So if you’re a hospital and your wireless goes down, you’re not only losing money, you’re also Losing lives. You’re potentially sacrificing patient care. Yeah. Welcome to another, episode of Unraveling IT. My name is Nate Troyer. I’m an account executive, and we have today Garrett Wiesenberg. He is the director of solutions engineering, and we’re discussing a riveting concept called wireless. We kind of just live with it and understanding it and maybe knowing the value and the pitfalls that can happen in adopting a wireless solution is probably a topic that is worth some discussion. So Garrett, thanks, thanks for joining us. Fun fact, I used to work for Garrett. He was my boss in name only. We often discussed wireless because one of those solutions people think should just work. And how do you overcome that? How do you overcome that idea that, I mean, it just works. You just throw up a couple APs and Bob’s your uncle while I’m on the Internet. Well, it usually starts with, quite a bit of planning. And in that planning, we start discussing the business outcomes. Right? So the way I like to describe it is that everybody just thinks that wireless works because they always say at my house, in my home. I’ve got Frontier, Comcast, whomever it may be, and the wireless just works. They’ve got a single router usually placed somewhat centrally in their home, and it just works wherever you’re going and whatever you’re doing. What they don’t understand is that business Wi Fi is different from your home Wi Fi from the perspective of it’s not just one access point placed centrally in the building trying to service all of your clients. By clients, I mean devices, whether laptops, cell phones, tablets, etcetera. With business wireless solutions, you have multiple access points that are going to be placed all throughout your facility to provide you with with good coverage. Well, if you’re in a ten thousand square foot warehouse, one access point may be so far away that you can’t see the signal and you can’t connect to it. Your device can’t see the signal. Your device can’t see the signal or connect to it. And so you have to go from AP to AP to AP as you kind of walk through that facility and get to, you know, the place that you’re going. In that process, you’re going to be roaming between all of those different devices. And that’s something that typically doesn’t happen in home internet or home wifi usage. And that’s what makes wireless more complicated than people tend to to realize. Mhmm. So one AP would cover my house more than likely, and I’d be fine. Correct. Yep. And and if we take that paradigm and then try to apply it to business, that’s really not the case. Yeah. Though those ISPs have it figured out. They know that a single router placed somewhere in the house can more than likely cover an average sized American home. Okay. Okay. So what are the what are the the pitfalls in that you’ve at least seen in in, you know, clients adopting, a wireless solution that doesn’t, like, work out? I have devices that can’t see my wireless, signal or they’re not able to connect or what whatever. Is it, like, multifaceted or is there one predominant thing? It’s very assessment upfront to understand the RF environment in that given space in conjunction with the business outcomes that you’re trying to to achieve. So what’s a wireless assessment? A wireless assessment is, there there’s a few different ways you can kind of handle it. There’s a predictive and then there’s a passive. The passive is typically what’s performed first. We would come on-site and we would perform, a complete walkthrough of your entire facility using a tool that’s monitoring the RF environment. You’re gonna have to tell us what RF means. Radio frequency. Okay. Alright. Explain like I’m five. Yeah. So, radio frequency. I mean, everything operates on the RF spectrum from, you know, the actual radio waves that you listen to, you know, in in your car to light to Your microwave. Yeah. Your microwave. I mean, everything has some presence on the RF spectrum. So what are some things you’re able to see when you do these types of wireless assessments? I’ve been able to pinpoint, you know, somebody in the kitchens using the microwave because all of a sudden we see a complete flood of the entire RF spectrum. Which would prevent people from connecting. Prevent people from connecting. And that’s why it’s so important that you analyze what’s in your space to better understand what we would need to do to design around that. Plasma cutters are another great example. They operate and cause a lot of interference. I found, Apple TVs. I found Roku devices. I’ve found Bluetooth speakers all the way you know, I I found almost anything you can possibly find in in clients’ environments by performing these, passive on-site assessments. So what are some of the what are obstacles that you would see to a good wireless, connectivity in a, bank as compared to say a hospital, compared to, you know, a machine shop. Those are drastically different environments. I know. I know. Yeah. So, you know, your your basic office building, it’s just going to comprise, you know, however