding, the letter of credit relief and some of the new gotchas. So NTIA's July 2025 programmatic waiver finally loosened one of the nastiest constraints in Bede, which is the letter of credit requirement that had effectively shut out a lot of smaller community-focused providers. This update lets awardees use banks that are quote unquote well capitalized or rated BBB minus or higher by a recognized rating agency rather than relying on a very narrow slice of institutions. And this allows the size of the letter of credit to ratchet down as a project hits deployment milestones. This is huge because before you had to have this crazy letter of credit from just a very few amount of agencies or banks or financial institutions that could provide it. And it seemed that it was built specifically to shut out certain groups or certain entities. So raising this or changing this is really awesome. Practically, this means that more WISPs, co-ops, and regional ISPs can realistically participate in Bede without tying up an unsustainable amount of capital for the life of the build. On the flip side, states are now weaving these new rules into their implementation plans, and some are laying layering on their own risk controls. So the game shifts from can I get a letter of credit at all to can I satisfy the specific state's version of acceptable risk while still running a business? Uh that from telecompetitors. So lots of lots of fun things that are happening there, but nevertheless, it seems like Bede is moving forward until you talk about some of the news that happened today or in the last couple of days. And so on that, we flip over to our buddy Drew Clark at broadbandbreakfast.com. And the headline is White House issues order pledging to withhold Bede funds from states with onerous AI laws. So check this out. I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read some of this article. President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at bolstering federal authority over artificial intelligence policy and requiring the Commerce Department to restrict BEAD funding if states' laws on artificial intelligence are too onerous, quote unquote. The executive order, labeled Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, makes minor modifications to the November 19th draft executive order, as reported by Broadband Breakfast. The draft version contained the aspiration that a single minimally burdensome national standard of AI regulation would actually exist, but the final executive order suggests that this is a goal to be achieved with Congress and said that the 2B developed framework should also ensure that children are protected, censorship is prevented, copyrights are respected, and communities are safeguarded. All new language that have been added to this executive order. Now, these changes don't impact the core conclusion that NTIA must issue a policy notice within 90 days specifying the conditions under which states may be eligible for non-deployment funding under the$42 billion BEAD program. In signing the order, Trump framed the effort as a matter of geopolitical and technological competition. There's only going to be one winner here, Trump said during the Oval Office signing, and that's probably going to be the U.S. or China. And right now, we're winning by a lot. Trump linked the order to a broader effort to speed permitting for AI data centers and their power supplies, saying firms will be allowed to build their own electricity generation will receive rapid approvals from the federal government. If they had to get 50 different approvals from 50 different states, you could forget it, Trump said. I need is one hostile actor and you wouldn't be able to do it. Now there's a lot that goes into this, right? And and talk about you know the thing that I kicked off this episode with, talking about AI and all the things that they're doing there. This this has an impact on that. If if the states aren't willing to play, or if there's you know, if there's onerous AI laws, as you said, then he's going to withhold funding from them. So now the onus is on the states to figure out how they're forming their quote unquote AI laws if they want access to Bede funding. And I it's just it if it's not one thing, it's another with Bede. And I think that that that is like the story that has consistently come up. And it's like the government keeps holding Bede funding over the heads of the states and the groups that can use it and that need it and that want it. And I I'm my fear is if they keep going back and forth and dilly-delling with these things, dude. I mean, what's it doing at the manufacturing level and at the channel level where people are like, are we going to ship or are we not going to ship? Are you going to buy or are you not going to buy? Do we need to produce equipment? Do we not produce equipment? There's so many things that go back and forth with Bede. And and, you know, as a small business owner in this space, in a in a space that could either be hired as a consulting or an engineer or an integration firm, man, I'm not I'm not touching any of this stuff because I don't want anything to do with it right now. I don't want to be anywhere near involved with what is happening with Bede until money starts flowing and projects start working because I'm not I'm not the type of person who wants to start a project and then get held up for 180 days on payment or trying to figure out how to pay crews to do work that isn't funded. It's just, you know, it these little you know puppeteering tactics that the federal government is using with regards to bead, dude, they just suck. And now this is just one more thing that's added on top of that. All right, so some other news from AWS reInvent 2025. Networking quietly gets more multi-cloud, and this was a big flashy headline. It was a big story that came out of reInvent. At reInvent 2025, AWS's flashy AI stories got the headlines, but the networking people were paying attention to launches like AWS Interconnect, the multi-cloud preview, which offers private high-speed links between Amazon VPCs and other clouds, starting with Google Cloud