No… there isn’t a test at Wireless Field Day 5, but being one of the two new delegates to the event I wanted to gather as much knowledge as I could prior to the nine vendor presentations at WFD5. For the most part I know of each vendor and their products, but have limited working experience with their solutions, so I wanted to share some of my research I have done to prepare for Wireless Field Day 5. To keep this post of moderate length I cannot mention every vendor and/or resource, and the vendors mentioned here is in no way favoring them or a knock on the other vendors. With nine vendors presenting, and each having two hours for a total of 18 hours of demonstrations I’m sure to have plenty to share in future posts about all the vendors.
One of my fellow WFD5 delegates wrote a great blog post last week about the upcoming Wireless Field Day event and what to aspect from such an event. The published post was by @wirednot and mentions several of the vendors presenting at WFD5 and lists some of the hot topics that might come up during the presentations. Again, being one of the two first time delegates this blog post gave me an overall feel for the event and had some good links to learn about past delegates, past Wireless Field Day events, and links to several of the vendors presenting.
Another really good article titled “Another Controller-less Wi-Fi Solution” posted this week by @matthewnorwood highlights the Airtight Networks APs and management solutions. The article has a link to the Airtight Network web site where I watched a series of demonstration videos. The videos were well-organized and ranged from 2 to 6 minutes in length, and each video concentrated on a certain area or topic for the Airtight solution. I found the videos very informative and they covered some hot topics in wireless including cloud management, software defined radios, BYOD, security and monitoring. The article isn’t completely about Airtight Networks and Matthew does talk about the three planes of wired and wireless traffic along with an overview on basic WLAN network architectures (some cool graphics).
Working in the education market I have followed Aerohive Networks and read about their BYOD and education solutions. Like the other vendors the Aerohive website is full of information with plenty of documentation, videos, and blogs. Aerohive does have a YouTube channel (other vendors may have YouTube channels as well) and the videos posted on YouTube were another resource I used to learn about Aerohive. Andrew von Nagy will be presenting at WFD5 for Aerohive and I look forward to meeting Andrew and seeing his presentation. Anyone following Andrew on Twitter (@andrewvonnagy) knows he shares a lot of great stuff, not just on Aerohive, but wireless technologies in general. Andrew’s revolutionwifi blog was one of the first wireless blogs I started following and I’m always impressed with the content, knowledge, and style of how Andrew presents the material he writes about.
To be honest all the delegates for Wireless Field Day 5 have outstanding blogs and I have spent many hours reading their posts. These blogs are a tremendous resource for me with tons of information and details on networking, wireless, security, hardware, software, storage, etc… Each delegate’s perspective on the wireless world and related technologies along with their knowledge and passion for wireless really shows in their posts. Links to all the delegates blogs are available on the Wireless Field Day 5 website.
Three vendors, Fluke Networks, Metageek, and Wildpackets will be presenting on their products for packet analysis, site surveying, network performance, and network monitoring. I’m familiar with these vendors and most of their products, but I still visited each of their websites for a refresher ahead of WFD5. Since I don’t have an expansive IT budget I tend to use freely available utilities and I’m really looking forward to seeing these three presentations and how their enterprise solutions compare to the open source tools I’m accustomed to using. I definitely should have more to post about these three vendors, the presentations, and their products.
For myself reading the blogs and visiting the vendor websites was not only great for learning, but for also noticing trends and what could be the future direction for wireless technologies.
For anyone wanting to see the Wireless Field Day 5 presentation schedule along with links to watch the live demonstrations can visit the Wireless Field Day 5 web site. The event can be followed on Twitter using the #WFD5 hash tag.
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