(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE Conversation where we go in depth thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every organization is concerned about how they are going to generate greater value out of the networks by adding more people in more places and supporting more applications. Now we've effectively moved from a wired orientation into a wireless orientation but a lot of enterprises still envision and experience some limitations. What CIOs, business leaders and infrastructure people want is they want a modern wireless experience and the good news is we got a lot of technology coming down at us that are likely to get us there. Now to have that conversation we've got a couple of great guests today. Shrikant Shenwai is a CEO of the WBA and Matt MacPherson's the CTO of Cisco Wireless. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So let's start, what's WBA? >> WBA is Wireless Broadband Alliance. It's an industry consortium. And what we do is essentially look at wireless technology but from a perspective of how wi-fi together with other technologies can deliver the great experience and meet the requirements of enterprise as well as others, in particular service providers community. >> So we know what Cisco is Matt, so (laughing) We'll stay here and talk about this. I said upfront that we've got a lot of new technologies coming down the horizon. Specifically you've got Wi-fi 6 and we've got Gen5, we've got the next generation of cell service. A lot of people think there's a divergence on the horizon. You guys don't, explain why. >> I don't think it's we just don't. There are others in the industry, especially these people who are to make technology decisions, the CIOs, CTOs. What they are looking at is, I have a business problem, how do I solve that business problem? What technology makes me do my job better? Can it do it more cost effectively? And essentially what it boils down to is to say, if I have to use certain technologies, whether it's 5G, 4G or whatever that might be for certain use cases, I'll use it for that. But when it comes to wi-fi? The great thing about wi-fi is wi-fi has always been the technology in the indoors environment. It's the most successful wireless technology, almost similar to the 3G technologies. So what these are looking at is how to combine the power of the two together. How do you make them work together? And that's essentially where we find ourselves in a biy of a good position to help industry because we have players from the traditional cellular side working within WBA, with companies like Cisco to look at how do you actually make the experience work better by not choosing between either or but together these technologies. >> So it suggests to me that what you're looking to do is find the best of 5G or the cell G experience and the best of the wi-fi experience and bring 'em together so that you can achieve those new densities, higher performance, greater security, everything that folks want in that modern wireless experience. Cisco is going to be one of the companies that actually makes this happen. Matt when you think about bringing these things together and this notion of converging or let's call it unifying experiences. >> Mm-hmm. >> Because that's what's going to make it simpler. What types of things do we need to think about? What's the metaphor that folks need to worry about as they think about how this is all going to happen? >> Yeah I think a lot of times when you have these very distinct technologies and a very distinct use case, you had LTE and as that moves into 5G, 5GNR and you had the wifi world, it was very understood this was unlicensed, this was licensed. There was a segmentation. You expected to be going 80 miles and hour down the road and using this. You expected to use wi-fi when you were indoors and the corporate environment, right? And when these things start to come together and you see this overlap, right? You can read that two ways, right? You can say, hey one technology is threatening the other. Cisco doesn't see it that way. Cisco sees it as these technologies come together it produces an opportunity to use both to provide the best experience wherever you are. Unifying both axis's into common core infrastructure, right? So this means that the user, not caring which technology they're coming in on, will always get the experience that they're looking for or the IT department, the one that they want to provide or that airport, right? Wherever you are, indoor or outdoor. >> Well so let's talk about experience because I think the experience that most users are focused on, and by that I mean consumers and individuals who are actually doing work, and therefore pushing their service providers and pushing their IT departments to fix is that the LTE world allows me to roam and not lose a signal. The wi-fi world allows me to hop from network to network if I want to as long as I authenticate at each point. >> Exactly. >> How is that 5G experience going to be applied in a wi-fi world so that I don't have to constantly be giving up private information? Authenticating in new and various, sometimes over 5G kinds of ways? >> Again, it's a bit of a, I mean it's a great question in the sense that in one technology it's been solved for a long time. In the other technology there's a bit of back pressure just on how do you securely connect to that network, right? You know it's interesting, I was talking to one of the VPs of roaming at a very large operator and I asked him, I said, "How many roaming agreements "do you have to have in order to roam anywhere "in the world?" And he basically said, "Well, you know it's somewhere north "of 800 roaming agreements." >> Wow. >> Right? So there's actually that many operators around the planet that they have to negotiate these agreements with. They get the lawyers together, they talk about cost. They talk about service and quality, et cetera, right? Now in 2017 there was 124 million wi-fi networks-- >> Hotspots. >> Hotspots on the planet. >> 124 million? >> 124 million. By 2022 there'll over 500 million. Now if we want to be able to authenticate and onboard wherever you are? No offense to the legal community but I don't think we want to put a lawyer between every one of those negotiations. >> And you couldn't use a block chain. (laughing) >> Good point. (laughing) So what we're doing is we're working on a new technology that's called Open Roaming. It's based on Passpoint Hotspot 2.0 so that when you go into a particular environment it'll see the network, it'll discover the network. It'll understand how