 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Aloha. My name is Matt Darnell. I'm here as usual with my cohort Greg Jackson. Greg, great to have you today. Thanks. Great. We're here with supporting your tech and we are going to be discussing about small, medium-sized business Wi-Fi deployments, some types of things that you should do, some differences, all the letters and alphabet soup associated with that. But first, as we normally do, we're going to talk about some current events. And the first thing, I found this product and it was kind of a starter type of thing. It's called the Relay and it's a screenless phone for kids. So, and it's not really a phone. It's a phone that you could talk and listen, but it works more like a walkie-talkie. And it's really small. It's less than three inches by three inches square and it's got a button in the middle and it works like a walkie-talkie. So, you could have, let's say that, you know, I know you have kids and I have kids, we give every one of our kids these and you and I have an app on our phone. Whenever I talk into the app on my phone, it's just broadcast to all my children. And when they say something into it, it's sent to everybody else. And it's designed to allow kids to be able to talk, you know, you talk to them, it has GPS in it so you can track them, you know, where they are. But they're really want, the goal of this is to kind of curb that smartphone addition. And one of the biggest arguments I have with my children is time to put the screen down. So, this doesn't even have a screen. And they're looking at, they call them channels where, you know, let's say, you know, if your child has one, my child has one. If you and I both agree, we could create a channel between our two kids so they could talk privately. And they're going to have a games channel where you could ask for the joke of the day or maybe a trick, you know, you would throw 30 other people, you know, to have these devices, you do a trivia challenge. And I tell you, this screen addiction with kids is such a huge thing. And this, I mean, it looks awkward. I mean, it's square. I don't know, I think if it looked, but it looked more like a phone would have a screen. So, I mean, do you think there's a place that any kid that had a phone, like, if I tried to give this to my kids, they would be rejected. There's no way that they could ever go back. But if this came out 10 years ago, and this is all they had, I mean, do you think there's a chance for a device like this? Yeah, I think hindsight's 20-20, right? So, I would ask you, is this a punishment device? It's a punishment. Well, and the, for an elementary school kid. Yeah, that'd be great. Yes, it's a good starter device. Exactly. Because it does have the tracking. Is it cell or is it Wi-Fi or has it? It's cell. It's a real phone. It's a real phone. Okay. I mean, you push to talk. Interesting. You know, it's that, and it, I mean, there are, and there are apps you can get, like, when we were driving around Europe, we were in two different cars, and we were using a walkie-talkie app that used cell data to go back and forth. And that worked well. So, I just, that's the first, you know, real product I've seen that is directly aimed at curbing that screen addiction. Because it is, I tell my kids that if, what they want to do all day is, you know, get home from football practice, get their phone, go back in their room, look at memes, look at whatever they're doing. Do some goofy videos on Facebook. Yeah. I tell them, get out of there. Come out here and do that. And when we start talking about our home automation, you know, we could talk about things like, I'm curious, is there a way, and we need to research this, when my kid is in his room, his phone doesn't work. Yeah. You know, does that kind of, I mean, literally, it's to the point, I don't let him charge it in his room. He's up till one o'clock in the morning. He charges it by, it's by my bedside, you know. And if he doesn't charge his phone before I get to bed, it doesn't get charged that night. So, he's on whatever percentage, you know. So, just these strict, strict rules that, you know, I've had to put in place in my household to curb that. And with this kind of device, you know, I don't think that's right for my kids and the age of life they are. It's a good time out to them. I love it. Absolutely. Here you go. You can walk, you're talking to me all you want, but there's no screen. Yeah. Okay. And this is something that I knew that you were kind of interested in, and I was interested as well, because, you know, the prime day meltdown on Amazon. Yeah. You know, I think this is a, you know, you asked something the other day about, you know, is this really newsworthy, right, regarding Tesla. And I