many users you may have with Yeah. Our main devices. There’s usually not a lot of interference outside of your your basic microwaves and and some other, you know, minor odds and ends anything Bluetooth. But it’s a fairly simplistic environment. It’s more about just just providing good wireless coverage and throughput to your to your end users, really, is what it’s about. So they can walk from their desk to the conference room. In a medical facility, there is a drastically different approach you kind of have to take because there’s so many medical could Or could be in like a lead case room. Yeah. Or in, exactly. Lead case rooms. I mean, I performed, some work at the hospital downtown here, and I was cutting into some drywall to to run a cable. And the drywall in that room was four layers thick because it was a burn unit. Oh, okay. And so, you know, you walk into those facilities, you never know what the architecture is going to be. It could be brick, it could be stone, it could be steel. I mean, an office building, usually pretty simplistic, steel studs, drywall on either side, pretty basic. A hospital is definitely gonna have some other challenges around not only the architecture, but the the use cases because if the wireless is down, all of a sudden, you might not be saving as many lives as, you know, you Yeah. You need to be. It’s it’s imperative that their wireless stay up and running for, you know, critical safety systems. But there’s also a lot of other factors and and materials and interference objects, things that will absolutely cause interference in that facility. Okay. Then you go manufacturing and that’s a completely different ballgame because usually you’re talking about a wide open space that’s Or metal, metal everywhere. Yeah. Exactly. It’s usually a wide open space with a lot of metal shelving and that metal shelving is usually filled with Metal components. Whatever parts and pieces you want. You know, ranging from metal parts to, you know, just boxes. All these things. Anytime a wireless signal tries to propagate through any material or try to go through any material, you’re going to lose some of that signal strength. Mhmm. But obviously, the harder the object, so, you know, you think of drywall versus metal, the less it’s going to get through. And so if, you know, in most of my, in my experiences doing the wireless assessments for those manufacturing facilities, while it’s wide open and you could technically put an AP dead center in the middle of that warehouse and it would more than likely cover a couple hundred feet either direction with with ease. It’s all the shelving and other objects that they put into that warehouse that causes the issues and causes or facilitates the need to put in more access points. So that’s that’s really good to know. I think that’s, that’s kinda like leading into my next next question, which is, you know, now that we have an idea of what we need to put up and how we need to put it up, and, you know, where access points need to be. How do we secure it so that, some some cyber criminal, you know, doesn’t get on to our wireless and start wreaking havoc. I mean, obviously, I think most people watching this wanna, like, there’s SSIDs. There’s ways that you can say, like, you guys can be on this wireless channel or this wireless channel. But what what’s what really should you do to secure your wireless network? So the way you secure your wireless network should fall in line with the framework that you use to, secure your entire network. Okay. It’s just it’s an extension of that. So, you know, obviously, we, of course, adopt or try to, you know, push the adoption of zero trust Mhmm. Which assumes you’re already breached and it’s providing, you know, the the idea is that you provide users with only access to what they need and and At the time of need. Yeah. At the time of need and and nothing more. Most modern wireless solutions from all the the big name players have the capability to integrate with either Microsoft for, you know, SSO or, you know, certificate authorities and and and leverage a lot of different, features that give you the ability to lock down, you know, when users are accessing it, how often. So you can try so they’re they’re log driven. So you can track those logs back to a seam so that you can know what’s going on. So you can basically just tamp down on something Yep. When it’s happening. A a great example is, you know, back back in two thousand ten, two thousand fifteen, pre shared keys were were older age. WPA’s, right, or even WEP keys. Right? Oh, yeah. WEP. Yeah. Good old WEP keys. Do you like thirty six character long WEP keys because it’s so impractical. Anyway, yeah. But now we’ve kinda moved we’re we’re moving away from those pre share keys because what we find is that if you have a pre share key, you can potentially join a device that should not be connected to your network to the wireless. You know, prime example is my personal cell phone, should not be connected to your internal network for for any reason whatsoever. But if I know the password, I could do that. So, you know, they’d move from that into, you know, LDAP or or user based authentication where username and password, that still poses the exact same security risks because you’re only looking at the credentials and not the devices. The user credentials. