RUCKCast #78: Back To School

In our latest episode, Jim and John sit down with special guest Ryan McCaigue to talk about every kid's most favoritest time of the year...back to school! For our teaching trio, they discuss key factors in deploying and supporting in-school Wi-Fi that will earn them that A+!

To learn more about client capabilities, check out "The List" at https://clients.mikealbano.com/

For the WLANPi tool that was discussed, check out that out here https://www.wlanpi.com/

To read more about the profiler tool to check out your own clients capabilities, check out this link https://userguide.wlanpi.com/wlan-pi-os/wlan-pi-profiler

Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E
and
https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/

Transcript

RUCKCast 78 Back to School

John Deegan: Good morning, Mr. Palmer. How are you, sir? 

Jim Palmer: Not bad, John. You let the music go longer, even. I like that. 

John Deegan: I did, and you know, I'm looking at my soundboard, and I'm like, there's a way I can do it that actually, and other podcasts that I listen to do this. I need to figure out how to do it where I can fade it for like a minute, where it's still playing very softly in the background.

So maybe for a future episode, I'll figure that out. 

Jim Palmer: I don't know, a minute? 

John Deegan: You know, whatever. It's just, you know, a little background music, a little mood music, you know? 

Jim Palmer: Well, then they're gonna accuse us of being radio DJs, and that's not cool. 

John Deegan: Well, I mean, we don't, I mean, well, yeah, anyways. So, so how are you, sir?

We, we we're back for another episode. And I like that, back for another episode. We're at segued, right? It's back to school time. 

Jim Palmer: Oh. Man, you went fast today. 

John Deegan: Those are the worst, I think those are the worst words in the English language. 

Back to school. 

Jim Palmer: It depends. So, I found out. Alright. Justin, if you're listening, I'm sorry.

I found out, I found out when I was an adult that my mom and my aunts that lived near me, you know, within a couple of miles, turns out every day, every year on the first day back to school, they would all get together for a celebratory lunch to celebrate the end of summer and the beginning of the...

Their time. You know, so I guess it really depends. There we go, Sam. It depends on whether or not back to school is good for you or bad for you. 

John Deegan: That's true, but I still think it sucks. It's torture, man. It's the summer's great. But yeah, so back to school for the those of us in the wireless and networking profession means a lot of different things.

And so we figured it would be a good time to have a nice special guest on to talk about Wi-Fi in schools. 

Jim Palmer: Is he that special? I mean, really? 

John Deegan: He's, he's joining us. He's up early. He's joining us. Of course he's special.

Jim Palmer: Yeah, we got Ryan McCaigue here. He's what are you, Ryan? Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself. 

Ryan McCaigue: Thanks a lot. Good morning. 

Jim Palmer: I've obviously declared you not special, so. 

Ryan McCaigue: Yeah, yeah, just the average guy, SE. 

John Deegan: Might be the record for how fast we got off the air. 

Ryan McCaigue: So, I'm Ryan, and I'm an SE. I cover Arizona. And New Mexico and Utah.

I've been with Ruckus about I'm coming up on 10 years. It's going to be my 10 year anniversary here pretty soon. 

Jim Palmer: Nice. And so,

So as part of your SE duties, for three different states. What's some of your bigger customers, the ones that you kind of work with? I mean, is it school districts or, or? 

Ryan McCaigue: Yeah, I've got actually I have two, I have two territory account managers that I cover and we have a mix. So for the first many, many years that I started doing design work here and working it was a lot of school district work.

So school districts across the state where we're our biggest customers and E rate is a big deal for us to be able to go out and do appropriate design and work with school districts to provide the connectivity that they need. Over the last couple of years what's really come up for me is the multi tenant housing So I do a lot of support for MDU service providers.

I've got a couple of very large ones in my patch that I work with. And so that's that's a growing vertical that's in my space, but education is still my biggest vertical in these three states. So we have large school districts deploying hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of access points across the state.