and Azure coming next year. On top of that, services like Route 53, the Global Resolver, promote, sorry, promise more unified DNS for hybrid environments, taking some of the duct tape out of the split brain and multi-region name resolution component of it. For Wi-Fi and campus folks, this matters because more core quote unquote core network functions, including security and traffic steering, are being pushed into cloud fabrics that span multiple providers. That makes the WLAN less about getting traffic to a single data center and more about intelligently feeding traffic into a mesh of cloud edges where policy and inspection live. So instead of sending traffic to just one location and trying to figure out is this better left and right, this is allowing it to go all the way across the board. The more AWS and friends normalize multi-cloud networking, the more pressure there is on campus and branch designs to be cloud aware by default. This is like a whole next generation of SD WAN, right? It's not just about internet breakout everywhere. It's about smart paths into whichever cloud edge is currently running the app your user cares about. So think about that. You've got an app running in Azure, you have an app running in AWS, you're trying to figure out how to route between the two. This is a really neat thing that's going to have some great implications for the way that user experience is crafted moving forward. My dogs are going bananas today. I think the UPS driver, it's Christmas, right? So the UPS driver's constantly at my door, so I apologize if you all can hear them in the background, but I got to get this cut because I've got a hot date with my wife. We're going to spend less than 24 hours cruising down to Mexico City to go watch Fred again on the USB 2 tour. It's going to be so much fun. I was able to grab tickets for that, book some last-minute flights, go down and just have one night of dancing in an incredible environment with my wife. And if you have any background on the whole rave culture thing, some of these events are so incredible because they're not announced until the Sunday before. And you've got a couple days to get your stuff together, get your travel ready, get prepped, and the events on Friday. So it's going to be a really fun time going out to support an event like this. And I hope that more of them are to come. So I'm going to keep rolling through the dogs barking, and let's see what this next story is about. Alright, let's see what else we got going on. Oh, this is a good one. So Ubiquity launched their Unify 5G Max lineup. This is supporting 5G as a WAN. Ubiquiti's new Unify 5G Max family, led by their Dream Router 5G Max, is about making 5G a first class WAN option that feels like any other Unified gateway to deploy. The flagship unit combines a 5G modem capable of multi-gigabit downstream, Wi-Fi 7 triband radios, including 6 gigahertz, and a 10 gig SFP plus uplink. It also has a 4.2.5 gig Ethernet switch and local storage via micro SD for Unify apps and N VR style workloads. I mean, this is like this is really neat what they're doing. You know, Ubiquity always has these really cool products that they bring to market, and this one is is no different. Everyone that's talking about it, there's there's a lot of love for it. The setup, I think, got a little klugey in some places, but overall, I mean, you've got an indoor version, you've got a pretty slick outdoor version as well. And there's they're dedicated, right? So you've got dedicated indoor, dedicated outdoor 5G max modems. The outdoor variant carries IP67 rated protection. It's built for pole or rooftop mounting to pull in better signal and backhaul entire sites where fiber isn't economical. And with list prices in the mid hundreds of dollars and availability slated for early 26, this gives MSPs and prosumers a modular way to stand up primary or fail over 5G at remote sites without giving up Unify's management model. So this is great for them as an integration to everything that they're doing. I I love that there's this, you know, this crazy path of, you know, I could say innovation, but it's also necessity, right? People are trying to leverage all these different ways to connect to the internet, where it's satellite or 5G or fiber or copper, whatever it is. And I love to see things just continually coming out to support people to meet them where they need on the connectivity side. So it's really, really neat. Now, this is awesome for pop-up venues, construction sites, and rural home lab nerds. It's basically 5G in a box that speaks into your unify system. The question will be how well it behaves under sustained load and how operators price their underlying 5G data plans once people start treating this as real backhaul and not just backup. So we'll see where that goes. A Reddit thread this week showed a home labber dropping a Unify 5G max modem on a second floor window ledge, feeding a dream machine, and pulling down multi-hundred megabit speeds with 20 to 30 milliseconds latency on a budget MBNO Slim. The kicker was when their cable ISP glitched during the primetime streaming, the family only noticed because the kids' Xbox Nat type changed. Everything else quietly filled over directly through that 5G, with Unify metrics catching a clean graph of the transition. So that was a pretty cool testament for what they're able to do. In one of the big demo halls at reInvent, a set of AI-powered ops booths were running live dashboards over the venue Wi-Fi while thousands of attendees hammered the network with speed tests and video calls. The fun part was when a nearby lab initially broke routing as part of a quote unquote chaos testing talk, a few demo pods saw their dashboards stall while others riding over a separate SSID with different upstream paths stayed smooth, giving a very real-time lesson in why segmenting expo Wi-Fi from critical demo Wi-Fi still matters. Alright, so it's coming whether whether it maybe sooner rather than later. It's Wi-Fi 8. So let's talk a little bit about Wi-Fi 8. Wi Fi 8 or 80211BN makes multi AP coordination a core design goal, not an optional add on, aiming