remember a small outage with Amazon several years ago, probably about five years ago. And I had to look it up. But I was interested to see, you know, when Amazon's down, you know, how much are they really losing? And prime day is something that Amazon has been pushing for months. And you're supposed to have all these great deals and then look, I mean, better prices than Black Friday. I believe prime day is an anniversary date. I think it's like a birthday for Amazon. I think that's the inception. Yeah. Okay. So, but I mean, I was going through some stuff, just wanted to clarify some facts. Do you know how much money they make? Amazon? Yeah. Just take a guess. On prime day or all year round? Either. I'd say prime day, two billion. Okay. How much do you think they make annually? Annually 300 billion. Okay. Well, you were close in the first one. So 3.6 billions the target for Amazon day or Amazon prime day. It's a 36 hours. 36 hours. Yeah. Okay. Which is so it's a Martian day. Exactly. Okay. And they're right around $178 billion a year. $178 billion. So when they go down, minutes count. So I believe five years ago when I had to do the research, because I didn't know how much they were going to lose when they're out, but it's in the five to $7 million range for every half hour, 45 minutes. It's hard because, and for those of you that don't know, Amazon prime went down when just everybody went there all at once. And when you went to the servers, if you look on the picture on the you got a picture of a dog. That's what you got. Oh, no, it was a cute puppy. It was a cute puppy. It was the dogs of Amazon. Meet the dogs, dogs of Amazon. And you hit refresh, it would just give you another dog, another dog. But we're, I mean, it's different. If I wanted something at Target and it's not open, I can shop somewhere else in town. If I want to buy batteries or phone cords, I mean, maybe some things on the techie side, I go to New Egg or Monoprice for cables. But if I want to buy a drone or I want to buy something, something else I just bought, like we bought charging cables and adapters, we get that on Amazon, Amazon, whatever their brand is, there's no alternative. So if they're down for a day, I would, it's almost like they'll get that the next day. You know, I mean, unless you absolutely need it. And if you absolutely need it, you're not shopping on Amazon anyway. It's like, really, what's a day's difference? So let me ask you this, how many things do you think they sell? How many different things? Because they stock some things, or they say it's filled. How many things on their menu? Golly, 10 million. Okay. How many customers do you think they have? Active customers? Prime customers. Prime customers, 200 million. Okay, so I'll give you a chance. I have two accounts. I have two prime accounts. I'll give you a chance to change your answer. For every offering, they have a customer. Really? Is one of my answers close? Yes. I forget my answer's worth. But I'm going to, I'm going to, 10 and 100, 10 and 200? I think you said 10 and 200 million. Okay. So it must be 10 million because you would have known the other one if that was the right answer. 100 million. 100 million. How would you say 200 million? That's not even close to 100 million. You know, it's a 100 million. 100 million. So they have an offer. They pay $129 a year. Now it's $129. Yes. Right? And you know, that's like Costco. Some people say that Costco sells everything at cost once they distribution and they make their money off the membership fees and the $1.50 hot dogs. They clean up a lot. But I mean, it's, but they're a public company. So I mean, their books are out there. I mean, it's not like it's a private company where everything's closed, like Tesla. Nobody knows how much money they're burning through. Exactly. But they have a 100 million Prime Day. It's Prime users. Prime, yeah. Exactly. People that pay money, okay. And so why are you a Prime member? Let me ask you this. What would you get out of it? I get to be lazy and not go into a store and fight with registers. So free shipping. No, I just do convenience. But you get that with Amazon. Why are you an Amazon Prime? Why do you pay $120? Are you an Amazon Prime member? I am. So why do you pay the $129? I thought when I first became a Prime member, if I spent enough, the Prime membership was free. That's how long ago I think I joined. Okay. It could have been, like it used to be $99. Yeah. Well, it used to be $79. Is that okay? Yeah, $79, $99. Then it went to $129. So there's some, you know, there's some market guys that are saying, okay, you know, time out on the price increases. And it's interesting because they're, I thought they, I thought Alibaba was actually bigger than these guys, but Amazon. Alibaba being