and where to authenticate and the connection will just happen. In fact it's almost interesting demonstrating the technology because you basically pick up your mobile device and say, oh look, see I'm connected, demo over, right? And that's really what you're trying to achieve. Different problem, different scale of problem for wi-fi but something that we definitely learned from the community over on the 4G/5G side is that in order to benefit from the network you have to be connected to the network. And that's why we're pursuing this type of work. >> Yes, if I could just add to what Matt said? I think the historical context here, because in the world of 4G/3G/5G the roaming was between carriers and he said there were 800 carriers and maybe there were a lot of them but there was a finite number of those providers, network providers. In the world of wi-fi, because wi-fi is wi-fi, anyone can deploy wi-fi. You just talked about a number which is half a billion hotspots around the world in 2022. Even today there are so many different types of hotspots all over the place. So the model that you applied for roaming between the carriers, which is clearly one model that has to be duplicated, in fact, that's where WBA started and we did have foundation work to help the carriers do roaming with each other. But having done that, what we're finding is that's enough in the world of wi-fi. What you need is more than that because it's a different world. You have venues, you have hotels, you have all kind of different providers, enterprises. They all want their networks to be connecting. So to apply the same model of interconnectivity that was done by the carriers to this environment, doesn't work. So what you need is a bit of, almost like a roaming consortium approach where anyone who is part of a consortium can automatically connect to the others who want to join the consortium. And that's essentially what Cisco has done with their Open Roaming. And from a WBA standpoint, as an industry body, we think there is a need to standardize that. There's a need to make it much more standards based so that anyone and everyone can get connected using the same protocols, same ways of connecting with each other and that's where we see a lot of work happening now as we speak to make all those things happen. >> Without diminishing the inherent value of Wi-fi 6 while sustaining the security, while sustaining the new densities, while sustain a new performance and I think you're right. I think that, you know 800 seems like a lot but those are service providers. They are economically incented. They're financially incented to put those relationships together. Versus in the wi-fi world where people buy their boxes to build their private networks and the transaction cost associated with trying to figure out how all that works together? It's overwhelming, there's no way to do it. So by introducing new technologies that just makes it a feature of how things can work together, it just facilitates the negotiation costs and the transaction costs associated with providing this experience. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, you absolutely have it right, and the interesting thing is that we look at it two ways. One, you want to make that user experience very seamless, right? Automatic, which we're doing. We've done it at big venues like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Over 110,000 attendees, right? You want to give 'em an experience where they're just on the network and they're getting the tutor services that they need to reach. But what I also say about something like Open Roaming or Passpoint, is it also becomes a building block to some of these next generation technologies, right? In other words, if an operator wants to offload into a wi-fi network? They have to be on the wi-fi network. >> Mm-hmm. >> So if we're automatically connecting to wi-fi, the opportunity to offload becomes much higher and now we can apply next generation technologies like intelligent path selection. When do you go to wi-fi? When do you go to LTE or 5GNR? And even some of these technologies that we're seeing some of the device manufacturers doing today, like multi path. Maybe we use both? Maybe we use both because we're trying to optimize delay? Maybe as we go from voice to rich collaboration services and rich collaboration services go into things like AV/VR, where you need the bandwidth, where you need a better delay characteristic? Now we're enabling those and we're not enabling it just with wi-fi. We're not enabling it just with 5G. We're enabling it together, right? So that we can address that problem of making sure that we can provide connectivity wherever we are, given the services we have, the credentials that are already on the device, seamlessly. >> A user, whether it's a human being or an application effectively sees a network, even if it's physically instantiated, in a couple of different forms? >> Exactly. >> Human being, application, and IoT device, how do you get these billions of devices connected? And again, when you need to connect, for example, you just had this announcement in EU about vehicle to vehicle communication using wi-fi so you need roaming in a wider context here. Not just about connecting the carriers. Connecting the entire footprint or as much footprint as possible. Whether it's from the enterprise environment, from the carrier environment, other environment. Connecting devices, in fact IoT, as we know is another big thing and that's where we are seeing a lot of fraction again, especially with Wi-fi 6, there's a lot of work being done to support IoT based connectivity on wi-fi and part of that will be, of course, all with the roaming as well. There'll be a roaming component to that. >> Excellent. Very exciting stuff. Can see a lot of new use cases, a lot of new opportunities. Lot of discovery that people are going to have to go through but the bottom line here is we're talking about a new, modern wireless experience that's combining multiple technologies, unifying multiple technologies to provide it. Shrikant Shenwai, Matt MacPherson, thank you very much for joining us for another great CUBE Conversation. And I'm Peter Burris, see ya next time. (upbeat music)

