[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Welcome to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Badot. And this is the show where we explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way that we live, we work and you know, how we, how we lead things. And you know, it's a really, you know, trying to look at how AI influences other technologies as well as how those technologies can influence AI.
And today's guest, we want to welcome back, you know, Jim Bradfield. He has been really a pioneering CEO with decades of experience leading mission critical technologies across a lot of different sectors from cybersecurity to, you know, enterprise networks. And you know, Jim is a returning guest and we got to pick his brain a little bit the last time, but we're going to dive deep into it this time looking at, you know, really AI and secure wireless systems because you know, that's one of the things that, that Jim loves to do and he is an expert in the field. So Jim, welcome back to AI Today. Thank you for being here.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate it man, thank you.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah, so we're looking at a lot of different things and you know, the problem facing a lot of folks in the audience is really just not knowing if their technology investments are, are paying off. You know, it often feels like they can be spending money without seeing a lot of real value and that's always going to be a problem. Whether you're a small business or a homeowner, it really doesn't matter. So, you know, but from your perspective, why do companies struggle so much in proving that their, you know, technology investments, whether it's AI or whether it's WI fi, are worth it?
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah, because they need to have an accurate measurement of the existing versus the new system and whether or not anything was amiss before. It usually turns out that everything was poor before, but nobody really complained a whole lot about it. Now with WI Fi, you know, one of the biggest things to do is do an on site survey with a certified person in WI fi for something like Homina and Ekahau software. Now that is an AI enabled software. It actually goes out and takes a look at what's going on in the network. Somebody goes out and actually surveys everything in the area and takes a read of is exactly what's happening and that will give you everything that's happening on the old system.
And then when you get a new system, you make sure that it's designed properly with that kind of software before you even put it in. That's usually the biggest mistake that happens. Nobody actually does what they call the pre survey and Nobody does a predictive survey or an access point on a on a stick test, which is an active survey of the way the network's going to run. So it doesn't work, you know, and surprise because somebody put it in the way it used to be. But that used to never work either.
After the install, you've got to do a post implementation survey with the same software and you've got to make sure that everything is compared against old versus the new. That's one of the things that doesn't happen. Now you also need to do a full configuration review of the existing wireless network that's the existing wireless network and provide some detailed recommendations for the best practice updates to be applied. Well, if you don't do that, guess what, you're kind of going from greenfield. So you've got to have somebody come out and actually go through as if nothing was actually installed and actually go through to make sure it's working the way it's supposed to be.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And you have seen this probably even more times than I have. I know I was often a troublemaker when it came to this. But from like a shadow wifi perspective, you know, oh, we're not getting the performance that we want, so let's set up our own. And we would do that and we would just go out and you know, kind of try to increase our performance the way that we felt that it should act, not necessarily going through some of the proper channels to do that. So from a network performance perspective, how can we make sure that the productivity of the signals, the WI fi and the performance and the safety that goes along with that are really configured the right way and are going to give us real world outcomes as opposed to just things that they may see on some of those tests that you were mentioning.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's a real tough one. Let me give you kind of actual example of what we did for a warehouse in Fernley, Nevada.
So these guys kept complaining, oh, the WI fi that you guys put in was terrible. And you know, you. And we said, well we didn't design it.
We actually, all we did was go ahead and have somebody install it where you told us to put it in.
Well, what had happened is it had been designed by a manufacturer and the manufacturer had used an Excel spreadsheet to actually draw the floor plan. Well, if you've ever tried to do something on Excel spreadsheet for a floor plan and scale it, it's not possible.
So what they did was they made it a complete mess and they put in so few Units. Like we ended up at the end, we ended up needing 195 units and they actually designed it for 57 or so, you know. Right. So that's one of the problems you get, you don't have somebody knowing what they're doing.
And so you've got to make sure that you do this correctly from the start. Now the biggest application problem was that they had a bunch of these in a mezzanine area in the center of the factory, for example, it's all metal and you know, the access points were not designed to go through that metal. And so nobody, nobody figured out that, well, hey, this is not going to work. Right. So we actually went out on site and believe it or not, I went out on site and spent about three days there going through everything and following a single single person who went to every single picking station to pick anything for every single area of that giant million square foot warehouse.
