In this episode, we welcome Rasika Nayanajith (CWNE #153, 2x CCIE) from Australia. We discuss the different ways to give back to the Wi-Fi Community. We hope that this episode will inspire a lot of Wi-Fi engineers.

Our Guest

Rasika is the Team Leader Network at La Trobe University in Melbourne Australia. He created the well known mrncciew.com Wi-Fi related blog and he has been designated VIP by Cisco to be very active on the Cisco Support forum. He has done a lot to give back to the Wi-Fi community and we were very honored to have him on the show.

You can follow him on Twitter @mrncciew.

Discussions

We discussed the different ways to give back to the community:

* Blogging

* Participating in vendor’s support forums (Cisco Support Community, Aruba Airheads Community, Aerohive HiveNation Community…)

* Becoming an Instructor

* Presenting at conferences

* Mentoring

We also deep dived into Rasika’s experience in creating and maintaining his blog. Rasika gives some valuable pieces of advice for anyone wanting to blog or participate in vendor’s support forums.

Useful Links

* Rasika’s blog: mrncciew.com

* Cisco Support Forum

* Aruba Airhead Forum

* Aerohive HiveNation Forum

This Week In Wireless

WLPC in Phoenix

* Really great event (about 250 WLAN pros)

* Talks about packet analytics, machine learning, Wi-Fi analytics, algorithms used by survey tools

* Videos and presentation will be made available publicly by Keith Parsons this coming week

Upcoming WLPC dates:

* WLPC_LATAM in Bogota August 1-2 (En espanol)

* WLPC_EU in Lisbon October 3-4 (In english)

Aruba Atmosphere

* Aruba Atmosphere will take place this coming week and is held in Nashville.

* Aruba should be covering their new os ArubaOs 8 in more details. Update next week!

* To follow, hashtag #ATM17 on Twitter

Arris to Acquire Ruckus

Arris and Broadcom jointly announced that they have entered into an agreement for Arris to acquire Brocade’s Ruckus Wireless and ICX Switch business for $800 millions in cash.

Arris, which is currently mainly offering equipment intended to the home market, hope to expand its presence into other markets such as education, public venue, enterprise and hospitality.

Link: https://www.ruckuswireless.com/press/releases/20170222-arris-acquire-ruckus-wireless-and-icx-switch-business-800-million-cash

FCC Lets Wireless Carriers Use Wi-Fi Airwaves Critics Worry about Interferences

FCC has officially gave the green light to carriers for them to be allowed to use LTE-U over the 5GHz band. Carriers will then be able to offload some of their traffic to the unlicensed 5GHz band used by other technologies such as Wi-Fi.

Technically speaking, this is not really a good news for our Wi-Fi networks, since LTE-U is a less polite protocol, and Stations will start broadcasting a the less occupied frequency without waiting for a channel to be open. Most Wi-Fi experts are skeptical and a lot of debates and talks have been happening on Twitter since the announcement.

This is week is the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and we will see if people will be talking about it.

Link: