(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)