Before we get into the nitty gritty, I have to give a shout out to Keith Parsons and the whole WLPC Team. Keith's vision for bringing together the Wireless LAN Professional community and to keep the conference going and growing has changed the industry. I was lucky enough to be at the first WLPC in Austin, TX--how far we've come! This is the 11th year of WLPC, and it is now international, with conferences in Europe, Latin America and the United States.

The overarching theme of this year's conference was AI. There were talks about how impressive our own brains are relative to AI, how to use generative AI (genAI) in general, how to use it to shore up a lack of python coding expertise, how AI was affecting the industry overall, how AI could simulate a site survey, and the use of AI in spectrum analysis. David Coleman's talk "Next-Generation Spectrum Analysis for Wi-Fi: Insights and Optimization" really opened my eyes. He talked about the fact that he and his colleagues are using genAI to identify likely sources of RF transmission, using CSV files of digitized spectrum. David specifically mentioned that these techniques are working with data from a Wi-Spy, and can be used to identify doppler radar used in DFS bands. He mentioned that since genAIs only allow relatively small data uploads to a prompt, spectrum captures often need to be partitioned in order to submit them to a prompt. David's talk inspired me to start working on AI-ready spectrum export for the next Chanalyzer release.

Spectrum Analysis also was having a moment at this year's WLPC. We saw spectrum analyzer screenshots, video or demonstrations during at least 10 of the 42 talks. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Wi-Fi 7 features such as MRU and puncturing are easier to understand when they can be seen in action. There was also much discussion of channel planning, transmission power management, antenna optimization, and even band-pass filtering--all topics that are more readily discussed with spectrum analysis visuals. We were honored to have the WiPry Clarity as a Finalist for Product of the Year.

As usual, there were a number of talks on topics of design, channel planning and site survey. I took notes on a number of things that should be updated in the recommendations that the MetaGeek App and inSSIDer make with respect to best practice for channel widths in different spectrum bands. Charles Clare gave a talk titled "Exams. Lessons Learned Continued.... More Students, WPA3, 6Ghz, Cisco 9166D1," which told a pretty interesting story about setting up a temporary network for exam proctoring in a historical structure. He talked about the tools he used to plan and validate the deployment, including the MetaGeek App.

When I was at Cradlepoint, lots of Product Managers that we hired to work on private cellular were jumping over from Wi-Fi vendors. Private Cellular vendors have been saying that that private cellular would eventually replace Wi-Fi. It definitely doesn't feel that way at WLPC. There was some talk about private cellular, and I attended a deep dive on doing cellular surveys with WLAN Pi. I am working on adding CBRS (3550 to 3700 MHz) support in Chanalyzer, since the Wi-Spy Lucid and WiPry Clarity hardware support that band.

Packet analysis is always a hot topic at WLPC and throughout the networking industry. Wireshark continues to be the tool of choice for Network Engineers. One major driver for the adoption of Macs in the industry is that the wifi cards support promiscuous capture directly to Wireshark without any special drivers. Much of the troubleshooting and optimization work relies on beacons, probes and probe responses. There were a number of talks that focused on the importance of optimizing channel airtime utilization, and the visualizations created in Eye P.A. and central to the MetaGeek App are still best-of-breed for revealing airtime utilization. The MetaGeek App will support the soon-to-be-released WLAN Pi Go for packet capture.

Check out all the great talks from WLPC, and I hope to see you at the next one!