Jim Palmer: And I happen to know, because I do my research as a good podcast host, unlike John, that you actually came from a higher ed background, correct? 

Ryan McCaigue: Oh yeah, that's a good point. So I call myself a recovering academic. So, so I was... I was actually a Dean for Network and Communication Management for a major university that had 21 campuses.

I rolled out their NetComm program and we did online and in person lab experience. We did everything from BICSI compliance testing to certification on switching and routing and telecommunications phone so basically everything in that space. We trained technicians, engineers that would go out and deploy and... And do networking. So I did 16 years in higher ed and the students kept coming back telling me they were making more money than me . So I was like I think gonna go do something else. .

John Deegan: I was gonna say, I've heard that a lot. I I've interviewed a few, a few times to my bosses who might be listening Nothing recent higher ed, and, and I've, I've talked to a couple people that work there now, and they're always kind of floored by the salaries they can get out.

But they also were very, very big on the perks. I know, I want to say four or five years ago, I interviewed at a couple different colleges in the area in in New York. And for me, the one... Big appeal was free tuition. As a parent of triplets. I was like, sign me up. That's huge. But yeah, But now 

Ryan McCaigue: for me, it was a lifestyle.

I love the lifestyle was wonderful, right? So, you know, I get that little summer break and you know, there was just something about it that It didn't have the pace of life that I have now, that's for sure. 

Jim Palmer: So, you know, it's funny you talk about, you talk about the summer break and I know one of the things that I always look for on social media when we get to this time of year, the end of the summer break, is I always see the post come up.

And I guess now it's a post, not a tweet. I don't know. That's a complaint for a different day. But I always see the, I always see the pictures come up. I mean, it's like, oh, you can see the students coming back in because you'll see this flat line of clients. And then all of a sudden, like those clients start to climb as, you know, and as the, as the administration kind of comes back in and then, and then, you know, some of the early students and then, you know, the main push and you can see those spikes go up.

And I always, it's always interesting to me because you can spend the entire summer working on your network. And then you have like this, this. You know, one week period where it goes from absolutely dead nothing to this massive load. And it's always like, how do you, you know, when you're, when we talk about education and this demand for, you know, making sure that it works right on the first day, what are some tips and tricks that you found over the years of working not only in your previous position, but also, you know, what you do today, what you've been doing. What are some of the things that you found that is like, hey, these are some essential things that we always check when we're getting ready for our back to school, as will the network support.

You know, this influx and as everybody returns to the classroom. 

Ryan McCaigue: Yeah, that's great. And, and it's really apo. 'cause yesterday I had a couple panic calls from some schools right off the bat. Right. Yesterday was the first day here as well. And, and so these spikes in traffic a lot of times there are hidden things in the network that cause issues with connectivity and, and we're, they're so highly dependent on Wi-Fi to work.

You can't interrupt the learning process And Teachers will immediately go to plan B if anything fails in the technology space. And nowadays with all the online testing and other things, it's mission critical. And so for us I think the first part of essential operational stuff is to do good design and good Wi-Fi engineering and to understand the properties around Wi-Fi. 

My favorite statement is always to say less is more in Wi-Fi. And what I mean by that is you've got to find a balance. I would love to sell you an access point, a lot of access points. It retires quota. Right. 

Jim Palmer: Right. 

Ryan McCaigue: So, so it's great when I can just, you know, Hey, put more APs in, but in reality more is not better and more APs create some problems in the network.

And I think many schools have been tempted to take what I call the easy button. Let's just put an AP in every classroom. I've been to schools where I had, I saw as many as four access points in a classroom. And two, and the one next door, and I said, well, why do you have so many APs? Well, this is the computer lab, and I was like, oh my God, no, you guys don't understand that that, that device has got limitations particularly around channels and bandwidth, it's turn taking, right?