Turned out we found all kinds of problems. We found out problems where they didn't have their network configured properly. So things would time out, you know, after 15 minutes, boom, the guy would time out and he didn't know that he had a, had to log back in and it took 30 minutes or 30 seconds rather to log back in.
All he would do is run away and complain and then he would get a new unit and he would come out and then it would log off again after 30 minutes or whatever. Right. And that's just because it was a bad network setting. Well, and you know, I followed around and watching all this kind of thing, they also, it turned out, believe it or not, they had, you know, the labels that they put on there to scan for each picking item. We couldn't even read them. They were, they, it been like there for 10 years or whatever and they had animals chewing them and, and you know, maybe there's a hundred little lines in a barcode and maybe 30 of them are available. Right. You can't see it. So they had to stop and manually read what the barcode numbers were and actually input that every time. So that just took their productivity, just took it away.
So, you know, and, and it's really important just to make sure that you understand the application and you understand what you're doing and you have somebody that really knows what they're doing out there to actually configure the system, actually design it properly and actually test it after it's installed.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think with, you know, we always know that, you know, infrastructure compute is always going to be the first one that everybody Complains about, right? Because it hits them, hits, hits them the fastest.
Storage, same sort of thing. And with AI, as they're upgrading their systems to try to do more, you know, they think they've got, oh, I've got to upgrade everything else that comes along with that.
They don't usually think about the network until there's a problem, oh, darn, you know, I can't move that much data or something like that. And so there's always that, there's always that give and take between those. And, you know, how, how businesses are measuring their ROI with the technology that they're getting is often only on either the AI side or the compute side.
From a general perspective, what advice would you give them to say, hey, you know what? You really should be looking at the total infrastructure and networking is going to drive a lot more of your performance than it used to with these AI models.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, so in including, including all that, network performance is another thing also, which is cyber security issues. Right. There's all kinds of things. What typically happens is a manufacturer of a robot system, for example, is going to provide you with some software and it's going to contact those robots and tell it to do this and that and this and that, whatever, and it's going to only do those things.
And then the AI is going to drive all that software and it's going to drive that communication. But if you have really poor communications to those units, the unit's going to sit and back up and go, wait a minute, what, where am I going? You'll see that thing wandering down the road a bit and you just never know that that's going to happen.
The other thing is, like you said, hey, maybe, maybe I have a network timeout where I've told those units to go offline every 30 minutes or every two hours for the network communication, the network connection. Well, okay, so then you find that thing standing over there by the water cooler all by itself because after whatever the timeout was, two hours, it's gone, or, and you don't know what it is, and everybody's going, let me redo the AI, you know, and, and it turns out it's not AI at all. That AI is screaming at that thing. And that thing is going like, you know, he's not getting the message because the networks timed him out and sent him away.
And you know, it's, it's all of those kind of things. You got to do a full network assessment. And the cyber security part of this thing is real because usually what happens is you Bring an outside vendor in to develop your AI system and develop your communications with it. And guess what, you have a whole bunch of things going on in the network you didn't have before.
And sometimes they leave it open, they leave it available for people to hack and to just go and kill you and take you offline and shut your factory down. So all of those things have to be looked at and it, it's a full process. I mean it's not just a slam bang, you know, turn you over in 30 minutes kind of thing. This is, you know, like a couple of weeks worth of work on a site to actually make something done. And you better have somebody that knows network and WI fi to do that. Otherwise you're just going to be messed up. That's all there is to it.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Yep, yep. And, and you know, that's, that's, that's great insight, Jim, because it's so important for that entire ecosystem to be understood. So those watching, how can they get a hold of you?
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Yeah, so they can get a hold of me by NAS Wireless.com www.nas Wireless.com they can also get a hold of me at JBJR NAS Wireless.com and they can call me directly. 925-382-0410 and I have LinkedIn obviously, and it's Jim Bradfield on LinkedIn. And we also have a TV show ever changing technology on Now Media. So we've got a lot of ways to reach me. So I'll take your call personally if you need some help.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: Well, that sounds good audience, stick around with us. Jim's gonna be back. We're gonna deep dive into some other technologies around the actual performance and what's actually happening on there. So stay with us. We'll be back after a few commercial messages.
