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Chips, Glorious Wi-Fi 6E Chips!

Qualcomm, owners of the Atheros line of Wi-Fi radios, recently announced the availability of Wi-Fi 6E chips. Game onnnnnnn! 6 GHz Wi-Fi is here. Sort of... Qualcomm is selling Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax w/ 6 GHz support) chips, but we don't yet know when enterprise-grade APs and mobile devices will begin supporting 6 GHz Wi-Fi. Chip-to-product timelines can vary. Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) saw enterprise WLAN vendors sell products only a few months after chip announcements. Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) saw the big vendors wait a year or more before introducing new AP models. A ton of concerns factor into a vendor's decision on when to develop, manufacture and market new AP technology. Vendors with small market share may be extra eager. Aerohive tried to boost their enterprise Wi-Fi profile by being a leader in Wi-Fi 6. On the other hand, some vendors' enthusiasm for new Wi-Fi hardware may be dulled by competing organizational initiatives. Aruba/HPE, for example, was veering f...
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At Least They Didn't Blame the Wi-Fi

Prime Video's stream of the 49ers-Cardinals NFL game received plenty of bad reviews on social media. While most of the negativity focused on stream quality, Wi-Fi largely escaped blame. There is one application type that confounds networks above all others, and it is live video. Pick your poison: voice, location tracking, on-demand video, cloud-hosted apps... None of them cause problems as consistently or predictably as the livestream. The issue is a simple one: broadcast vs. two-way. Packetized data networks are a two-way communication medium. Receiver must acknowledge sender. Live video has, since its inception decades ago, been a broadcast technology. Your television doesn't send anything to the local broadcast tower. Same with cable boxes. Same with satellite dishes. Pushing against this immutable scientific fact is commerce. Sports leagues see the billions of dollars being spent by streaming services, and they want some. Streaming services see the millions of eyeballs tun...
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Pi in the Sky, Part 1: WLAN Pi Basics

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For some Wi-Fi professionals, WLAN Pi is the ultimate swiss army knife. For others, it is a byzantine puzzle.  Your humble blogger takes great pride in taking the complex and making it accessible. For the WLAN Pi, it starts with the Basics. The WLAN Pi project has been part of the WLAN professional community for several years. Conceived as a some-assembly-required kit project, the Pi has now grown beyond its humble roots. Your humble blogger has been fascinated by the WLAN Pi for some time, in large part because of the involvement of Jerry Olla. Jerry is a long time member of the WLAN community. He is based in Wisconsin, which makes me like him. He believes that the Milwaukee Brewers should not have received a publicly-funded baseball stadium, which makes me like him less. (I kid, I kid.) Jerry reached out to yours truly after a tweet expressing frustration at the WLAN Pi experience. Many Wi-Fi people have read, seen or been told about cool stuff that can be done with ...
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