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what you’re basically saying is, like, the the whole LDAP thing was still it’s only looking at the user because I can type that username and password in on my phone, or I can type it in on my computer, I can type it into my iPad. Like, okay. Exactly. And it it was simpler because it was something that you had to use each and every day. So you knew what your password and credentials were. So it was easy to connect to the wireless. If your password needed to change, you could change it and reconnect. No big deal. And it prevented, administrators from having to go in and, you know, change the the pre share key every time an employee quit that knew it or, you know, every time they hire somebody in, it saves a lot of the administrative effort on on the back end, but it’s not necessarily the most secure because it still puts the control in the user’s hands as to what devices get connected. K. So then they moved into user credentials and device based authentication. And that’s great because what that does is it takes the the user credentials and then it also will authenticate the device and and make sure that the device is allowed to connect. Okay. That’s great. But it also created more administrative headache because now, if a certificate is not on that device and it’s not authenticated, they can’t connect. If their password resets and their only connection is wireless, it creates an issue where they can’t change their AD password and reconnect at the same time kind of a thing. Yeah. It’s kinda like having a a building where only your staff can get in, but, oh, by the way, I have to issue you a card now. Yep. And that’s a whole process. Yep. And so where we’ve really evolved to is more, a certificate based authentication that leverages not only certificates, but, either, you know, conditional access policies or security group of some kind to basically state that, you know, any company owned devices that’s a part of your domain dot com or dot local Yeah. Can join the wireless network as long as it’s in the security group and has this certificate. Don’t some of them also do automatic like, this have this happened on my phone too. Like like, I can I can add my phone onto our network, but I need to have certain applications Correct? Present. And if they’re not present, that doesn’t happen. It’s automatic. Yeah. That I mean, that’s that’s that’s MDM. That’s also conditional access policies checking, like, almost like a host check, essentially, to make sure that you have an EDR or an AV solution or, you know, any anything of that nature that your company would require. We’ve even had requests to make sure that only Windows eleven PCs with certain Windows feature updates installed are able to connect to your wireless. And, you know, there is a level of granularity that we can get to. Don’t know that we can go quite that far, but we can at least That seems like gigantic. Yeah. It would be a definitely a On your team. Well, because I mean, if if you don’t have the the security, feature update, you have to go do a Windows update. But if you’re not connected to the Internet, how do you As we know, the customer is always right. Now that that’s, that’s really interesting. So we’ve we’ve discussed, you know, the fact that while people may think it’s not difficult to do wireless, it’s actually incredibly difficult. Our first topic, deciding which APs you need, where they should be located. That’s the outcome of a wireless survey. Then securing it is more about what what features do the does the actual equipment have, which brings us to, you know, why would I want to buy a business wireless solution versus just, like, non business or very low grade business equipment or maybe even home equipment that you could get at, you know, Best Buy. Because I mean, Best Buy sells, you know, wireless equipment. That’s not bad. I think it depends on the outcomes. Right? So if if you’re a hospital and your wireless goes down, you’re not only losing money, but you’re also Losing lives. You you’re potentially losing lives. I mean, you’re you’re sacrificing It’s the income of it’s the source of your money. Yeah. You know, you’re you’re potentially sacrificing patient care, you know, whereas it’s same thing with manufacturing. I mean, the biggest reason manufacturers and and their warehouses typically have wireless is to scan and pick parts off of shelving and get that out the door. If all of a sudden your scanners can’t connect to wireless, you’re down, you’re losing money. Right. You know, offices like like our office, for instance, most of our users, connect via wireless. In that scenario, if wireless goes down, we can’t work. We would all have to connect to our hotspots, and it would be very difficult to kinda do what we need to do. A lot of offices also still run on ethernet cabling. So it may not be as impactful to, you know, your standard office. It just depends on your use case scenario. But