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation welcome to the cube studios for another cube conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology I'm your host Peter Burris every Enterprise wants the modern wireless experience and by now most should know that that's going to be a combination of 5g and Wi-Fi six it's not either/or it's how do we apply both of them to achieve the technological outcomes that we want within our business but it requires new thinking because there are a lot of new technologies here that are going to be applied to make that modern wireless experience happen what will be those new technologies how hard will they be to adopt and what kinds of new use cases will be will be utilized well to have that conversation we're here with Eric McLaughlin who's the GM of the wireless solutions group at Intel and Matt fierson who's the CTO of Cisco wireless Eric Matt welcome to the cube Thanks beer to hear all right so you know what let's start with you Matt when we think about this notion of the modern wireless experience I've assert it's going to be both but there's a lot of new technology behind these things give us some insight into what are some of those new technologies that folks are gonna have to start worrying about yeah you know when we're looking at something like a next generation technology there's certain areas that you expect right you expect it to be a little bit faster you expect it to connect to maybe a broader set of devices but what's interesting I think about Wi-Fi six versus previous generations is really there's new technology enhancements that really broaden the set of use cases that that technology can be applied to for example in the old days which actually isn't that long ago I think today you might even say today right um what you would do is when you go to implement a wireless technology at an enterprise what you're doing is you're trying to control a collision domain so that you get it known experience right and what you would tend to do is you tend to over provision the work and hope that it was undersubscribed and there was a lot of Technology a lot of best practices in order to do that a lot of administrative overhead politics associated exactly right and you're doing these RF walks and all these things right with something like Wi-Fi sex and the ability to schedule the air interface this becomes much much simpler you can get it more deterministic result you can map applications that might be mission-critical to lower delay characteristics and this is something that the protocol accommodates right so I think that's in the net and that is even though the technology is more sophisticated it's actually going to be easier for IT administrators to get to where they need to be for the applications they need to serve so I'm gonna dig into that in a second but let's start with you know Eric what are some of the underlying new technologies is this a big leap is that a small leap is it you know we've always talked about how you know some new thing was going to be bigger than you know best thing since sliced bread and where is this on that spectrum well from our perspective we from our perspective we see this as a significant leap in technology some of the underlying things that are coming as Matt mentioned moving from contention based to a scheduled network enables a much more efficient network from a client perspective which is where I spend my time you can you can deliver data over the network faster due to OFDM a implementation which allows huge amounts of throughput you've got larger channelization coming along with this and the combination of those things is going to to allow use cases lower power and things that we haven't been able to do with Wi-Fi in the past or at least not at the user experience level that that everybody needs in laws so to get to that user experience level it means that someone's gonna have to make some adjustments to how networks work network administrator's from practices evolve that always scares CIOs that always scares Network people Matt is this going to be one of those cases where a large leap in technology translates into you know and even bigger leap and the adoption practices some processes to actually exploit it yeah I think it's one of the things that you know a company like Cisco we pay a lot of attention to because we do see that the technologies can become more complex and if the individual IT department or the systems integrator is responsible for that complexity what happens is they actually implement less and less features so that they can get to the result with less guessing on whether or not things are actually going to work or how one feature impacts another what we're doing at Cisco within ten pages intent-based networking is basically we're pushing this policy down into the network through an abstraction that allows you to push that policy in such a way that the network then figures out how to accommodate what you're asking for and then in the reverse you're reading these analytics back that tells the administrator whether or not that experience is actually achieved so the technology is more capable for sure but it's actually going to be easier to use deploy and apply the policies that you need so one of the first place is where we really exploit the new technology is in the discovery metrics etc associated administration so it's easier to adopt it for everybody else exactly and that'll accelerate the curve so we got we got a significant advance in the quality of the technology a modest advance in the adoption characteristics or you know limited barriers and leaps we have to take here that suggests that there's going to be an explosion in the number of use cases Eric what do you think yeah we definitely see that you know today when you think of Wi-Fi in an enterprise you essentially think of access getting your device your client connected into the network so that you can have access to the data that you need and share the data that you have with others what we see and and and we kind of coined this term internally of office of the future we see Wi-Fi being used in a variety of ways to deliver experiences that a user needs and wants but doesn't know how to get today things like where are you located where are you at within an office you go to a new office you're in a new location you're able to pull up maps and see what's happening where's the conference room that you want to go to what cubes are open and those kinds of things we also see other cases where you can use Wi-Fi for sensing what's happening in the room around you what's what's happening in the environment that you're in and how does the user and the device that you're using react to those new environmental characteristics and how do you make sure that you're delivering the best possible bandwidth the best possible experience so that new things can happen connecting devices in a different way and getting to your data and