It's a CSMA, you know, not, not collision avoidance, or collision avoidance, excuse me, not collision detection, so the idea that it, it, it has to ask for a time to be able to transmit, and if it's taking turns with all of these other access points, and if they're on overlapping channels then that turn taking is latency and poor performance. So good RF design is the first thing to make sure that you are finding a balance.,

John Deegan: You know, I've heard for years, you know, you look at Twitter and X, whatever, and YouTube, and you watch all these school design people. And I've always told it was just one AP per classroom. You're saying it's not that easy? 

Ryan McCaigue: It's not that easy, and actually you're not doing yourselves any favors, right? So, I kind of liken it to the noisy room, right?

The three of us are taking turns talking right now, right? And there's not a lot of contention for the airtime. But if we were in a really loud room, a conference area, with hundreds of people talking at the same time, it'd be very hard for us to hear each other and to communicate effectively. And so as we add more access points into an environment, even if we have to turn the power down, and there's some tradeoffs for that those signals carry.

And whenever there's APs on the same channel, they're contending to use that channel. They have to take turns. So, by appropriately spacing access points, using the attenuation of the walls of the environment, we can control the spread of that signal in a way that we try to minimize as much as possible that co channel interference, the idea that two APs on the same channel are going to be taking turns in that space.

So getting them appropriately spaced is key. Depending on the structure, I may do one AP in every second or maybe even every third classroom. Now, the caveat being that your AP has to be engineered to handle 30, 60, 90, 120 concurrent using user devices. And, and I think ours are, they, they routinely handle that and no problem.

So I think that the, it's ultimately a question of doing good RF design upfront, understanding the properties of the building and. Placing the APs at appropriate distances and giving them as much headroom, I'd say, signal to noise ratio as possible, so you get high throughput communication. I want devices on and off as quickly as possible with as high a bandwidth as I can get.

John Deegan: That I find interesting, and I've done, you've done extensive work in, in, in educational spaces. I've only done a couple projects, but the thing that's probably most interesting, when you mentioned design, and you hit it, and I like how you said it, it wasn't 30, 60, 90, 120 users. It was user devices, because I think that's one of the areas that really has been exploding.

You know, you used to go into a conference room or a auditorium, and you'd see a couple of APs because, oh, you're gonna have 100 students in there. Nowadays, 100 students might have... 400 devices that are connecting to Wi-Fi. That, that part's really, I think, been hard for some people to kind of get their heads wrapped around that it's you know, you can have a 20 user classroom and your needs are, like the class size is not growing.

It's the device count that's going up. 

Ryan McCaigue: For sure, for sure. Well, and then, you know, there's interesting environments in schools too, like I don't know they call it the, you know, cafetorium or something like that. I mean, it's like a gymnasium, theater, You know, eating everything environment. But one of the things I've noticed is they're doing centralized testing.

And so now they're bringing in hundreds of kids on folding tables with laptops or tablets into that one space so they can watch them take standardized testing and I get administrators calling me saying You know, we're having trouble with our testing. I'm like, you have one access point. That's a four by four AP and you got 400 kids in this room trying to use their devices, of course, you're going to have problems, right?

Jim Palmer: So, you know, I have a, now it's my turn, John, you know, I have a question about that, you know, because it is something that, you know, you alluded to, even before we started recording this episode, you know, about. You know, online test takes, online test taking and, you know, and then you were talking about the reliance of education these days on the internet and networking and technology and Wi-Fi specifically because, you know, with the exception of the computer lab, you're not going to wire every student in.

And I'm always curious about when the... When you get these calls about the online test taking where they put everybody in the, we call it a multi purpose room where they have the collapsible, you know, the foldable tables and chairs and everything like that how would you solve something like that?

I mean, is it like, do you bring in like some APs on a stick? And, you know, be like, Hey, we're going to turn off APs around that area. I mean, is there, is there, I mean, to me, I look at it as like, almost like an event and go, you know what, we're, we're changing how we're doing our day to day business. We're making an event.

And so for me, I'm like, well, no brainer is you have this plan where you say, Hey, we're going to bring in APs on a stick and we're going to set these things up. I mean, is that something that?