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So we're back with Jim Bradfield. Had a great discussion on the first session.
Jim is an expert and you know, really one of the world's, you know, leading Experts on network technologies and really performance and oftentimes, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna touch on a subject here that is near and dear to everybody's heart, but you really just don't. You really don't realize it. We're gonna talk about your experience on the network, and it doesn't matter if it's an airplane network or if it's an wherever that is. We want to talk about experience. And Jim, thank you again for being back on the show.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: So, Jim, you often hear everybody complains, oh, the network's not working, the performance is bad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we talk about user experience. And oftentimes folks have a hard time putting those really together. They may not understand the nuances with that.
When somebody says user experience to you, what does that really mean?
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that I take that as a very broad thing. A user experience is just that, you know, whatever. The network should be transparent to users. Users shouldn't notice any different over the wireless network that they see on the wired network, right? On the regular network where they plug in, they're at their desk.
Well, a lot of times they do and, you know, nobody bothers to check. And the only difference now is that, you know, from a wired network is in. In. It's used everywhere for every application, is that you don't have to be at your desk. You can roam, you can use your phone, you can use it just about any device.
So, you know, the company should make it simple as possible to get on the wireless network. And a lot of times they don't. They make it really hard for users to actually get on a network.
Right? They actually. For a guest network, you know, you think about it, if you think about when you're getting on an airplane and you've got to log in to, like I fly on United. Well, I got a United app. I gotta log in there. I gotta do a whole bunch of stuff to connect to the network takes my, you know, five minutes. Maybe it connects, maybe it doesn't. Typically it doesn't, you know, and now you gotta go through again and keep trying and trying and trying. And that's a real bummer of the user experience, man, especially, you know, it's one thing if I want to watch cartoons as a kid, but here I am, I'm actually trying to work. And you know, that. That really just is horrible. So that is real. A real bad type of service. Now for corporate users, the client devices should already be set up. They should already be on the network, they should already. And if it's a new user or a new device, they should go to it and have that thing already checked and authenticated to the network. Once you have that done, boom, now you connect. Since you hit that wireless, it's going to go, you shouldn't have to go log in again. You know, that kind of thing is, is really a real pain for a new, for a user.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's, that's oftentimes the frustrating part that we hear because, you know, you mentioned it in the previous segment around cyber security. Right. And so the other thing around that is, well, if somehow some reason the agents are out scanning my computer and it causes everything to slow down, you know, your experience is awful, you can't do your work. And so folks, forget about those other ancillary things that go into the performance of the network. Right. And so, you know, the big push that we see, I know you see it, like I said, even more than I do, is really trying to be more predictive around some user is having a bad experience. We want to get on top of that before they start to get frustrated. What processes, technologies, AI techniques can we use so that we can help prevent those frustrating experiences that users are having?
[00:18:36] Speaker A: To remember that a lot of the IT things are still for big companies even, and for venues especially, and that kind of thing. You know, a lot of that's driven from stuff that was put in 10, 12 years ago. And, you know, they, they provide wireless services for the personnel. But one of the things is they don't ask users for, you know, actual complaints and, and areas where there are problems. And so you only get the most vocal user. Maybe you're getting, maybe there's a hundred complaints in a day, but you're only really getting 10 from people, so you don't even think it's serious. And so all the major wireless controllers, all the major wireless systems, now, they all support very large networks and they do it through AI. But you've got to back up and like we talked about earlier, you got to make sure that everything's designed properly. If you don't have that network designed and scoped out properly and configured properly, I don't care how good your AI system is, it's only going to report bad things. It's not, it's not going to help you. You won't know what you're doing. So you've got to make sure that you have somebody that really knows what's happening. They're going to look at all the statistical Data, the disconnects, reconnects interference.
And they're going to actually show you outside DDoS attacks. Right? They're actually going to show you attacks on the network. And that's a real big thing to be looking at because you don't know what's happening. A lot of times those attacks happen because you're getting connects and disconnect, connect, disconnect, you know, that kind of thing all the time. And people complain about it, but you don't realize it's from an outside attack.