the Amazon of China. Exactly. Okay. Yeah, but they're like less than $40 billion. So I'm like, oh, you guys are small potatoes compared to the Amazon. Exactly. That's a lemonade stand. So I like the free video. I like the 2D shipping. So free shipping is like, if you buy five things from Amazon. But even a lot of things are free shipping if over $25 or something. Yes. But yeah. But whenever I shop on Amazon, the first thing I do is I, when I do a search, I click the check box prime and I can I click five stars, four stars, four stars or bucks. Exactly. That's the first thing I do. It's like, you know, if it doesn't have four stars, I'm not interested. Forget about it. You know, I mean, luckily my wife didn't have those options. She forced you married me, right? This guy's two and a half stars, right? That's common. That's going to, we'll bring that up on one of our shows, trying to start to do that with credit. Oh, Tinder, right? You go out with somebody, you rate them. What's Tinder? I don't know. I heard some. I read about it. Good answer. Right. There we go. Okay. So, all right. Block, now this shocked me. Okay. This was the kind of thing that I read that I didn't believe. Last week, two blockbusters, video rental stores closed in Alaska. How many are left? One. I mean, can you believe that? I mean, there were still two blockbusters. I mean, then there's another one left in Oregon, right? But who's getting out of their, in their car, drive into the store and renting a video? I don't know. I mean, I guess they were saying that- They should have started doing video games. That's what they should have started doing. It's because the band, they don't have the band with, you know, they can't do that in Alaska. It was, it said that in 2013, there were 13 of them left. But these were the, so there's one blockbuster left in the country in Bend, Oregon. And that's the kind of thing where if I'm ever in Oregon, I'm going to go just to rent one more time. I'm just going to rent it, walk out, wait five minutes, walk back in and turn it back in, right? You know, and video the whole thing just to have that experience. Yeah. I think it should be part of some like historical walk. Seriously. This was the last, that is, you know, I remember when Netflix used to send me movies. Yeah. Right? Red box. And I remember thinking, why in the world? How are they going to get by with just online? You know, this is back, that was pretty visionary. You know, it's saying, you know, the band was going to keep increasing, you know, and we used to do, you know, all, we'd go up to the, yeah, we're on like the five, five DVDs at a time plan, you know, and you put them back in and I thought that, I thought that was a great model, but obviously that, that would be dead, you know, today. So, I mean, Netflix, I think that's one of the best examples of a complete phase shift of a business where Blockbuster was not able to do that. You know, they can't, you rent a movie for 19 cents on the dollar or something online, a streaming copy, but Netflix was so successful at making that transition. And, you know, it's kind of like we tell people, you know, in your 1900, you know, you could have been the best carriage maker, you know, pulled behind a horse, but when those Model T's started rolling off that assembly line, it didn't matter how much, how much money you made, you could have been making them since Roman times. Yeah. Hey, you got to either change drastically with the times or, you know, you're going to, you're going to go by the wayside. So, I think Netflix did something that, that's, you know, Blockbuster obviously didn't do, but anyway, so I was just, it was just shocked, but okay. So, we have about the 30 seconds here, but Greg, let me ask you about your beer. How do you like your beer? Yeah. So, this story interests me. So, I remember vaguely something coming out a couple years ago about customizing beer based on, and then using AI to customize that beer. AI being artificial intelligence. Yeah. So, I've only got 30 seconds, but- We had 30 seconds. It's over? Yeah, it's over. Okay. So, let's hold that for next time. That'll be a teaser for next week. How do you like your beer? Yeah. Okay. So, Aloha again. My name is Matt Darnell here with Trustee Sidekick. Greg Jackson. I want to thank you for watching Supporting Our Tech. We'll see you in about a minute. Hi, I'm Howard Wigg. I am the proud host. Green for Think Tech Hawaii. I appear every other Monday at three, and I have really, really exciting guests on the exciting topic of energy efficiency. Hope to see you there. Aloha. I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just going to scare you out of your mind. So, come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons, and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up, and