Ryan McCaigue: I've seen that, right? So I've seen people do that. And a lot of times, at the get go, when I'm doing an RF design for a school district, I'll ask them, how are you using this large space, right? Right off the bat. You tell me, what's the maximum number you plan to have connected in this space at any given time?

And that's per classroom, per community space, per, you know, in this case You know, the in the, in the event space, you know, the, the cafeteria. So there's a couple of strategies, right? Yes, you, I. I typically will say, first of all, you need to move past a standard 4x4 access point, multi user MIMO.

Let's move to the top of the line high density access point that's got 8 streams up and down. Right? Let's go to something that can handle, you know, many more concurrent devices, has more horsepower, has more bandwidth. Is backfed with multi GigEthernet has appropriate power. And let's then figure out how many of those we need to put in this space in order to handle the maximum load.

Now, a lot of times in these environments, I don't necessarily always put the APs in the room. So there may be one or two in the room, but typically there's some circulation spaces right adjacent to that room. Maybe a hallway, a corridor, some other classrooms, or things like that. What I try to do is I'll use the walls around that building, around that space to attenuate some of the signal. I have APs just outside the space that are kind of reaching in and grabbing a corner of that space. It helps, you know, again, limit the power and the throw and the co channel interference while still providing that additional level of connectivity. Right? So, strategically placing them is really key.

Right? 

Jim Palmer: And I have to, I have to you warm my heart because I thought I was the only person that would look at attenuation and, and, and look at some of the, you know, cause I used to get this at my last job, but there'd be like, how do you deal with these walls? You know, to give you, you know, like this crazy attenuation, like, you know, normally we think of a sheetrock walls, like 3 DB and, and, and, and yet at my previous location, my previous job, we'd have walls that were, we had some that were 30 DB.

And they'd be like, how do you deal with that? And I'm like, how do I deal with it? I'm like, I use it. I use this attenuation for my benefit. 

Ryan McCaigue: Yes, exactly. 

Jim Palmer: So I think, I think you bring up a really good point that I think a lot of people, and especially in K through 12, don't necessarily think about because they're not as learned in the black arts of Wi-Fi and radio stuff, you know, that, you know, sometimes embrace these attenuation, high attenuation things, you know, like, Oh, we have this one wall that's crazy. Well, that's great, you know, because use that to your advantage. Don't look at it as an impediment. Look at it as, as a benefit.

It's a benefit. And so I, I love the fact that you brought that up because not too many people think like that. 

Ryan McCaigue: Yeah, it's and there's other structures, right? So a lot of times there may be support beams or other things in a facility that you can use to create that radio isolation that you're looking for.

So that as you rotate through the channels that are available, you're not, you know, you're not re engaging on the same channel with another AP, you know, because you've used the facility to help control that spread. 

John Deegan: So that brings up a good point and I swear it's not like we're watching a script But you're mentioning channels and you probably are reading the script.

But anyways, it's good. That's good. That's why Jim writes it So you mentioned channels and there's And Jim, kind of, I'm going to tie them together because, Jim, you mentioned the black arts and we had this conversation, I think, yesterday about a friend of yours. One of the problems, this isn't on the script, so I'm going to screw everybody up a little bit.

One of the problems with a lot of, and I've seen it just in talking with some folks in higher ed, or just ed, not higher ed necessarily, just educational support folks in general, the training funds. Well, the timing to do the training and the training funds. So, a lot of these folks are winging it. They're not necessarily CWNEs like Jim and I..

They're not necessarily RCWA or, or any sort of level of training. It's literally on the job, seat of the pants, and getting it done, and, you know, MacGyvering it, which is great, and my hat's off to you, because we were all there at one point, believe it or not. So they don't necessarily know a lot of those tricks, but so you mentioned channels and channels are a big deal Channel widths is width is one thing we can get into but DFS channels is a hot topic So you know would you recommend using it?

How do you steer the people in that direction because that's a it's hard to know right like those channels Some devices support them, some devices don't. Jim's shaking his head because I know what he wants to drop in there. 