So you should have a wireless engineer, somebody like my team, for example, you know, somebody come out a couple of times a year and go through the wireless network and see what's happening. And that includes going through the configuration and what's going on. You've got all this AI configured tools that will help you review it and see what's happening. Passive, which means you're just scanning the network and seeing if there's a bunch of weird stuff happening, or active, which means that you're actually connected to the network and you're pinging something behind the network so that your test is an actual test of what's happening to the user. And that is going to give you the overall health of the network and as well as point out trouble areas and things like that that happen. So you've just got to make sure that you get, you get ahead of this thing and, you know, admit that you don't know exactly what you're doing. And that's okay because, you know, nobody knows what you do. Right. Nobody understands what you do either as well as you do. So that's why you have somebody from the outside actually come in and do a check and make sure that everything is happening. And you got to still ask the customer. And that usually doesn't happen. People don't ask.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. And that's the, that's the biggest, that's the biggest thing people forget about with user experience. It's the user. If you're guessing what their experience is, you're missing the whole point of trying to provide a user experience to people. So that, that, that just really nailed it right on the head that you've got to, what you said you've got to get the user involved. And for some reason people, people are hesitant or they just don't do it. And that's not, that's not a good practice, you know, at all.
So what, what is one step that you could tell our viewers that if they do it today, that they're, you know, whether it's a measurement, whether it's a process or whether it's a tool that they can improve the experience of their customer immediately if they were to do what one thing.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Yeah, the one thing again is have that network looked at by a professional and have that thing scanned.
Now you're not going to be able to do that at home, but you're definitely going to be able to do that in a large institution, hospital, you know, those kind of things. And you need to have somebody knows what they're doing with an expensive tool like a homino or you know, that kind of thing. Ekahel those things cost about 12, $15,000. You know, it could be as much as 20. So that's not just going to be some Joe Blow off the street. You're not going to find that guy at Home Depot to come out. This is going to be a real certified expert. And that's the thing that you've got to really do to make sure you know what's happening on the network and you can compare that to what's supposed to be happening or what was happening before.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's, that is fantastic because you know, we often think just we love to do things ourselves. Right. Because we're good at technology. We think that we can do all of it right. And we forget, you know, maybe sometime it's better to get a little bit of help that can double check our work for us. And you know, that's great advice to get a third party to come out and do a survey and help you optimize those things. Jim, from, you know, on your show, you know, we, we've, we've talked about some of the technologies and those kind of things. What are some of the more recent, you know, technologies that you've, you've talked about on your, on your TV show on NOW Media.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So you know, the big, the big things there are really, you know, and like you've talked about with your guys on AI, so and I just talked about this with my son in law, he works at Delta and, and everybody is inundating him with requirement for AI. Requirement for AI. But part of the problem is that you've got to understand what that AI is supposed to do and you've got to understand all the inputs of all those kind of things because all the, all these software and everything else that's analyzing your network and that's checking especially on the wireless side of the network, you know, it better be tried and tr. True otherwise you don't even know what it's actually giving you. And that's one of the biggest things. It's, it's a check with something like a homino or echo. Again, I'm not trying to, you know, give them a plug, but you know, it's, it's the biggest things in the network. And IB Wave does the same kind of thing for cellular. You've got to make sure you are working with something that is a tried and true and already set up system for AI. Right. It's got to be, it's got to be already, already integrated and already working. Otherwise you just don't know what you're getting.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: That's right. That's exactly right. And you know, I, I love watching your show and, you know, enjoyed the time that I got to spend on it with you too. I mean, but you know, for our audience, we have been telling you AI is everywhere. It can impact everything. It can, you know, from real estate to networks to just the software development piece. And so that's why, you know, I encourage you watch Jim's show because you're going to learn more and it's from a different perspective of what we're talking about. But it's all, it all comes together. So pay attention.
I want you to stick around.
We're gonna, Jim's coming back for, you know, another segment. We're gonna even deep dive into some, you know, bigger buildings, bigger networks, bigger problems. Right. And so stick around. We'll be back after a few messages from our sponsors.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: Sam Foreign.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Welcome back to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Bideau and we are back with Jim Bradfield, his career.
