CRN hosted a roundtable discussion in June among 12 wi-fi experts to discuss the state of the wireless channel.

Attendees told deputy editor Tony Yoo at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney that the explosion of connected devices has led to an abundance of opportunities for solutions providers.

Guests:

• Paul O'Donohoe, Dimension Data Australa
• Chad Lurie, Tetran/MOQdigital
• Darren Lynn, Uplinx
• George Soumilas, Enosys
• Andrew Ratcliff, Matrix CNI
• Deni Saupin, Matrix CNI
• Carl Jefferys, GX2
• Brendon Major, MIT Services Group
• Darrin Hunter, Red 29

• John Gonzalez, Extreme Networks
• Mark Verbloot, HPE Aruba
• Phil Tarbox, Xirrus

• Tony Yoo, CRN

Wireless is no longer a side-business

When we first started the business, wireless was a little bit of a sideshow. Now it’s very much mainstream and one the main pillars of our business, alongside security, voice, switching and routing. Wireless is probably our number one solution set at the moment in terms of revenue and engagement with customers. So it’s huge.

Phil Tarbox, Xirrus

There’s no Ethernet jack on the tablet, there’s no Ethernet jack on a smartphone. It’s the only way to get these devices connected to the network.

Deni Saupin Matrix CNI

Our concentration is around what Aruba and HPE are doing these days. By all accounts, I would say that [the HPE-Aruba] acquisition is going very well because we’re starting to see feature sets appearing in the traditional HPE side of the business which was a feature in Aruba. Mark - we’re very happy with what’s happening there. We were a bit worried when we heard about the acquisition... But we’re quite happy with the way it’s going.

Customers are ditching cables

Is wi-fi technology at a point where customers can consider going all wi-fi and dumping the cable side of things?

Darren Lynn, Uplinx (pictured)

We’re going through that exercise with one of our customers. They’re currently building a new building – four floors. They are comparing the [total cost of ownership] of putting in 250 wired ports against putting in 20 ports for wireless access points and the odd utility device. I had the conversation last weekend and all the details came through yesterday. I go back to my education days and everything was wireless except for printers. You’ve got 30 kids in a classroom, you’ve got a 1,000 kids in the school, you got 300 teachers - there were a lot of switches, but everything was wireless except the printers.

Brendon Major, MIT Services Group

We did a customer last month that was a church. The reason we moved them to completely wireless is because they moved into an old school. It had concrete roof, concrete floor and concrete walls. The cabling was all kept free and half of them were broken from mice eating through it – it was just a nightmare. The entirety of the whole organisation, which is 200 people, runs on wireless. It was easier to run 10 cables or 30 cables than it was to run 300 cables.

Schools are at the cutting edge

I think the education market in Australia, I’m sure Extreme Networks and HPE Aruba will agree with this as well, has very much been at the cutting edge in terms of implementing wireless technology. An IT manager in a school, from a wi-fi perspective, has got a more difficult job than a CIO working for a leading bank. These are very complex networks, with highly mobile, highly unpredictable people who are having to connect to the networks. That’s where it’s been really important for us to have partners that have really specialised in this.

Brendon Major

A lot of the issues are around teachers’ expectations and what the wireless technology can actually do. You walk into a classroom and your wi-fi just works – that’s great – but they’re [also] expecting to walk in with a new device that’s never seen the network before and for it to just work.

Darrin Hunter, Red 29

A challenge in education is getting people to invest in replacing technologies that they put in not so long ago. The old-school way of doing wi-fi that a lot of people rolled out, even up to a couple of years ago, isn’t cutting it now with the number of devices. Education really opened their doors to BYOD. We’re seeing a lot of the limits being lifted on students being forced to only have one device on their network.

Wireless is becoming a recruitment tool

I think people are moving away from wi-fi as a method of connecting. It’s more about a method of communicating or driving a business task. The great thing about it is through technology rather than face-to-face, you get an opportunity to be able to have context-aware interactions and that’s where we’re going now.

Businesses are now starting to recognise they need to be able to change the experience for their customers. But also it’s around the staff themselves, right? With the Generation Ys and Zs coming in, connectivity is now a basic human need. When you’re trying to attract people into your workplace, the level of coverage and the type of coverage and the access to a variety of devices determines whether you get the cream coming and working for you or you get the dregs that come and work for you. That could be a massive business differentiator.

Every hotel needs good wi-fi, or else

We’re having a great time. The hospitality business is very buoyant as well – in this country, in Asia, and the US. The hospitality market has some different aspects – your standard enterprise customer may not realise there’s integration with hotel PMS systems so that when wi-fi is typically for free now, in some cases it might be a poor quality, or average quality wi-fi for free and then premium quality for loyalty members or if you pay extra.

To a hotel, wi-fi has become the biggest issue for them. If you get a guest who has a problem with wi-fi, they’ll go onto TripAdvisor and they’ll say “crap wi-fi experience” even though they were maybe having a few difficulties, being tired and emotional at 10 o’clock at night, and didn’t know that they were in airplane mode or something. For hotel management, all of their remuneration now is based on the quality of TripAdvisor reviews. One bad wi-fi experience can really ruin a hotel manager’s quarter.

Not only does the quality of infrastructure have to be good but also the quality of your helpdesk that take calls from hotel’s guests at 10 o’clock at night. It has to be pretty good to talk people through so they actually have a good experience. That’s a big part of it as well.