Ryan McCaigue: This is a, so the RF engineering space is a bit of a religious debate. 

Bye bye.

Right. So the idea I'm, I am pro DFS channel, right? So I want as much channel diversity as I can get. In a space. And so my advice to most of the schools that I've worked with, and it's been sound and it's tested and it's worked out is turn them on. Okay. Let, let's, let's get them on there and, and make that, that diversity of channels available in that five Gigspace and then watch.

And, and watch your log for a while and see if you get what I would call a DFS event where a radar, you know, NextRad sweep comes through and your APs, you know, ungracefully vacate the DFS channel and drop everybody like a rock and then they struggle to find their way to, you know, it's not announcing that it's changing, it just happens, right?

So watch the log, see if it happens. If it's not happening, then stay with the DFS channels. The caveat being that, yeah, I've run into devices that do not support DFS channels. I remember one particular device that was used for screencasting from a tablet to a projector. And whenever the AP in the area was on DFS, the it would drop and it, it couldn't use it.

So they had to eliminate those channels. But for the most part, the benefits have outweighed the risks of using it. For most of my school districts, I have one district that's pretty close to an Air Force base that has some problems every now and then, but it's not like a daily occurrence. It's like once a quarter, you know, once, once a month they might have an AP or two that'll, that'll drop and rechannel.

But otherwise the benefits of being able to use those additional channels provides capacity and throughput and connectivity. That's, that's you know, beneficial to performance. 

John Deegan: So a hundred percent, a hundred percent. I agree. 

Jim Palmer: A couple of, a couple of things I, I'm going to mention out there for our listeners, and I'll put the links in the show notes is, You know, not have, you know, clients not working on some channels, specific channels, things like that.

It's actually a very common thing that we run into in the Wi-Fi world. And there's a couple of things that we use. And so if you're a school administrator sitting here going, or, you know, you work in IT, and you're like, how do I figure this stuff out? There's a couple of resources that we use that I want to throw out there for everybody.

And the first one is a link and we call it "The List" and it's clients.mikealbano.com And then 

John Deegan: He recently updated it too. 

Jim Palmer: Yeah, he did. I think he, I think he, anyway, he's back. But anyway, if you, and I'll put that link in there, and if you go there, there's just these lists and lists and lists of all these different devices, and it tells you what channels they support.

And so you can, you know, if you have a school issued device where it's like, hey, all of my students are using... this one Chromebook, you can go find it and figure out, Hey, does, you know, does it support DFS channels? Maybe it supports a lot of them. Maybe, you know, I found, I found a a device recently that supported all, all of the five gigahertz channels, except for four.

And it was like, and it was really up in the, in the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar channels, the 120, 124 128 range, kind of a 132. It was in that chunk that it didn't support. So that's a great resource. The other thing, and I'll put a link in the show notes, is a tool called the WLANPi. Now the cool thing about the WLANPi is it has a tool called Profiler.

And what you do is you basically, and this is what you, and this is what is used to build. Mike Albano's list is you take your client device and you associate to this or you attempt to associate to this tool on the WLAN Pi and it fails. But what it does is it tells you everything that that client supports.

And so those are two different things and I've used it in the past when I was having problems and come to find out that the brand new device that they bought for all of this one group didn't even support five gigahertz and it was like, and I'm like, and I'm like, how did you buy a device in the past couple of, you know, I mean, literally like in, in the 2020s that doesn't support five gigahertz and they managed to do it.

And so then it's like, great. Now I have to redesign my network to support 2. 4 in places where I really wasn't going to do it. So two resources that can help you out with that one. 

Ryan McCaigue: That's great. You know, I get, I get these calls too, or that people are saying, well, I'm only getting. You know, 50 meg or 80 meg and this other device is getting 400 meg or 300 meg.

