Bluesocket Lives, Evolves Into Managed WLAN Services Offering Under ADTRAN

Back in the day, Bluesocket was THE commercial captive portal for wireless networks. As WLAN in general gained broader acceptance and the market widened, Bluesocket also started providing access points and morphed their captive portal appliance into a controller (like the WLAN big guns were starting to use with thin APs.) As this was playing out, Cisco, Aruba, and at the time Meru, were largely dominating the market and Bluesocket  didn't generate a lot of buzz anymore. But- nor were they "over".

My Own Bluesocket History

I have covered Bluesocket through the years for my column in Network Computing, like when the company introduced their initial controller offering, and then their virtual controller option. Network Computing also covered ADTRAN's acquisition of Bluesocket in a piece done by colleague Steve Wexler.

On the personal front, I helped pre-ADTRAN Bluesocket develop a new guest access feature set that perfectly fit the needs of my University when our native Cisco wireless guest option was anemic by comparison. To this day we still  use the Bluesocket portal for guests, and though it may be a bit dated, it still has amazing administrative flexibility and works great for letting guests self-sponsor or be sponsored based on cell phone number as user name. (I made more than one plea for both Bluesocket and ADTRAN to spin this off as a separate product but they didn't bite.)

Bluesocket also donated controllers that I took to Haiti on a humanitarian IT visit  that serve as the functional heart of two networks on University of Haiti campuses that me and my fellow volunteers created.

You could say I have a bit of a soft spot for Bluesocket given my history with the company and their products.  But after the ADTRAN acquisition, the already small player in the WLAN space seemed to get even quieter. But wait...

With their latest announcement, ADTRAN's Bluesocket may be on to bigger things.

Following similar recent announcements by Meraki and PowerCloud, Bluesocket is throwing their hat into into the cloud-managed hosted WLAN ring.

ADTRAN calls their new offering ProCloud, and it hopes to empower channel partners, integrators, and service providers with the ability to provide hosted enterprise-grade WLAN offerings to customers built on established the Bluesocket vWLAN magic-in-the middle.

Also announced are ProStart (installation, service, and training for customers that can't do their own wireless for whatever reason)  and ProCare (customer-selectable maintenance support options.)

See ADTRAN's page on ProCloud,     and Business Wire press release.

Wireless is certainly a competitive landscape to begin with, and the expanding managed WLAN pot is starting to simmer with interesting players jumping in.  Though I get that ADTRAN and competitors see the hosted WLAN thing as an easy service-add for partners that don't yet really offer wireless, I hope those who follow this path all don't lose site of the fact that "easy wireless" doesn't  automatically equal "good wireless" and that proper design and policy are still the cornerstones of successful WLAN.

I wish ADTRAN and my old Bluesocket friends best of luck in their new venture, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who will be following how managed wireless services will impact our industry.

Pondering WLAN Innovation

The modern wireless network, regardless of who creates the components, is certainly getting complicated. But is it innovative?

Asked another way- does sheer complexity equal innovation? And who decides what constitutes an innovative feature or component? Is it the vendor? The customer? A developer thousands of miles away from both?

Here's where I pause, and assure readers that what follows is not meant to bash any company, I'm simply pondering what innovation means to today's WLAN, and whether it couldn't perhaps be stewarded along a bit more collaboratively as the world gets increasingly more dependent on the fruits of our wireless labor and our systems get fatter with features.

There are a lot of definitions of Innovation, and some pretty fascinating reads on the topic. For the purpose of what's on my mind, I'll call innovation a good idea that serves customers well with some meaningful market duration while making the originator a profit. Simple enough. If I had to give innovation a formula, it might look like:

(Good Idea + Customer Acceptance) x (Time on Market + Affordability) =  Amount of Innovation
Or something like that.