please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keeping you safe. Aloha. Welcome back to Supporting Your Tech. I'm Matt Darnell here with Greg Jackson, and there's always that intro that plays before our videos, and I need to talk to... I want to change that up something. I mean, we're a tech show, maybe some Daft Punk, maybe, or something, a little more techie for that. I think it's Paco Bell's Canon. Should I beatbox for you without helping? Can you? Right? I mean, absolutely. Just to make sure there's no license issues. But again, so today we're going to be talking about Wi-Fi. And Wi-Fi, if we could switch to the picture here, in this network here, it's this piece right there. And this is an example of an external Wi-Fi router, and here we've got a little antenna there. A lot of times, if you're a very small business, the Wi-Fi will be integrated into the router. And let me just start there, Greg. When you talk to customers, what are the main differences you see with a built-in one versus an external router? Excuse me, Wi-Fi access point? Typically, I think it's for convenience. If I understand the question, it's more about where are they going to place the device? Is it the best place for the device to be? But you're tethered to where the internet comes in. So when you buy these all-in-one units, they're very convenient, but now they stick it in the middle of the office. The antenna is sticking up, lights are going everywhere. That's the best place for the Wi-Fi, but is it really the best place for the router? So I would prefer to separate them. Yeah, and when you do get that call and you order internet service, a lot of times they'll ask you, do you want one with Wi-Fi or without? Right. And people will say, oh, I want one with Wi-Fi, and then they never think about it again. And it's often some corner, and they don't realize when they go to the other side of the office, why they don't have any internet connection. So that's, to me, that's the biggest advantage of having the external Wi-Fi is you can place it wherever you want. And as long as you have cable and power where you want it to be, it can be very, very easy. Exactly. There are ways you can power it over the cable or even if you just have power there, no cable, to do what we call a mesh network where they're just kind of repeat back to each other. Overlapping a little bit. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, but the biggest disadvantage, in my opinion, to have a separate Wi-Fi device from the router is another device to manage. So now if there's a problem, it's not just is the router doing OK, but now what's the IP address? How do I talk to this extra one? Nobody remembers that. It's worked for four years, and we can't talk to it anymore, and I see that happening all the time. So they go in and reset it, so then passwords aren't there. Sometimes they get lost, Matt. They literally can't find them. They can't find them. They can't find them. So I knew it was over here somewhere. Exactly. And then we'll talk about that a little bit later. Yeah, so those are the teammates. So a small business, 10 people. I really think you could get by with one external. I recommend external. And we'll talk about some cloud management, so you don't have to think about those type of things anymore. But yeah, so that's all we have with Wi-Fi. So now what is Wi-Fi? And do you know what Wi-Fi stands for? I'm going to guess wireless fidelity. You would think so, but nobody knows. I mean, I looked for like 10 minutes. What does Wi-Fi stand for? And it's, you know, and the little trademark, the waves coming out that the Wi-Fi Alliance did that. But yeah, Wi-Fi, it's one of those things. There's no definitive answer why they call it Wi-Fi. They might have been thinking wireless fidelity, but yeah, there isn't. But Wi-Fi, it would allow you to do any device you buy today, cell phone, laptop, even on most desktops you buy today, have Wi-Fi in. And it's a very high-speed way of connecting your device to a network. The disc end would have had that there. So that's what Wi-Fi is. I mean, some people may, just to help, you know, some of our viewers conceptualize this, this stuff's been around for, you know, the technology is just being used differently to deliver Wi-Fi. So Wi-Fi is a version of cell phones, microwave. We've got, what are some of the, those are some of the things that we've been using in the past. I had a couple other thoughts, but we've been using this for so long that we're just using the same RF signal, but now we're transferring data on top of it. So conceptually, we know what it is. Absolutely, yeah. And a lot of people confuse it with other things, like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, totally