they're much more seamless and easy fashion so one of the things that everybody talks about is security hmm and it's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate security from networking in fact we're seeing in a lot of enterprises I'm sure you guys are too the NOC and the Sox start to slowly merge together into a secure infrastructure that's capable of moving data around how does security play into some of these new use cases I think it's a key question I mean when you when you look at security and you know even when you look at some of the new devices like IOT some of those devices can be sophisticated some of them not so much and so one of the things that you want to do with security is be able to differentiate that different use cases or maybe even the different equipment onto different segments of the network so how do you isolate some of these use cases from each other I mean especially around technologies like IOT which could be every light bulb in your building right somebody hacks into that light bulb and next thing you know it's spreading across and you know it could take down the whole network right so the fact that you have OFDM a and you can schedule the air interface means you can segment it if you can segment it you can secure it right so this becomes a fundamental function of the underlying technology in the case of Wi-Fi six so if I've got the opportunity to secure things better and I can support greater densities with greater performance and lower latencies that suggests that the devices themselves can get born numerous and more interesting very IOT so talk a bit about some of these use cases Matt about related to IOT and and how that's how these technologies are going to liberate some new capabilities within organizations yeah you know in in organizations today you got this IT administrator and what is he doing he's he's dealing with less staff right and oftentimes less funding yet he has to address more and more devices and sometimes users on that network well we know that IOT is going to drive this to the next order of magnitude right so we have to implement easy simple ways to push the policy into the network and you know what it might not be done by the IT administrator it might be done by the OT department and so when we look at these types of the operational segments that but not exactly exactly so you might want the operational department to have the capability to onboard these IOT devices but they have to onboard them within the policy of the IT department so that the network remains secure again the OT department right you have to onboard them in the policy of the OT Department well both both because I t's also fundamentally responsible for securing the network right right right here so as we think about the new IOT use use cases we think about greater security is there a particular area or class of application you mentioned the office of the future is there another one that we think about when you talk to customers that is likely to catalyze a lot of the excitement yeah I can give you a couple of examples when we talk to our customers especially in enterprise you can ask a very simple question do you have mission-critical applications and you know every enterprise believes it has mission-critical applications now depending on who you're talking to if it's if you're in a manufacturing plant and you're moving robot arm that's pretty mission-critical right you don't want to stop the assembly line but you know you're going to something like healthcare right you have a heart monitor or you have a palm or yes that's pretty mission-critical to but even when you go into carpeted space you know if you're over it at Cisco for example we live and breathe WebEx collaboration tools and we want to be able to prayer our prioritize that experience and make sure that we're giving our not only our customers but our employees the experience they need so that they're not focused on the function of the network but they're focused on their business right they're focused on what they're trying to do but I want to take this example of mission critical and and and see if I can wrap this up and I'll use a healthcare example so healthcare is provisioned inside a hospital or inside a doctor's office but as we think about IOT with greater densities more performance more reliability more security I can actually think about utilizing some of these technologies Wireless to provision health care to where the person is now you know I got my little apple watch that's got to be a first that's a first step but it's pedestrian compared to where we're going to be in the future talk about that for a second is it possible that we will see a business be able to extend itself and the services that provide using these technologies all the way out to their customer and so that they so anybody anywhere at anytime can have that engaging experience if it's required is that really where we're going with these technology I think it's an i man it's a spot-on question I mean if you look at what's happening in the industry services are moving into the cloud that's clear we've all seen it the numbers are there right well we want the cloud to move to where the service exactly so you say you have these services moving in the cloud mate and maybe that cloud is distributed right so there's all sorts of technologies around that right and the users are definitely going mobile right so what happens is in the IT department is what what they used to have completely contained they have their computer room and they have their network and they have their access is now actually spread out into this these mobile environments much more much more distributed and when in the example that you were talking about with IOT you give it an example of your watch but I wonder when all these things that we're wearing start to become more and more intelligent I think what's going to happen is that there's going to be services that come from the cloud that extend into that access network that's managed by an entity that's different than the cloud service but will be able to produce a predictable experience because of the ability to segment and to apply equality a service and to have predictable delay all those types of characteristics right so this technology is really preparing you for these types of shifts that we're seeing in in the users use case and in the industry Eric Matt great conversation thank you thanks very much for being on commit thank you to be here thank you for joining us for another cube conversation on Peterborough's see you next time [Music]