Back to the question of who decides what constitutes innovation? If a new feature or product is marketed as "an innovative new offering", my first thought would be "how do you know it's innovative if it hasn't proven itself in the market yet?" Time judges innovation, not the person who came up with the idea. Sure, HP's TouchPad was an engineering accomplishment, but if it was really innovative, it wouldn't have tanked, would it have? Or maybe it's too harsh to say that "failed innovations weren't really innovative after all" (Perhaps some would-be innovations come along at the wrong time- again, I'm just pondering.)  Whatever- it's heady stuff to contemplate at the analytic level.

Back to wireless networking. I look at some of the systems I use (both for client access and WLAN management) and see a mix of innovation and feature bloat. Sure, there are nice aspects that bring value to the typical customer, but also ill-conceived features that obviously were never presented to a WLAN Admin Focus Group. Because they are all packaged together, you have have to tolerate the non-innovative distracting stuff to get into the innovative features, It's just the nature of the beast. Maybe this overall affect could be improved. Maybe we should start hyping BYOI as much as we hype BYOD.

What's BYOI? It's Bring Your Own Innovation- and we need more portals for it between customers and WLAN makers.

Wireless network administrators know what they need. Arguably, they can be serve as the advisory panel for features likely to be good innovations, and also judges for when an innovation has "expired" and needs to be replaced (why I am thinking of Apple's Bonjour protocol?) Sure, vendors give us hyper-complicated systems bursting with graphics and endless menus, but that doesn't mean we've been given innovation. And innovations don't have to be crazy disruptive and life-altering for the entire WLAN space, they can just be simple little changes that we'd buy more of because they are needed.

Without a clearly defined method of getting feedback and feature requests to decision makers within WLAN companies, it is my conjecture that innovation suffers. Meraki came close to getting it right with their Make a Wish mechanism (i remember being thrilled when I asked for alerting on DHCP pool exhaustion and then it showed up shortly after), but even after I made my wish, there was no way of knowing whether it was heard. Or whether others had asked for it as well. For many big companies, the culture seems to be "you the customer can just wait for us to innovate on your behalf, and if you feel like getting frustrated feel free to talk to your SE who also has no clue what's coming". Again- no bashing; the WLAN industry is generally amazing. But some of us would like to influence the innovation we pay for and help the mothership to realize when they get it wrong in the name of innovation.

Wouldn't it be cool if each vendor (or the industry itself) had a portal for  "What Admins Love and What Admins Hate About The Current System"? Ideally, it would be visible to at least other customers of the same system so we could see what our peers are also thinking. And if once a year, the feedback was aggregated, sorted, and put in a Top 5 of Loves and Hates with vendor commitment to answer them in some meaningful way ("Yes, we see that 98% of you hate the new Flash Interface, we'll try to work on that by 12-months out", or "75% of you would like to see ______ but here's why that is technically impossible" kinda stuff). Or if not a feedback dashboard, some mechanism that accomplishes the same thing.

We The Wireless People would love to have more of a hand in innovation, for everyone's benefit. We're closest to our clients, we know what we need, and we know what we don't. And if it doesn't get used, it isn't innovative.

MetaGeek inSSIDer for Office hands on

Playing with my own copy, also provided by MetaGeek- I could do no better than Sam's write up. I encourage you to read it, and have found great value over the last couple of weeks in inSSIDer for Office, even in environments that are "too big" for its intended use. This one is a keeper.

Remembering Back When Wireless Was Edgy

For those younger IT types that grew up with wireless, this quick trip down memory lane might be little more than a yawnfest. But many of us remember when wireless was new, edgy, and fraught with mystique. This piece is for us geezers.

Back in the day (that day being around the late 1990's/2001-2002ish), wireless networking had a whole other vibe. It was a relatively expensive technology, and usually served as an "accessory" to the wired network. Or it provided point-to-point bridging alternatives to leased lines. To "do" wireless, you had to understand networking and have a solid working knowledge of RF. Early access points were way too expensive (and client counts were too thin) to warrant dense deployments so you had to know your stuff when it came to antennas, power settings and how to manually manage a given RF domain.