You know, we were talking during the break about some of the customers that he supported, you know, through the years and deploying, you know, really just some of these large, you know, scale networks, you know, really across the world. And you know, Jim, oftentimes we see, you know, sometimes somebody has tried something new, maybe they're trying a new AI tool and maybe the experience isn't very good or maybe it's just, you know, maybe they shouldn't have just done it in the first place. Right. But we want to really tackle that scalability problem that we see because, you know, it's not a linear, oh, I've got one network that covers this now. Now I'm going to add a repeater or something like that and boom, it's going, you know, rainbows and unicorns. Right. It doesn't work that way. Right. And so how can we, you know, help either hospitals or schools or other Installations that are just big, you know, and they're, they're, they're growing beyond what they expected. But how can we help them make sure that they've got a stable WI FI system that really grows with them?
[00:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah, that, that's been the real problem with Wi Fi. Remember that as recently as 10 or 15 years ago, wireless was just an add on that was not something that was primarily used for anything. Now because of the robotics and because of the things in the schools, because of the, you know, computer on wheels and things like that that you do with the kids, the, you know, distance learning and all those kind of things, everything is wireless now. And it's got to work, right, because you know, everybody, everybody is doing so much stuff. Maybe you have used to have one device on the network total in a room. Now you could have, you know, four per student or four, three per student or three per person in the office. I mean, that's going to be maybe thousands on the network. Well, so when this stuff was designed before, it used to be, you know, let's put one here and put one there and I think we can get one over here and one over there and yeah, I think it looks good.
Well, that was great for hotspots. But now when somebody from purchasing is told by it, well we need to upgrade, what they do is they get the number and they say, well, we have 14 APS, you know, 14 access points. That's great. But you really, you know, if you actually did an AI survey and an AI predictive survey and design, you would find they need 50. Well, that's awesome. She put in 14.
Well, that didn't work. So then, you know, the IT guys are going like, well and they get out there and they start throwing things around and, and the cabling guys move around and so nothing ever works. And that's the part of the problem, right, because it, it was never actually designed the way it's supposed to be. You got to do things almost greenfield and they used to turn the power up and it would interfere with each other and yeah, it was just ridiculous.
So now you need to make sure, like we talked about in the previous segments, you got to make sure that you have somebody who knows what they're doing. They've actually got to go out there and actually do an on site survey and a predictive design and an on site test and make sure that everybody knows exactly what's happening. You know, the systems now are faster and they have to be able to integrate with the network properly and integrate with the application they're supporting. Think about all the new robotics and all those things. You have to segment those networks and you've got to put cyber security in on those networks. You got to put a separate network, you got to air gap that whole network. You don't want that thing in the outside. Right. You need to make sure that nobody can get to that thing from the outside. Well, that's kind of a new deal for everybody and nobody ever did that thing. And you know, some of the stuff's basic, like, you know, in a warehouse. I've seen things mounted upside down. I've seen things mounted in the ceiling surrounded by metal and things like that. Well, you know, it's going to attenuate. It's not going to work. Again, it's above the ceiling, it's in a cabinet, it's on a floor, whatever. And you know, this, this just is not going to physically work. So you've got to make sure you know what you're doing and you have somebody who knows what they're doing take care of that for you now.
[00:30:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: You know, again, upgraded wireless systems. Awesome. That's all using AI to make sure that your communications are actually supported and working properly and to make sure that you know what's happening and make sure that everything is operating as fairly and as properly as it should.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think people forget too. At the same time, it's no longer just buildings.
We've got IoT devices everywhere and connectivity and how things come together and how data moves and all those other things play an important role in not only, you know, the data collection piece and really setting up things, but also, you know, all your downstream things that you want to do with that data, whether it's supply chain, whether it's, you know, optimizing vehicle maintenance in, you know, mines and stuff like that. There are so many different things out there for folks to think about. And so, you know, having a third party, as you talked about, really help you scale is crucial. But you know, for a small business, where is a good place for them to look for somebody like that so that they can really understand the type of requirements and the type of third party consultants that they really need to get?
[00:32:00] Speaker A: Yeah, well, one of the things that they can actually do for themselves is get on Homina or Ekahau's website and take a look at some of the things that these guys actually do and talk to them, you know, and actually talk to them and review the webinars that they put out. These guys all put out very, very, very expensive Training materials and things like that for users, and it's actually awesome. Now, one of the things that you've gotta. You've got to think about is, you know, AI. The AI designed software and the AI design equipment like we kind of talked about during the break there.