with, you know, a lot of scenarios, it’s really about your business outcomes and whether or not you’re going to be losing money should you go down. And the reason I say that is you can go to Best Buy and you can pick up, you know, an an ingenious wireless solution or Linksys router or whatever it may be. And you can install that in your, you know, your facility all over the place. You’re gonna run into a lot of issues, with, with your outcomes. Number one, because roaming between all of those devices typically isn’t going to be seamless, meaning you’re physically going to disconnect from AP number one and physically reconnect to AP number two. Oh, so that’s Instead of seamlessly transitioning between them without the user really having, you know, much of a, an impact. So there’s business outcomes that absolutely are gonna dictate what wireless solution you should go with and and why it would matter. But then there’s also a financial impact, to going with those low cost, entry level, you know, either high Well, isn’t isn’t there an administrative impact too? I mean, typically, those aren’t gonna have consoles, right, that bring everything together. Correct. Consoles typically don’t exist to manage your Wi Fi seamlessly, you know. Right. So you’re so you’re so you’re logging into devices by the side of the device Got it. Yeah. Individually. Okay. On top of that, security, right, needs to be front of mind because those devices typically aren’t receiving, you know, as many security patches as often, because they’re just intended for end user, you know, homes. I mean, they’re they’re not being patched daily by by Microsoft. Yeah. There there there’s a lot there there’s less of an expectation. Yeah. Exactly. It’s not quite as important. The expectation is that it works. Not that it that has tons of features. Exactly. And so, you know, security needs to be to be front of mind as well. You want the product to be supported. You want it to be secured. You want it to work. And in the event of an outage, or, you know, a failed piece of equipment, you want to be able to quickly recover and and get back up and running. Mhmm. And that’s where I see the the true downfall of those entry level or, you know, consumer grade wireless solutions is that there’s typically no warranties or, support on them whatsoever. Outside of maybe the most basic, but if you’re Right. Like like email support. Yeah. Like if you’re I’ll email you and maybe in a day you’ll email me back. Exactly. If your device goes offline, it it dies for whatever reason, you need to get something put back in there so that your business can get back up and running. Well, what if Best Buy, Walmart, wherever is is out of those today? Mhmm. You know, what are you gonna do? Now you’re introducing maybe a potentially, you know, a third option into your environment, and now it’s even more of an ad hoc, you know, nightmare. Yeah. You know, just a a kind of a offshoot of this conversation, you know, when you get into the the business enterprise level wireless stuff, does the hardware change drastically enough for you to, I’d say between, like, models, to go like, oh, the you know, this hardware is better than this hardware is significant. Like, you’ll you’ll notice a difference. Or is it more administration how you know, ease of administration and features that are more software driven and not hardware driven? Are you talking about vendor comparison? Yeah. Vendor comparison. In the same product line. No. Vendor comparison in the enterprise space. So now we’ve we’ve left the best buys behind, and now we’re like, okay. I I can buy into why I need an enterprise vendor. Yep. But now I don’t know what to do. Is it Meraki? Is it Cisco? Is it Fortinet? You know, is it Ubiquiti? Because they play in that space too. Yep. So or HP. Yeah. So number one, every company makes great products. Every company makes not so great products. I mean, they all make, you know, they all want to make money. So they’re all making Yeah. They are for profit like this. They’re very much so for profit. But they’re all, you know, offering up products that are very low cost and low barrier to entry, and then products that products that are, you know, designed for the San Diego Comic Con convention center Yeah. Sort of thing. Yeah. Right. With massive APs that can support a lot of users with external antennas, etcetera. But if you’re you’re talking about just comparing vendors and and which one to choose, I would first, you know, ask what is your current stack and where are you looking to go with your, networking technology in in the future? Because I think that’s gonna dictate it because, you know, Meraki, Fortinet, Cisco, Aruba, you know, Aerohive, even, Ruckus, you know, all, all these, all these vendors that, you know, make pretty decent, you know, business grade wireless. And Datto’s in the mix now too. Datto’s also in the mix. Kaseya technically, but Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Still Datto’s product owned owned by Kaseya. But, you know, they all make great products, and they all will work. But it’s going to depend on how do you want to manage it. It’s the