for about 25% better throughput, 25% lower latency at the 95th percentile, and a similar reduction in packet loss compared with Wi Fi 7 at the same interference levels. Instead of each AP fighting for airtime on its own, coordinated multi AP schemes let APs share client context, negotiate who talks when, and manage roaming as if the entire deployment were on one distributed radio fabric. For dense enterprise and venue deployments, that means better handoffs, less ping-pong roaming, and more predictable behavior when clients move between BSS's, because the next AP already knows the client's QOS and security profile before the handoff. Vendors are positioning this as the shift from best effort Wi-Fi to something closer to deterministic behavior in crowded RF, especially for voice, video, and industrial applications. A key Wi-Fi 8 innovation is coordinated time division multiple access, known as CTDMA, where multiple APs on the same channel agree on who gets the transmit opportunity instead of colliding with random back-off. In practice, a controller or coordination entity assigns time slots so that nearby APs don't shout over each other, which cuts contention and makes latency more predictable for high priority traffic. This is particularly important for AI and sensor workloads where uplinks matter as much as downlinks in cameras, XR headsets, or robots pushing data upstream. Coordinated TDMA and related mechanisms like coordinated OFDMA and UL Mu MIMO or multi- multi-user MIMO are designed to keep those uplink flows on schedule even while regular best effort clients share the same RF. Wi-Fi 8 also extends spatial reuse ideas from earlier amendments into coordinated spatial reuse by allowing APs to transmit at the same time in the same channel when they can do so safely. Now, by exchanging information about interference in client locations, APs can adjust transmit power and reuse spectrum more aggressively without clobbering each other to death, increasing area capacity instead of just raw peak fi rates. On the client side, Wi-Fi 8 adds initial link setup improvements and coordinated roaming, where APs share client state ahead of time, like we just talked about, so that handoffs avoid full reauthentication and long pauses. The benefit for this obviously is fewer drop calls, fewer video freezes, plus roaming that feels like it's staying on that one logical AP even as devices move throughout these multi-AP environments. Now, here's the reality check. How much of this is actually going to be real? Because it sounds pretty fantastic. Analyst and vendor roadmap suggest that Wi-Fi 8 standardization will wrap around 2028, with early silicone and pre-standard gear appearing between 2026 and 2028, similar to what we saw with A211N, like right before it launched. Most agree that multi-AP coordination will ship in stages. Simpler features like coordinating roaming, basic handoff, and some controller-driven scheduling will appear first, while more complex schemes like full CDTDMA, uh CTTDMA, sorry, and joint transmission may be limited to high-end enterprise or industrial gear gear. So let's see. I mean, who's going to launch uh C T DMA first? It's going to be cool to watch. In other words, all these big promises for ultra high reliability, near deterministic latency, a massive multi-AP orchestration are directionally real, but that's going to depend on a couple things. One, how much scheduler and coordination complexity vendors are willing to build in controllers and APs? What like what's that silicone gonna cost? What's that what are those chips going to cost? What's what's that gonna cost the piece of equipment from a memory and processing side? Not to mention if you're putting into controllers or cloud controllers. We'll we'll see on that one. Number two, whether enterprises actually enable these features, which often trade simplicity for performance gains. And three, regulatory inspectrum realities in six gig and any future bands. I mean, cue the sound clip about what's going on in Europe right now with six gigahertz. A good narrative is that Wi-Fi eight's multi-AP features will be very real where there's budget, controller intelligence, and good design. For everybody else, it's gonna feel like Wi-Fi 7 Plus until the ecosystem catches up. So we'll see how long that that lasts. So if you have to take that one sound bite, that's the one. It's supposedly gonna be real when there's budget, not just from the money side, but also from the memory and processing side. So there's a quick uh snippet on Wi-Fi 8, and that wraps me for this week. Get ready to head to Mexico, gonna go have a great night. I will catch up with you all next week. Lots of really cool stuff coming in January. So enjoy the holidays, enjoy relaxing a little bit. I'll still have a couple shows before then, but you know, come January, we've got CES, and that's gonna be a doozy for me. Gonna have so much fun deploying some Wi-Fi there and having a great time. I'll show you guys a little bit behind the scenes there at CES 2026, and then going from there directly into NRF in New York City at the National Retail Federation, which is one of my favorite shows. Between those two, you get to see like all the consumer electronic stuff, and then you get to see all of the retail stuff, like one after another, and that really sets the pace for the new year. So if you're gonna be in Vegas for CES or New York New York for NRF, let me know. After that, and in and in three days, registration opens for WLPC and Phoenix. We've got three days on Monday. The registration for WLPC Phoenix 2026 opens. Do not sleep on this. Registration goes fast. I have a feeling this is gonna be a pretty exceptional year. Maybe we'll even get another sellout year. So make sure you buy your passes early, register for those boot camps, get everything ready for WLPC. I can't wait. It's gonna be really great. I've you know, I missed being in Prague with everyone, but we all get to catch up in Phoenix here in just over two months. So it's gonna be awesome. Make sure to register for WLPC, and I will see you guys soon. Have a wonderful weekend. See ya.