You got to make sure that you really are clear what you want your wireless to do, because somebody's going to design it for you. And if you don't understand what you really are looking for, boom, you're. You're messed up now. You know, you talked about it. WI fi is everywhere, by the way. I'm going to tell you. In 1997, believe it or not, we designed RFID tagging for cattle.
And so that used to be a thing, not a thing, right? That's a big yellow tag now, you know, that's in their ear.
So somebody said, hey, you know, we've developed RFID tagging and we need to know how to make it work. Well, okay, you've got to find somebody that's actually wants to see the big picture and can actually help you develop that application and work for you to figure out how to make wireless work wherever you need it to work. Hey, I actually went out in the winter in Greeley, Colorado, to the feedlots out there that were, you know, thousands of acres, and there was eight feet of snow. And the guy told me, hey, what are you doing there? You know, you got this truck and what are you going to do with that? And I said, yeah, well, supposed to go out this here and model all this and that. And he goes, no, no. He came back and he had a pack horse and he put me on a pack horse. And I went and took all my equipment out in the snow out in the feed lots and actually did testing. Well, we've since been able to not have to do that. Now we can do that with AI and so we can do a predictive model to do all that thing. Now in today's world, on a farm, you actually have a wand. It looks like a kind of like a little toy, you know, a kid's toy that looks just like a saber, you know, saber lightsaber, and. And they want the area and you want all your cows, and you could tell which cows are where and how many you got. And then it goes up to, you know, vital link or somebody like that, you know, whatever, and it goes up into the cloud and in the sky and boom. And all of that is done. That's all AI think about what that does. You can do that for Anything, you can measure anything with an AI program.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think people, people forget about that too, that, you know, AI has been used in the networking field for years. I mean, it's, it's, you know, natural. You know, these large language models dominate the headlines, like I always say. But AI has been, it's been involved in technology for many years, cybersecurity and the networking side of the house. And it's actually much more mature in the networking piece than it is almost anywhere else. And people forget about that.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly right, man.
You know, use your AI, use what you've got.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, and I think from a business perspective, that should make a lot of people feel pretty good about that because that's a technology that is very mature.
So from an expansion perspective, you know, how can you help a small business really say, okay, I want to increase my footprint, but I don't, I'm not quite sure how that user experience is going to be affected. Meaning, like, I don't know if I need more, you know, more drops, I don't know if I need more endpoint, I don't know if I want more IO, all that other stuff in between. Where should they start?
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Yeah, they need to, what they need to do is have somebody who knows what they're talking about again, a certified wireless and network expert, for example, is a perfect place to start. You know, and, and what they would, what they would do is they would have somebody like us come out there and actually review with them what they're trying to do. And because we've seen hundreds and thousands of sites, you wouldn't, you know, that's a lot of number, right. We're doing three or four or 5,000 of them every year and sometimes as many as, you know, 10,000. Well, if you're doing that many, you've seen almost anything there is to see and you've developed all kinds of applications for people and boom, you, you go out there and you actually talk about it with them and they figure out, you figure out with them what they're trying to support, what they're trying to do, and you give them insight into that information. Once you do that, you're actually designing a network for them and then you use your predictive tools to design that, and then you use your on site predictive tools to design that, and then you've got your network. And once you have all that stuff set up, man, you know, everything is working awesome for them and it's better than they'd ever would had thought they could actually ever have.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And. And IoT is not new. IoT is not new, folks. And, you know, granted, the AI piece is becoming more important. You're thinking more about it, which is fantastic. I love that about my audience. They're doing awesome when it comes to those sort of things. But these technologies, whether it's controlling the thermostat, you know, from, you know, LA for an office in, you know, Columbus, Ohio, to, you know, just better integration of those kind of pieces, folks like Jim can help you optimize that because it's not new to them. They've been doing it for a long time. So I want our audience, though, stick around. We're going to one more segment we're going to close out with really starting to look at some of the dangers of, you know, dead zones and some of the other cyber aspects of this. And Jim's going to help us walk through that. So stick around.
