Hey what’s up everyone. In today’s episode we talk about TP-Link discovering what it’s like to ignore DFS, Google Fiber going Wireless?, Data frame slicing with Airtool, and CWAP exam gets updated and so does the study guide.

TP-Link Settles $200k with FCC for ignoring DFS and power limits

FCC reaches settlement of $200k with TP-Link for selling Wifi routers that ignore DFS requirements and power limits. This sounds very careless for a networking company. Is this what we accept now as hardware from these companies. Maybe TP-Link thought they could get away from it, or maybe an engineer wasn’t aware of the FCC regulations. But is this what we expect with inexpensive hardware? I don’t think so. Along with the fine, TP-Link has agreed to work with the open-source community to allow consumers to install third-party firmware on TP-Link routers.

This is a good move in my opinion but unprecedented from the FCC. This is a great way to move our wireless industry into embracing open-source.

Google Plans to Extend Fiber Into Wireless

CFO, Ruth Porat, said that Google Fiber would be exploring wireless due to the acquisition of Webpass. This was mentioned in Alphabet’s 2nd quarter earnings call. Why in the world would Google Fiber go into wireless? The main obvious reason I can think of is cost. It’s much cheaper to use hardware that costs a fraction of the cost of digging up fiber. Not to mention the labor costs of doing the work.

I think this is an interesting turn of events as Google Fiber now becomes fiber over the air. I can see the marketing lingo now….

Latest Airtool Update Gives Us Data Frame Slicing

Airtool is one of my favorite apps on OSX. It allows me to capture wireless frames using my built-in wireless adapter. But in doing so, some of these captures can take up precious hard disk space.

What Adrian Granados has done is enabled a feature to just grab the beginning of the frame and discarding the rest. What you have left is the 802.11 MAC headers.

Check out the latest update.

CWAP-402 Exam Released

The latest update to CWAP from CWNP is CWAP-402. It is 90 minutes and contains 60 questions. It is available now to test and has been available since June 28 2016.

CWAP-402 brings changes to 5 subject areas.

Tom Carpenter has hinted that Troubleshooting is a big part of the exam from the CWAP update webinar.

These are the objectives.

5% – Troubleshooting Processes

25% – 802.11 Communications

15% – WLAN hardware

35% – Protocol and Spectrum Analysis

20% – Troubleshooting Common Problems

Troubleshooting processes is a very small chunk of the exam at 5%.

Focuses on a troubleshooting methodology. Mentions of industry and vendor recommended processes. Not sure how vendor neutral this sounds.

But with any troubleshooting process, OSI Model is mentioned. Just remember that Wireless is at the Data Link and Physical Layer.

May mention of Wireshark and Omnipeek as well as the tools baked into OS such as command line using ping and traceroute.

At 25% is 802.11 Communications.

This sounds like the MAC Layer Frame Formats and Technologies AND 802.11 Operation and Frame Exchanges from the previous exam. Looking at 802.11 communications from a troubleshooting perspective. Understand the frame exchanges when a device tries to join a BSS....