 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today, and it will be available for you to watch later at your convenience in our show archives. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For anyone here who's not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. So similar to your state library, we provide training and resources and services and grants to all types of libraries in the state. So we will have shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries out there. Public, academic, K-12, corrections museums, archives, really our only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. We bring in guest speakers to Encompass Live sometimes, but sometimes we have our own library commission staff to presentations for us. And that is what we have today. Joining us this morning is Andrew Sherman, who is right now the title is Library Technology Support Specialist, IT guy kind of, and he's in our library development department here at the Library Commission. And Sherman is going to tell us all you ever wanted to know about Wi-Fi in the library. No pressure. And if you have any questions too, as it said in the description, if you have questions, type them into the questions section or go to webinar interface. We'll grab them and get Sherman can answer all of them. We'll see what he may answer some of your questions as he goes through this presentation. But if he doesn't, or if you just want to make sure he does get something covered, type it in when you think about it, we don't want you to miss out on getting any of your questions answered. So just type things in when you think about it, I'll keep an eye on it. And then we'll get you all your answers. So I will let you take it away, Sherman. Tell us all about Wi-Fi in the library. Okay. Thanks everybody for joining today. One of the reasons I wanted to do this program is there's a new Wi-Fi standard that actually just got approved on Monday. Wi-Fi seven is coming. But we'll kind of walk through the standards with our first slide. So this is the kind of the current generation of Wi-Fi. So Wi-Fi six has been out for a while. Six E was a stop gap because the six gigahertz radio frequency came available and Wi-Fi seven wasn't ready. Also as part of six E Wi-Fi seven, they've introduced a new security standard too. So they're throwing quite a bit of stuff at us for 2024. It's a lot of new stuff. So there are some companies that have released six E routers that they planned to upgrade to the Wi-Fi seven standard once it was announced and finalized, which just happened on Monday. One of the issues you run into though with that gear is it's kind of that first mover price. They tend to be the high end, pretty expensive gear. If it's a large library, maybe if it's a small library where really a consumer grade router meets your needs, I don't know that it's worth spending $500, $600, $700 on a Wi-Fi seven router, even for the future proofing it might give you. It just depends on the funds that are available to you. The Wi-Fi six E, Wi-Fi standard, why everybody's so excited about them is they offer significantly faster wireless connections. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to stay ahead of the internet speeds that are available now to businesses and consumers. Right now nationally, I think the average internet speed for a home is 200 megabits per second, which seems would be a luxury I think for some of our communities and libraries in Nebraska. I just finally got one gig service in Omaha, which is fiber, and I really enjoyed it. It's really, really nice. And currently I have like an iPhone 14. I bought a new computer last year, so I don't have anything that can take advantage of six E or seven at home yet. I don't have any devices that can use that bandwidth and speed, so I haven't upgraded my home router setup. I'm still running one that follows the Wi-Fi five standard data 211 AC. We do have some funding that's available at the Nebraska Library Commission for libraries that if they want to upgrade their network equipment and need some assistance with that, we can definitely help. Are you going to explain more about that later too? Yeah. I wasn't sure. I've been away for a little while out for a while. I didn't know if we had all that all the details of that figured out now. Yeah, we're still working on it a little bit, but I will mention it. So the library network right now, you should at least have a router that's supporting Wi-Fi five, the 802 11 AC standard. It's overspent the 2.4 and the 5 gig radio frequencies. So what you see in a lot of places where you go to, if you bring your device up to join the Wi-Fi network, you'll see there's a Wi-Fi network declared at 2 or 2.4 gig in the name of the network and maybe one at five. And that's kind of how things have worked in the past. You pick the one you want to get on. Five is going to be fast. 2.4 is going to give you a better range in what we call barrier penetration. So if you're in a large building, if you're in the room where maybe their Wi-Fi router or access point is, you can connect at five and it works really fast. If you're in maybe one of the meeting rooms in the building or outside, you maybe see both networks, but you see a lot better reception bars for the 2.4. That's the reason why. And that's why they keep using the 2.4 gigahertz radio frequencies. It provides much, much better range and much, much better penetration through the walls and things. I will mention that your wired network should at least be providing a thousand megabit per second or one gig connections. That's kind of the current wired standard. And for example, with the current fiber, a lot of the fiber now offering one gig that kind of puts your home network on parity with the speed of the internet service that you have. When we talk about Wi-Fi network names, that's called the SID, the service set identifier. So that's the name of