We'll be back after a couple of short messages from our sponsors.
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So in our final segment, we're gonna. We're gonna talk about really, the silent killer of productivity first. And then we're gonna talk about the potential killer of your. Your entire company, per se, if you're not careful. The first one, though, we're gonna hit the dreaded dead zone.
How many times have we been walking around the office or you see somebody carrying a laptop around the office or, you know, they're trying to hook up to their phone? Happens all the time. It's the dead zone. And Jim is an expert in making sure those things don't happen.
So, Jim, how can you explain.
We've touched on every segment, but I really want to hammer it one more time. How can you explain to folks how to prevent those types of, you know, things from occurring? Because it frustrates everybody.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: Yeah, dead zones, we call that zombie eradication.
So, you know, it's actually a pretty broad category boiling down to basically poor performance or no performance in that area. And you know, the biggest, the biggest issue is that the customer who's using it, you know, the actual person who's using it doesn't really know what's happening. They just know that they're not getting the network transmission or, or that they're going too slow or, you know, whatever, and they're, they're just unhappy with what's happening. So the simplest issue is you go out there and you actually check and make sure that there is a WI FI signal in that area. Well, maybe the WI FI access point died, you know, the AP is gone or, you know, or it's just misconfigured or something. You know, it's just offline. And that's really simple to figure out.
You can do that without a whole lot of extra equipment.
For areas where there is a good WI FI signal, it's not always the fault of the WI FI network. Remember there could be a good signal. But you know, the network name, which might be school guest for the actual user or you name it Guest, you know, that might be set up for a guest person to come in. Well, or they actually have the school guest user name as well. Somebody thought they'd be clever.
Well, but that one's a secure network, so nobody actually knows what network they're supposed to be on. So in that area you can't log in because you don't have the credential for that network.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, that's the simplest thing right now. The most important thing there is to make sure the client device is actually connected to the network.
You don't even know that. Sometimes there's going to be different security. Sometimes there's going to be client devices not going to function properly for that network. You know, there's a lot of things that might be interference keeping you from functioning. So, you know, the more difficult area though is the network. Suppose that you actually configured all the wireless property properly. You got a good signal, you got everything going, everything is, you know, perfect, except you're not connected to the actual network you're supposed to be connected to off the access point. So the access point port configuration on the switch is not configured. Well, hello. It's not going to transmit any data. Surprise.
Well, the other thing that might be there is maybe everything is all set up and correctly configured in the network, but you're out of what's called IP addresses, the actual number of the, the name that it's given to you by the network.
Well, like at home, this is a real simple one. A Lot of people complain my TV won't go on to my wireless network. What's going on here? Well, when you initially set up your network, they give you four, what's called IP addresses, four network numbers, reservations.
If there's five and four already on the network and you're the fifth one, well, that one isn't going to work. And you don't know that. So you need a different kind of equipment at home or on the network to give out more IP addresses. Well, you just sometimes don't know. And that's really what causes people shut down.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think that goes to the broader topic we even mentioned and discussed earlier around user experience. What you just walked through are a lot of different things that folks check when there's an issue and there's a good way to do it and there's a bad way to do it. And if you as a user just, you know, hear from the other, other side of the line, oh, you know, it's, it's a, it's a network issue, it's in your laptop, I, I really can't help you. You know, that's not a good user experience. And, you know, folks forget about that. That, you know, walk through the, you know, steps with people, try to help them and, you know, even if it doesn't work at the end, nine times out of 10 they're going to say, you know what, that's a good experience because they tried everything that they could to help me. And people forget about that. What's your, what's your advice when you are talking to junior, you know, staff and, you know, junior members of your team to say, this is how you got to interact with the customer.
[00:44:58] Speaker A: Yeah. So most people, when they're starting out or even, you know, guys who've been shifted into a new position or whatever and have never dealt with wireless a lot, they don't even have any idea where to start troubleshooting. That's the biggest issue. That's the biggest problem. You know, the IT team's typically only going to look at the network component and the IT team is, is going to say, well, my network is set up properly and blah, blah, you know, well, you don't know that because you haven't, they haven't taken into account what's required to make that WI fi actually work in that, in that.