administration kind of like you were you were getting at. Each vendor is gonna have like models that are all comparable in terms of specifications, features. They’re not drastically different from from one another. How they’re administered though and how they’re they’re managed on a day to day basis does differ per vendor. And not necessarily drastically, but enough that it might make, you know, your decision for you. So for instance, some vendors, are still operating with on premise controllers, hardware controllers only, which can be a pain. Who are those vendors? Give me names. It doesn’t matter. They can, that you know, with those on premise hardware controllers, you’re you’re it’s difficult to manage multi sites from a single hardware controller. I mean, we did this all the time with Cisco and and the flex connect versus local mode. And there’s a lot we can get into there. And and to be fair at the time, you know, when we were when we were deploying the the Cisco wireless controllers, they were the they were the ones to have. They, I mean, they were the the cream of the crop back in, you know, twenty fifteen time frame. Yep. I mean, ten, fifteen. Now it’s all kind of become a a bit of a commodity in, in, in a way. It’s really more your flavor of choice. Okay. So obviously Meraki, Fortinet, Ubiquiti, they all offer a cloud type controller where you can monitor maybe Well, they all they all offer, a centralized management. Correct. It’s just where does that where does that lie? Yeah. Do you have to manage it? Rockey has no Yep. Has no on prem centralized management. It’s all in the in the cloud, and then Fortinet has the ability to do both. You can do one or the other. Yep. Exactly. I’m surprised I retained that information. You’re the wireless guy. I I wanna I wanna circle back to one thing that that I kinda kinda cut off. During the during the actual wireless survey, what other things happen from that standpoint? I mean, is it just a predictive survey or is it No. So, I mean, it can be just a predictive, but it typically starts we we like to start at least with the passive to understand, you know, the RF environment. Okay. And then after we have all that data, we can take it back, you know, to to the office and using a essentially a modeling program, we can basically build the facility in in three d. Oh, cool. And place access points wherever we need to place them to kind of achieve the the outcomes and put in the RF, you know, the the radio frequency measurements that we call. So you’re not guessing. You know exactly where to put it. We have a very good understanding of exactly what that outcome’s going to look like. Okay. You know, give or take a smidge. Okay. That’s Is that the technical term? That’s the technical term. Yeah. It’s a smidge this way and that way. And as always, after the implementation phase, we do another quick passive survey to to ensure that, the actual outcome of of everything’s completed Yeah. Aligns with, you know, what we had predicted. And if any adjustments need to be made, we recommend and and take care of the adjustments right then and there. Do you find that you need to do a lot of adjustments? Not typically. Unless for some reason the environment’s changed. Warehouses is is a great example. They move shelving around from Oh, yeah. Yeah. Start of the Yeah. Assessment three months earlier to when it’s done three months later. Mhmm. It doesn’t take three months to do that, does it? No. It it’s Okay. It’s a very quick process. But, you know, based on on client timelines and everything of that nature hardware availability. Yeah. It’s good to plan. Well, thank you, Garrett. Thank you for coming on and kind of, demystifying some of the wireless questions that we get, some of the attitudes towards wireless, and helping, you know, our viewers and the people who listen to us, make, I would say better strategic decisions. Yeah. Happy to be here. Alright. Good? Everybody like that one? Alright. Was it actually recording? Yes. Yeah. It was recording. Recording. Well, this would be the outtakes. That at the beginning, like, the the flubs at the beginning. There were no flubs by me. So Wow. This is really awkward. Oh, it is. Yeah. This is awkward, isn’t it? Okay. Everything has some presence on the RF spectrum. Including human bodies. Right? Correct. If the wireless is down, all of a sudden, you might not be saving as many lives as, you know, you Yeah. You need to be. I mean, it could definitely impact your your overall hastening them to a foregone conclusion for all of us. How do we secure it so that, mister and missus bad guy is not getting on to it, and I don’t know what else to call it. You’re potentially sacrificing patient care. Yeah. And it’s absolutely worth it. I like the way you put that. It was better than me, like, people are dying like, that’s patient care. Yeah. Very professional sounding. Keep going. Special question for you can leave it in or not, I’d say leave it in. I mean, seventy five percent of the statistics are made up twenty five percent of the time. Right? So Okay. I didn’t wanna throw out a a percentage number. Alright. But That’s good enough.