the network. So if you go into your router, when you set up your Wi-Fi, you give it the names of the networks. So if it's the name of the library or maybe the initials of the library, so if it's like Lincoln Public Library, maybe it's LPL and then 2.4 and then maybe LPL 5. So those two different Wi-Fi frequencies are available with a SID. So you know which one you're connecting to. What's new with 6e and 7 is these new routers have the ability to blend all those frequencies. So they just appear as a single SID or network name. So it would be just LPL. And what the new standards do is your device has the ability to connect to whichever network seems best to it at the time. And it has the ability to basically switch back and forth between the frequencies for whatever it calculates is giving the best connection and the best performance. So unfortunately that creates a little bit of an issue. So if you have the new iPhone 15s, the new pixels, you just bought a brand new laptop or desktop computer that has Wi-Fi, a new tablet. They actually prefer to have that single SID configuration that allows them to flex between which Wi-Fi network is the best. And our older devices, like I said, I have an iPhone 14, don't do that. Once you connect to either the 5 or the 2.4, it just stays on that. You kind of pick what you want. So it's going to be interesting to see how the new routers are going to support that. You throw in the new security standard, WAP3, which they've made a requirement to use the 6 GHz standard because they know people are going to want the faster speeds and they want to get people to adopt the new security standard. So they made a rule on the 6E7 standards that if you're going to use the 6 GHz connection, you have to use WAP3 security. Unfortunately, a lot of our devices don't support WAP3 yet. Again, you have to have the current generation device to have the ability to use that 6 GHz radio frequency and the WAP3 standard. So again, it's up to the router providers to come up with a way for their router to support not only that mixed frequency environment, but also what's going to be a mixed security standard for a little while too. The other big advantage about having a newer router in your library is over time what they've done is as these routers have become more powerful, they've added what we call memos, more memos to the box. What they did is they add multiple receivers transmitters into one box. In the old days, your router had a processor, one transmitter, one receiver, to improve performance and support multiple devices, they've been able to boost that number. So that's a significant gain you get with a new router is you get the boxes that have these multiple memos that give you much, much better service, not only faster speeds, but can support many more devices at a time at a high rate of speed too. So again, if we look on the page here, the current router in your library should be doing 80 to 11 AC at a minimum. If you're looking for a new router, I really recommend considering between the Wi-Fi 6 and the Wi-Fi 6E, 7 was just announced. If you want to hold off a little bit, maybe wait for those prices to come down on the routers and Wi-Fi gear to get to 7, but there's just not a lot of devices out there yet that will take advantage of it. So you could easily upgrade to a Wi-Fi 6 router at a very low cost and beginning all the benefit of everything but that 6 gigahertz radio frequency. So now this is the part we'll probably spend a little bit of time on. It's really how good is the Wi-Fi radio signal in your building? And there's a number of ways we can look at this. So on your smartphone, you can kind of walk through the library, see how things change, figure out where your signal is strong, where your signal is weak. If you have an iPhone, one of the bad things about the iPhone, so I have a sample to the right there on the screen, that's my Wi-Fi settings on my iPhone. And I can see the Wi-Fi networks and I can see the bars and that little fan shape. I can see how strong the reception is to it, but unfortunately the Wi-Fi, if you click on to that, I, with the little circle, the information, they don't show you the frequency or link speed, which is, I don't know why they don't do it. It's kind of a pain in the butt. I guess they figure most people don't care. They got a Wi-Fi connection and works are good to go. So you see on my screen, I'm connected, my home Wi-Fi network is called SHIRM units. I have a newer Orbi mesh Wi-Fi setup at my home and it does that blended network. So even though I have a network out there that says SHIRM units, my iPhone is actually picking whether to do 2.4 or 5 gigahertz radio connection. And unfortunately, I can't see which one it's selected in using the way kind of the new standards work. Older routers, you know, we would set it up where you would see a 2.4 network and a 5 network. And if you're an informed user, you're like, well, I've got good signal on the 5, I'm going to pick that because that's going to give me better speed than the 2.4. So this is kind of one of the interesting things with how they're, they're switching to this kind of unified, said network name that's going to allow your device to float between the frequencies to get the best possible performance. If you have an Android phone, you can go to your settings, network and internet, scroll down the network details, and it will show you which frequency you're connected to and what the link speed is. That's how many megabits per second you're getting for throughput. On a Windows PC, you can right click. So if you let's see those icons here on the screen, this will show you whether you're connected by cable or by Wi-Fi. You can right click on that, open network and settings, go to the properties. And again, you see what window calls your protocol, which would be the Wi-Fi frequency you're connected to and your link speeds. So this kind