And they'll close out the trouble ticket and just tell you it's use your error. Right. That's not, that's not a good thing. And they may not have any troubleshooting software tools either. And if they don't, they don't, they don't want to report to their boss that, well, they don't know and you know, we couldn't figure it out and then what are you going to do? Right. So they call it user error and take care of it that way. Well, so what you need to do again is you need to find somebody who has troubleshooting experience, has the AI software to actually go out and take a look at it and review the network and the wireless and make sure that you know what's happening and be sure that that person understands the configuration.
Best practice for the environment. Because every type of thing, you know, a separate network that's actually set up to be closed off and air gapped, you know, so it stays away from everybody outside that has to be supported differently, it has to be designed differently. All of those things have to be done different. You know, then and again you've got to work with the network personnel to make sure that you get to them and explain it to them what needs to happen and make it work.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's, that's so important because, you know, as you're, as you're going through that process and you're trying to figure out what the root causes of whatever that issue is. And the quickest way to get an angry user is for the network not to work. I mean that's, they get more, they get more mad about that than their laptop not working. And so, you know, from a, solving those root cause problems and trying to be more proactive, what's one case where AI is really starting to accelerate that analysis and solving those issues?
[00:47:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So we just did a big project for a car manufacturer out of Korea. You can probably figure out who it is.
And, and they have, they have global sites. They had a lot of sites all over the US and we did their first 13 or 15 sites, you know, and it's a, they're big, they're basically big warehouses where there's all kinds of parts and picking like we talked about. Well, everything is on WI Fi. Everything uses WI Fi.
Well, believe it or not, we went and did all these tests and we said, oh, guess what, your WI fi is not working in this area. It's not working in this area. It's not. Well, they said, wait a minute, that can't be. And so we did a deeper dive onto their network configuration and we found that some of the stuff just wasn't on. Guess what we did.
We climbed up into all the Shelving. And I had my guys actually open up the equipment cabinets and they said, yeah, your UPS's are all dead.
Surprise. So everything runs off of UPS. Right? In a factory, in a warehouse. Right. Well, these were dead. And so it made the switches go offline that were supporting all the access points in a certain area. So the users were having to turn up the WI FI noise basically and they were trying to log in and trying to work and they were disconnecting all over the place. Well, sometimes, you know, it's just not just a matter of the WI FI connection or WI FI configuration or even the WI FI design.
It's also configuration of the devices and it's making sure that everything is online. Surprise.
And that's a real big deal. You know, if your configuration is wrong on a handheld device, it's not going to work no matter how good your wireless is.
[00:49:18] Speaker B: That's exactly right. And I think, you know, it's definitely, it's definitely a challenge. And I, you know, I appreciate you going through some of these examples because it really shows, you know, how you can make sure that you're checking everything but also giving our customers some ideas on, you know, how they can scale. So what's the easiest way for folks to get a hold of you, Jim?
[00:49:42] Speaker A: Yeah, the easiest way is to look on my
[email protected]. they can also email me, which also works really well. Jbjr as wireless.com and they can call me at 925-382-0410. I'm gonna take their call and they can get me on LinkedIn. Jim Bradfield on LinkedIn and you know, happy to help anybody anywhere with just about anything. And we'll give you a free call, free review and take a look at what's happening with your network and then we can develop what needs to be done from there.
[00:50:19] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's, that's great Jim. Thank you for being here again.
You know, like I was telling folks, when the network goes down, everybody complains the loudest. It just seems to get people really upset faster than anything else. And I hope for our audience it really is a wake up call that, you know, AI is dependent on so many other technologies that if you forget about them or they're not optimized, your AI systems overall are not going to perform really as well as you think they are. And you've got to make sure that visibility impact decisions that are being made. Take all of those ancillary technologies into account because it's going to drive how you really can scale. And it doesn't matter if you're in a hospital, university or, you know, you know, supporting cattle, as Jim was saying, that, you know, you've got to make sure that signal performance experience of the user is really driven by, you know, what fundamentally they need, where and when, because that is, that's the most important thing. And so thank you for being here. I'm Dr. Alan Badot. I appreciate you as always, watching AI today. See you next time. And we're going to bring some new technologies and intelligence to life, so hopefully it will make your lives much easier. Thank you.