But aside from "I do wireless for a living" aspects of early Wi-Fi, there was an adventurist culture attached to wireless networking that has arguably faded away (or maybe it's just matured, too?). Some of us got into "war driving", seeking out wireless networks for the pure joy of finding them and seeing what we could learn about them. People did unholy things to Pringles Potato Chip cans and woks and old satellite dish antennas in the name of shooting signals further and hearing them from longer distances (which was part of the overall security threat package to early wireless.) The really geeky among the wireless-curious wrote WEP cracking tools, and the rest of us felt ten feet tall when we actually made those tools work for us to divulge what their owners were trying to protect. Again, it was just a different time, and there was a lot of thrill factor associated with wireless.

So why bring it up now? Depending on how you measure such things, we've had a few generational evolutions from the good folks of 802.11ville, and the connected world has certainly "gone wireless". WiFi is so commonplace, it's no longer just the realm of specialists- though the same skills are still needed as before (and then some) to really pull off "wireless done right" in a complicated world.  Sure, the past has passed.

But, I recently stumbled across something cool on the web that got me a bit nostalgic...

Anyone remember these days? Or these? Being a "radio guy", the notion of creating your own antennas and making signals go long distances is one of the things I've enjoyed through the years. At the same time, today's systems tend to be more micro-cell-ish and so  I had somewhat put this chapter of the Book of Wireless away in my mind's library.

A couple of days ago, I was researching something unrelated when I came across the WiFi Shootout links from the the 2004-2008 time frame. As cheesy as this sounds, it was kinda like looking at a photo album of my children, or at least children that I was quite fond of.

Ah, how far our wireless baby has come, and what a thrill it has been watching it grow up. *Sniff*.

Now be honest- how many of you have a tattoo that looks like 

this?

 

Gimme A Wireless Virtual Client Function, Already!

I'll start this post with two admissions:

1. Of late, I've been interested in the capabilities of 7Signal.

2. Long before 7Signal came to the WLAN space, I've been beating the drum for my WLAN vendor (and all vendors) to deliver what I call virtual client functionality. 

On 7SIgnal, I'm struggling with sticker shock and trying to figure out where it's very cool capabilities stop and where they overlap with tools like Cisco's CleanAir (which isn't cheap either). I am hearing good things about 7Signal from current customers.

About that virtual client thing, it is something 7Signal can do (along with a slew of other cool  things). But by now, I also think this is one of those capabilities that should be built into enterprise WLAN systems. (If I'm not mistaken, Motorola comes closest to having something like this.)

Quick note to vendors- you give us one innovation after another that you think would benefit your clients. Thank you. But how about this one that is long overdue? Your customers that actually run the WLANs of the world would LOVE you for it.

Here are two versions of what I'm looking for:

Simple version:

• I can do all of this through my wireless management system
• I can schedule the function to run at regular intervals and report on it
• I choose one of my installed APs to put into "Virtual Client Mode"
• Through the wire, I can have my Virtual Client connect to each of my SSIDs and exercise the likes of RADIUS, Credential Stores, DHCP/DNS, L2 and L3 paths via ping, traceroute, etc, rate limiting, throughput tests, whatever
• All of this is coordinated in a way that doesn't disrupt the existing client environment

Advanced Version:

• All of the above, PLUS
• I can manually choose any AP within a given range
• I can tell the virtual client to test itself against every AP it can hear within a certain range

You probably get the gist. The payoff- I can "be" in buildings or at sites that I don't have to travel to. The Virtual Client would be a force multiplier, and in many situations would bring far more value than seeing pages upon pages of rogues and interfering signals from neighboring WLANs that I couldn't react to if I wanted (hallmark of many current systems).

I can't believe that I'm about to say this- I get tired of the sometime extreme feature licensing that has come to be all too common in the WLAN industry. But I'd actually pay (a fair price) for GOOD virtual client functionality. 

Am I asking for too much? Are there WLAN vendors beyond 7Signal that are natively doing this that I don't know of?