Top channel partners make the difference

There’s still a perception – and I’ve been in wi-fi for about 10 years now – that it’s all the same. “It’s commoditised, it’s just wi-fi. It’s just all the same.” We know that’s not the case at all. We know that it’s far more complex than that. It’s somewhat frustrating when you still have those discussions and people don’t really understand that it is complex: the design has to be done right; that there are sometimes very challenging routes of deploying.

It does take a good integrator and also obviously choosing the right vendor. But to me that is the frustrating part of my job, trying to convince people that it’s not all the same, that there’s more behind it.

Wi-fi must satisfy the Twitterati

The Barangaroo South Public Reserve was an interesting project and we were brought in quite late in the piece. We effectively inherited a design and a layout of where the wi-fi needed to go. We also had to contend with the fact that the stuff was outdoors and rugged. A typical wireless access point, which you can mount externally, can handle the wet and is all-terrain. These wireless access points had to be mounted inside those poles, which can get up to 100 degrees in the summer.

We recently completed an extension to that wireless in their cutaway. They launched Australian Fashion Week in the cutaway of Barangaroo Reserve. One of the interesting elements there was because of the amount of concrete and barriers that are in that area, there is no mobile reception. It was really important for the bloggers and the Twitter-ers to have access to wireless during Australian Fashion Week. There was a big push to ensure that the wireless would be adequate to sustain the social media requirements.

CRN

Did you need to put in temporary infrastructure for that?

Chad Lurie

No, we managed to get it done in time but the wireless access points had to be mounted about 50 feet (17 metres) up because the height of the cutaway. There was a lot of OH&S requirements around mounting. Then you couldn’t penetrate the slabs around the cabling.

Density is the big challenge

It gets down to the number of devices – and that’s one of the biggest challenges. Some schools now are introducing those 3D goggles into the classroom for educational purposes. We’re going to see more things going into the wireless network, so density is going to be crucial.

Our experience in open public spaces and venues show traffic seems to flow one way. You expect it to be downloads and things like that to be the bottleneck – but it’s not. It’s actually people taking photos and using social media to actually share their experiences. That’s the traffic and some of the capacity planning needed is a real eye-opener.

Mobility and endpoint are now synonyms

As a security specialist, Enosys often gets brought in for security consulting before a wi-fi network has been deployed. Can you tell us about what some of the pitfalls are at that stage?

George Soumilas, Enosys (pictured)

Yes, so there are things like BYOD, CYOD, access policies, on-boarding policies, what’s being accessed inside the perimeter, what’s being accessed outside the perimeter by a BYOD or CYOD device – it’s all those permutations. You have organisations that have devices and services outside the traditional perimeter. How does wireless play into that? It’s just got to be seamless.

I was at a two-hour workshop at Microsoft, and Microsoft made the terms mobility and endpoint the same thing. They’re not even wireless players so if they’re saying that, it’s done and dusted. Don’t even talk about it anymore.

Security vendors are no good at wi-fi

My perception is that all the security vendors out there try and do wi-fi. You can go and buy wireless access points from Sophos, Fortinet or Check Point. But I think the security vendors are doing wi-fi rubbish. You can’t go and get Sophos access points and kit out a university campus or a school.

George Soumilas

Yes, you can. You can do it.

Darrin Hunter

You can but it’s going to be rubbish wi-fi. When I said security companies are doing wi-fi rubbish, I think wi-fi companies do security rubbish as well. There isn’t that crossover yet. I think that there’s heaps of potential.

Adding higher-margin services

A lot of our business is in the education space. What we found, particularly in the tertiary area, we’re talking about business criticality. They’re actually viewing their wireless as a potential key differentiator against other training providers and neighbouring universities.

Many of these customers, they don’t generally have wireless specialists as part of their engineering teams. They’ll have generalist network engineers or people of that ilk. We’re actually getting engaged to provide not so much a managed service but an extension of their services team. We’ll work to a little bit of an SLA with them and we’re selling fixed-price services, services with SLA’s around that.

The as-a-service Holy Grail is elusive

Are customers buying outright or are more of your clients moving towards access-as-a-service?

Darrin Hunter

We’ve been looking at wi-fi-as-a-service for a while now. We’ve been struggling with how you sell to somebody if you say: “Rather than you spending $50,000 upfront, we’ll sell it to you for $20,000 a year for five years, so it’ll cost you double.” There’s huge risk in that for us, even if we were to make double the money.

You end up with two or three people sitting there full-time, constantly monitoring, adjusting and fixing the network to do what the customer wants. All your hardware and services margin is just going out the window because it’s [costing] you so much to service that. Have it worthwhile for the customer and worthwhile for the supplier. Getting that balance right. I haven’t found a way to do the maths to get it to market yet.

George Soumilas

We’ve looked at wi-fi-as-a-service with customers and it generally breaks down. Because having it per user, per month just doesn’t work.

Deni Saupin (pictured)

We have the same issue that I’ve been hearing from everybody else. It’s really hard to model what your break-even point is and where do you start getting yourself into deep water with the support part of it.

‘Refresh cycle’ is taboo

Pictured: Brendon Major, MIT Services Group

CRN

Chad, do you have any thoughts on refresh cycles - whether you experience repeat business from that?

Chad Lurie

I think in our space, with the customers that we deal with, a refresh conversation about wireless would not end well. We see a lot of organisations now allocating budgets to road maps to remove the amount of equipment that they have. How do we get into the cloud? How do we get more agile? How do we kill the server rooms? How do we get out of our co-lo and go to Azure and AWS?