of gives you the ability to see how good your performance is. So you have a laptop, you could go to different parts of the library. If you have your phone, you could just bring up that. Like on my iPhone, I just bring up my setting screen. I can walk around and I can see those bars of reception go up and down. Or what you may see is you may see the Wi-Fi network just completely drop off because it can't see it anymore. You can see I pick up my neighbors Wi-Fi networks too. Depending where your library is located, you may see the library's network. You may see maybe the coffee shop next to you or across the street as Wi-Fi signals have gotten stronger. We see more stuff out there like that. If you want to do a speed test, and this is something we request as part of the survey we do every year, you can do a Google speed test. And the speed test by Ucla is pretty much what everybody uses kind of as a standard. And you want to perform that test on a wired network connection. That'll show you your true speed to your network connection. Now if you've got a new router and you know your Wi-Fi speed is greater than what you're paying for internet, you could do it on a Wi-Fi device and get a realistic speed. But wired speed, if you've got a current wired network, like on the previous screen we talked about, you should be running it 1000 megabits per second or one gig. Do your speed test there and you should get the numbers for what's working best. And also what we're seeing now with the move from DSL and cable to fiber is it brings up the kind of conversation of asynchronous and synchronous speeds. So in the past we're used to asynchronous service with our DSL and our cable internet service. So what that is is they prioritize download speed over upload speed to make their networks perform better. So if you're on a speed test you get two numbers. You get what your download speed is and you get your upload speed is. And historically it's traditionally been let's say your download speed is 100 megabits per second. Generally you're you're on an asynchronous connection then your upload speed would be somewhere usually around 25% of that. So if it's 100 megabit down it'd be around 25 megabit per second up. And in the past when all we did for the internet was just draw stuff down that worked really great. But now that videos become such a big part of the internet if you're doing video conferencing, if you're doing telemedicine, telehealth, things like that you may notice where if you're on a video chat and you have men people that are participating and you see their video lagging or their voices dropping out or their lips don't match the audio as they're speaking that's where you see that reduced upload speed is coming into play. With new fiber technology coming on those are moving to what we call synchronous connection. So your download is just as fast your upload is just as fast your download. So for example the new one gigahertz fiber connection I have at my house I'm one gig down and I'm one gig up. I can put video up for my web camera just as fast as the video comes down from the webinar and stuff I'm connected to. So that's going to be kind of the new world too as we see more and more people get fiber connected with the better performance we get. Yeah it's very different what you see when we're trying to get libraries new internet new fiber that it used to be you know they would offer 100 slash 10 and now it's all 100 slash 100. Yeah and there's still providers doing that. We've had some libraries that have moved to fiber and obviously gotten much faster download but some of the vendors are doing kind of a unique fiber solution where they're still to protect their network and keep their networks running as fast as possible. They're still limiting upload so even with a fiber connection you could be in an asynchronous situation that should go away over time and generally because you've got a much faster download speed you did pick up a much faster upload speed too even though it may not still be running in what we call synchronous mode where they're the same but you're still at the advantage of having much faster speed both for your download and your upload. So again looking at the you know the wi-fi signal in the building what is it dependent on and it's really dependent on the size in the floor plan of the library. A lot of the libraries I work with where we're running down weak wi-fi signal it tends to be the issue tends to be is where their wi-fi router is housed. A lot of times we've traditionally just had it so wherever the our internet and phone provider wherever that service enters the building we usually have a little closet with a shelf that's called the demark the demarcation point where they hand that phone and internet off to the building and that tends to be where the wi-fi router is and in a lot of buildings that means it's in a closet like next to the plumbing or something like that and so if you're sitting out in the front of the library or maybe even in a parking spot in front of the library the router is as far away as it can be and if it's in a closet where it's got the door shut and things like that that causes degradation and that signal strength so something to think about is you know if you're a library that has some the ethernet cabling in place you know can we do some stuff where that wi-fi router can be located in the middle of the building you know out in your open area so if you have people that can take advantage of the five gig radio frequency they've got line of sight close proximity to that router so they're getting as good a service as possible or I've seen a lot of libraries if the library has an addition or maybe their meeting rooms in the basement you'll see really poor signal down there again because of where the router is located and this can be on what are the materials that the building is built out of that are impeding