And why is that? And, you know, having taken the time to explain multi user MIMO, multiple streams, that device is different than this device. This one's on two four, that one's on five gig. You know it takes a little while for. For people to understand that not all devices are equal. I've even seen, for example, in the Chromebook space in education what appears to be a homogeneous run of the same model of Chromebook somewhere in the process of the production line, they updated the firmware drivers for the chipset.

Or there was a change in a chipset. It looks like the same, you know, model and everything else, but it's... It's physically different or it's software different and as a result, the performance is different. And so making sure that the device drivers are up to date on these devices in education, that's a challenge.

And, you know, and understanding when you buy, you know, and, and they're going through thousands of Chromebooks, when you buy these Chromebooks every couple of years or so, really pay attention to what, you know, they're inexpensive, they're wonderful devices, they're basically almost disposable, but look look at what the RF characteristics and the hardware is, is telling you.

Right. So, but, and I'm, I'm with you on the two four thing. I have a couple of warehouse folks and these barcode scanners and belt mounted printers, they're all on two four still to this day. Right. 

John Deegan: It's a little, well that, and it's kind of a, I mean, it's. You mentioned 2. 4, and you're talking about 5, and we talked about channels, and you know, like you said, you're a big fan of using every usable channel you can, so at the end of the day, 2. 4 serves a purpose, whether it's IoT or not. Right? And, and it's a hot debate with anybody in Wi-Fi, whether you're a noob or a seasoned veteran, like it's the running joke. Two four is dead long live, two four. At the end of the day, it's still three usable channels. And even if it's like the worst performing devices that like in the case of I, not the IOT's bad, but like if, if it's devices that aren't critical, Let's call it that.

They can work on that. IoT devices don't need a ton of bandwidth to necessarily work. For me, in past lives, I left that for a guest network. They could do five, but I left two four on for the guests because I didn't care. They just wanted to get on. But... We've got this new gift from the government, 6 Gigahertz.

Yeah, so, so while AFC is still not a thing yet, and maybe it'll eventually will be a thing in the next few months, maybe we'll see it is usable for the classrooms. So I'm kind of curious how that's playing into designs. I mean, it's a huge chunk of new spectrum that's got to help. 

Ryan McCaigue: Oh, for sure. I'm super excited about that.

I mean, when you lay that down on the on a sheet of paper and you look at, you know, 2.4 little space, 5 Gigbig space, 6 Gigis the other two combined and then more, right? And so the diversity of channels that that's going to offer is just a phenomenal windfall for us. I think it comes with some, some interesting opportunities and, and also some challenges, some things to be cautious about.

So far the, what I've heard and what I've read and what I've experienced is it attenuates obviously a little faster than 5 gig. Right and it's kind of that similar thing, 2.4 penetrates wonderfully, 5 Gig attenuates a little quicker, the signal drops off, 6 Gig a little higher, also, you know, attenuating a little faster.

And so revisiting your design and your AP placement, most of the folks you know, I'm thinking of the RF design tool for that. People that we work with and other things are saying, eh, we don't think you're going to have to redesign this. Or, you know, if you're going to drop and swap some APs, it's not going to be an issue.

I'm, I'm kind of reserving that and saying it depends, right? So it depends on the environment where the APs are, how you're going to use them and all of that. But the main thing is it's, we're getting this, this entire amount of brand new spectrum. The devices will have to support it. So devices have to catch up.

And we've got some caveats around the high power, low power, or standard power versions that we have to deal with, some frequency coordination if you're doing any outdoor, and I have a number of schools that do outdoor bridging and or they do their football stadiums or their track and field spaces with outdoor APs and so there'll be some frequency coordination things that happen once we get to that ability to put these up outdoor and And, but for right now, I think the benefits are phenomenal.

Having the ability to have all of those channels. I'm reserving. Yeah, not so good, right? So I, so I, I think there's a bit of a wait and see here. What's going to happen with this Wi-Fi 7 you know, that's coming down the pipe for us. And, and so on the We're caught up in E rate cycles and equipment refresh cycles and chipset manufacturing cycles and, and many other things that I think are impacting the Wi-Fi 6E, you know, push per se.