different technologies. Bluetooth is good at short range, your Wi-Fi has got a long range. They might like cellular NFC, the near field communications, when you tap two phones together, or if you do the pay by phone, you go to the store and you tap your phone on their little charge card thing, that's NFC and now there's Bluetooth low energy. And we're seeing a lot of these other new kind of protocols are coming about for what you talked about with Mr. Fry, that the IoT kind of internet of things. If I have something that's not plugged into power, I want that battery to last for absolutely as long as I can. So we have those kind of things. Wi-Fi is not good at that. Wi-Fi is very power hungry compared to Bluetooth or Bluetooth low energy, or even ZigBee, a lot of those other standards. So we have that there. And one story I'll tell you about, the number one thing people need to do is make sure they have Wi-Fi passwords on everything. And a story that we were just told yesterday, and I'm not going to name name, but they had the router and with the Wi-Fi, it was built in and they had said, yeah, we only use the 2.4 gigahertz. And they said, no, we're on the 5 gigahertz. And we'll talk about that later. And they go, no, no, no, we only use 2.4. And they go, no, no, we're on 5 gigahertz. And they said, no, but you can't, because we didn't set a password for the 5 gigahertz. So I mean, these are smart people. Because they didn't set a password for the 5 gigahertz, they weren't there. So definitely set that password. And it should not be one, two, three, four. It should not be your sweet number. It should not be let me in. Just something a little bit harder than that, and have that and do that. So definitely everything should have a Wi-Fi password. I remember back in the days, and we were talking about where people would do the war driving. You just drive around and you look for an open Wi-Fi and people would put chalk on the sidewalk or on the side of the building as big X in a circle and let people know. You see people huddling around there. It's because there's open Wi-Fi there. That brings up a good point. I mean, when you have Wi-Fi, one of the things that you want to do is shape the spectrum in which you deliver that Wi-Fi. So if you have an antenna that just emits the radio signal, sometimes you want it to go in a direction. You know, we've talked to a large customer that had to get internet to one end of their property, but didn't want it to hit the residential area on the other side. And that requires a different antenna. Similar to a flashlight, which sends a relatively coherent beam. It doesn't expand a lot versus a regular light bulb. You turn that on. It's just going to go everywhere, every direction. So definitely having that Wi-Fi, but put a password on your Wi-Fi. Please make it more than just your sweet number, your phone number, a couple of letters, and have that catch. I'm a big advocate of guest networks, too, having two different networks. You're always going to find somebody. If you have Wi-Fi, your employees, you're probably going to use it. You're probably going to use it for equipment. And then you're going to have somebody invariably that comes in and says, do you have Wi-Fi? Can I use it? So I would segment those off. I know that's important. And we're going to be doing that, installing a church in the school. And so there's going to be one Wi-Fi for the kids, one Wi-Fi network, the same network, but different SSIDs, and one for the teachers, one for the guests, and one for the admin. So just the paths will never cross. Yes. Hopefully that's the plan, right? Yeah. Okay. So talking about how fast is Wi-Fi, if we can switch the screen here, you know, what you originally, whenever you see that 802.11, that just means Wi-Fi. All you're concerned about are the letters after that. As you can see, it started off at 1.2 megabits per second. And it was on, we call it, 2.4 gigahertz. And if you're on that network, there's no reason to do that. So on your phone, if you see 2.4 or anything like that, you should not be on that. Where you want to be is on the 5 gigahertz. And why is that? Why is that? Well, within the Wi-Fi, just like on your TV, there are channels, right? And when I have 2.4, it's 1 through 13. And 6, help me out here. So 1.6 and 11 are the most popular. I'm sorry, correct, yeah. I don't think I can erase. 1.6 and 11. And the reason you have that is... It does go to 13, though. It does go to 13? Okay, that's what I thought. 