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Showing posts from April, 2020

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 the

The Risk and Reward of Wi-Fi 6 Upgrades

With 6 GHz Wi-Fi around the corner in the form of Wi-Fi 6E, upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 becomes a risky proposition. It was just over a year ago that your humble blogger heard the "news" about Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). The Samsung Galaxy 10 was on the market. It supports Wi-Fi 6. Our sales engineers were happy to inform us of the upgrade possibilities. Today's news is about a new technology, Wi-Fi 6E. It offers access to the 6 GHz frequency band, which is great. It is not available as a software upgrade from Wi-Fi 6 (as your humble blogger discovered recently ), which is not so great. "Future proofing" has always been elusive. As we are all experiencing right now, nothing can protect an organization from the whims of nature (human or otherwise). I wasn't saying "wait for 802.11n" in 2005 or "wait for 802.11ac" in 2011. If budget, manpower and leadership align, go for it. The reason your humble blogger says "wait for Wi-Fi 6E" today

Five Facts About 6 GHz Wi-Fi

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Two pieces of important news hit the wire recently: the 6 GHz band was approved for Wi-Fi, and alcohol sales have skyrocketed .  Combine the two, and what do we get? A five-pack of Coors Light Cold Hard Facts about Wi-Fi in the 6 GHz frequency band. Editor's note: This is a relatively long post, but 6 GHz Wi-Fi is an undoubtably robust topic. If you have questions after reading this blog, comment below or contact Ben via email or Twitter using the information below, and Sniff Wi-Fi will address those answers in a future post. We may be knee-deep in a global pandemic, but that doesn't mean your humble blogger can't brew up a post on the topic of 6 GHz Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi professionals will soon have unlicensed frequency available in the 6 GHz band. Here, then, are five facts to know about Wi-Fi in the soon-to-be-available 6 GHz frequency band. Fact #1: The 6 GHz band adds 1,200 MHz of spectrum for Wi-Fi The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the federal