Jim Palmer: Well, the one thing I can, the one thing I can tell you about 6 Gigahertz, well, I can tell you two things. One, there is a significant difference between, you know, this, the low power indoor that we have today and standard power, because AFC still isn't here yet, and John has his own personal rant about that, that we don't have time for.

And so that, that, I was really surprised when I saw that difference, you know, when you think, you think, oh, low power indoor, no big deal, but when you actually see it in operation. It's a big deal. The second thing I can tell you is it goes back to your point about the drivers for the chips, right? That is a very big deal at six gigahertz.

So if it's something that you're looking for, because yes. I could see 6 gigahertz being a great thing for K-12, assuming that your devices will support it. And, but it's going to also introduce something that's going to cause a lot of pain for administrators, you know, the IT people in these districts is keeping up with the chipsets.

With the correct firmware because it is so new. So, those are the two things I can tell you about that. 

Ryan McCaigue: Yeah, I, you know, my, my school administrators were, we've been educating them about the, the need for multi Gig switching as they do switch refreshes to talk about what their uplinks and stacking.

Bandwidth looks like an anticipation of these high capacity, high throughput APs. So we've been talking about that. And I think the the other thing that you know, and we touched on this earlier, we routinely, or I routinely tell my schools, if you have dual band devices, Chromebooks that can do 2.4 and 5 Gig, fly the student SSID on 5 Gig only. Okay, devices have a propensity to want to connect to 2.4, but a lot of times, you know, we're on 5 Gig only right now. I think at some point when we get to Wi-Fi 7 and we're doing, you know, 2.4, 5, and 6 concurrently, and we're able to, you know, pick those channels that we're operating on, it's going to get really interesting.

In that space. And so, I, I'm excited about the additional frequency. I think we're, we've got to work through some of the, the, the cycles for refresh and other things. I think you know, it's, it's, it's going to be a little while before we see a propensity of devices in the school that can support all that.

John Deegan: I think you hit on something important that's worth I'm stealing something that Jim and I talked about from the beginning of the week. It's important for anybody listening to this to remember that maybe, you know, we've got some higher ed or just general education support people listening to try and get a little bit more informed.

At the end of the day, Wi-Fi is not... Wi-Fi decision like what you go where the device is going It's all the clients and I'm not blaming the clients. It's the reality is it's a client decision So our job is Wi-Fi engineers or SEs or you know experts, whatever you want to call us we need to make sure we make the the decision as easy as possible, you know, whether we're turning up power, we can, we'll have another conversation in a little bit about that probably for another episode, but how we can sort of influence devices to go to things, like you said, make the SSID that you favor, only 5 gigahertz things like that, because clients will be sticky, clients will prefer 2. 4, just a they make funky decisions that we can't really control. We can try to influence them. So that's something important. It's not a cop out when your wireless engineer that's supporting your system says it's a client decision. It's legitimately the truth. I can offer it. I can't, it's the old, I can lead a horse to water.

It's not my fault when it drowns, because I can't control what that horse is going to do when it gets to that Wi-Fi signal. I just, I can't and with that said, I think this is a good, we're gonna I'll be behind the curtain here. We're going to split this into two episodes. I think this is a good splitting point because most of what we have left to talk about is on my favorite wired network subjects.

And Jim's gonna laugh because he knows it's... yeah. Anyways, so I don't think I have anything else on wireless. Jim, what are you thinking? 

Jim Palmer: I have lots of stuff on wireless, but 

John Deegan: We might have a couple that we start with in round two, but I think this is a good stopping point for the first part of this one.

Jim Palmer: Yeah. Let's bring, let's bring Ryan back for a second episode. Let's do it. 

John Deegan: We'll do it real quick. But so with that said, we're going to hit the outro music and if I can find the right button and we're going to hit it and then we'll be back in a jiffy. So hang on with us, Mr. McCaigue, and we'll talk to everybody on the next episode.