14 if you're Europe or Japan, I think. Japan, okay. These are the only three channels you can be on that don't overlap other ones. So if someone's on channel three, they're interfering with this one and with this one when they use there. So you're 1.6 and 11, right? Absolutely. So that's the problem. You've got some jerk that comes in that doesn't know what they're doing. They set their Wi-Fi. And they could be your next door neighbor. That's right. And you have no control over it. They set their Wi-Fi for that. And then all of a sudden, it's your Wi-Fi performance went down horribly. And as you can see, the fastest you can get with the 2.4 gigahertz here is at 150 megabits if you're on N. So the 5 gigahertz, there's this AC and AC Wave 2, and any access point you buy today should be at least AC. I can see it, you know, it's maybe another 20 bucks for an AC Wave 2, but that will set you up for the next five years for sure. And if you think of, because the maximum speed is 3.5 gigabits, but I don't know of any business outside of an enterprise that has something to connect to it faster than 1 gigabit. So the fact that you can go that fast on that is really futile. You're also limited in those things. You've got to be careful because the number of devices are limited too. So you really, like what you're saying is you really need to, if you have a requirement for that type of bandwidth, then it's important. But don't think that, oh, if it's 3 gigabits, then I can add 1,000 devices to it. The number of connected devices, you know, does degrade, if as it increases, will degrade the quality. Well, it's shared bandwidth, right? I mean, so if you had 100 people connected, it's 3.5, but divided by 100. And then there's overhead associated with that. Yeah. So definitely if you're buying something today, you want to have, you know, at least AC at a minimum, and AC Wave 2. And those typically have all the radios too. So you'll have, you'll see more antennas. They'll offer different frequencies that allow you to segment your network. So yeah, that's a good call. And instead of having to deal with that, you know, 1611 channels, 5 gigahertz, like 60 channels, has a lot of channels in there that, you know, that don't overlap so, and you can bond them. The biggest advantage of 2.4, if I say 2.4 has got an advantage, which is a clear advantage, is the lower the gigahertz, the better it penetrates things. Like TB, like AM, that's why you can get an AM signal almost. It's such a low frequency, it goes through brick walls. It goes through a lot of different things, whereas 2.4 gigahertz is, because it's logarithmic, you know, the way that it works, and yada, yada, yada, that it'll go through a wall that a 5 gigahertz signal just will not. So if you're having trouble getting a reception with a 5 gigahertz, that's the only reason, to me I'd say, put another access point in that building. But if that's absolutely impossible for whatever reason, that's the one advantage, because we've upgraded people where, you know, they were on, say, you know, 2.11b access points, and they had five of them. So we go and we put in the latest and greatest 5 gigahertz stuff, and they don't have the coverage that they had before. You know, where they have coverage is a heck of a lot faster, but they don't have the coverage that they had with 2.2.4, because it doesn't have the penetration through walls. You know, people inadvertently make Faraday cages, you know, they have chicken wire this and doing that kind of stuff. So yeah, so that's the biggest gotcha. If you're going from 2.4 to 5, chances are, unless it's an open room, you're going to have less coverage, because it just does not penetrate through walls like it does on a 2.4. So yeah, okay. So administering Wi-Fi, you know, the two ways to do that. One is you can talk to the device itself, like you're talking to your router or that, but like the kind of things we install, they're all administering the cloud. So when I want to make a change this access point, I don't need to talk to, I don't need to talk directly to that access point. I go to the cloud control panel. I type in my changes and the cloud pushes those changes down to the access point. Great for kids. You can, you don't have to be home to manage it. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And if you don't need 2.4 gigahertz, turn it off. There's literally turn it, just another attack vector, another attack point. You want to go in and turn that off. So definitely with Wi-Fi, set your passwords. 5 gigahertz is where you want to be. Anything new, you needs to be that 802.11ac wave two, if you can afford it, which I think most businesses can pay that little incremental and have that there. So again, this is Matt Darnell with Greg Jackson here and supporting your tech, talking about Wi-Fi for your small business. If you have any other questions or would like us to follow up on something, don't hesitate to leave us something in the comments and we'll get right back to you. Aloha.