that signal so a lot of times when you're talking like the wi-fi routers on the first floor and you have somebody in the basement or maybe on a second floor those floors are built to be have what we call firewall or fire barrier and so if you have a fire it can't spread easily those tend to really block wi-fi signal break concrete plaster all block the signal more than drywall does so if your building has an addition that can make a big difference a good example of this is my library in sydney where I was a director we had a bookmobile we have a bookmobile and we had a garage on the end of the library and initially when the building was built that garage was a drive-through so you would come in one end of the library and then drive through the other well they they whacked half of the garage face off and turned it into a meeting room which was great but because that was originally the garage for the bookmobile when you have a vehicle parked in a building you have to have fire rated walls between the garage and rest of the building so if you would have a vehicle fire or something it makes it hard for that fire to spread to rest the building so we couldn't get any wi-fi signal in our our meeting room at all or where we parked the bookmobile the fix of that was to put a wireless access point in the garage where the bookmobile was at and put one in the meeting room so we were serving good wi-fi signals in those spaces again like we talked about on the previous screen if you bring up your phone you bring up your wi-fi networks and walk through the building you can see that signal strength you could see maybe your network names drop on and off as you're walking through the building this allows you to very easily test your wi-fi signal back in the old days before we had the smartphones that had this capability there were a lot of your cabling or electrical companies they would come in and do what we call a wire audit where they would come in and they had a device that could measure the wi-fi signals through your building and find the dead zones and then help plan out how you would wire the networks for wireless access points through the building to make sure the whole building had good wi-fi signal another thing to think about is you know the wi-fi signal if it's good indoors what about the outdoors for example at sydney we had such a fast internet connection and such good wi-fi is i joked about us being the drive-by wi-fi for the community we had a lot of smaller villages outside of sydney that had terrible internet service so we would have folks pull up in front of the library maybe before they are going to work and they would connect to our wi-fi network we had delivery people they would park their truck in front of the library and get up to date on their delivery route and stuff we had sales people who would stop and park in front of the car and be able to use their our nice wi-fi signal and internet connection to update their information or send emails or things like that so something to think about you know do you want that wi-fi signal to reach some outdoor spaces if you do again do we want to think about having the wi-fi router maybe towards the front of the building so we're extending that signal nice and strong over those parking spots or does the library have a little garden area or something we're maybe positioning that we're doing an outdoor rated wireless access point gives us good signal through that area so there's a lot of things to consider there the nice thing is with your phone and you know the ability to if you have the cabling to move that router around the the building we can do a lot of kind of testing best case and figure out where our best positioning and all that can be and it's not very difficult to do at all so how to improve the wi-fi again we talked about you know can the wi-fi router be placed in the center or the kind of the Prima location library that gives us the signal in the air best signal we can get in the areas we want some of the libraries I've been working with since I came aboard I've seen some really really old routers I mean just 10 years old 15 years old that are way behind the times super slow and just getting a modern router that supports the current standards and has those multiple antennas and receivers and better range can make a huge difference and we're talking you know you can pick up entry level consumer grade wi-fi 6 router 60 70 bucks is all you have to spend and if you're replacing a decade old wi-fi router you're going to see substantial improvements in range and speed but the things we want to look at again is how large this library a lot of the routers or mesh nets works they they will tell you how many square feet they're built to cover so you know just the router itself may be what they call apartment signal strength where it's meant to just cover maybe 15,000 1500 square feet some of your mesh networks if you go to two or three device mesh networks they'll say large house which can cover 6,000 to 8,000 square feet businesses generally use what we refer to as WAPS wireless access points where they've actually run ethernet cable to the locations of where they want these WAPS and it creates a big one building mesh network that gives wife good wi-fi service throughout the whole building and when we're talking about a mesh network what we're talking about is a unified wi-fi network so in the old days like what I had to first do in Sydney is we had a wi-fi router that we ran some wire out so we could have it right behind the front desk in the main part of library and that wi-fi router served wi-fi throughout the main library area and the parking spots in front of the library because we had that fire barrier between the garage space in our meeting room and our bookmobile garage we had what we did is we put our best newest wi-fi router in the main library and then our old wi-fi router we put into what was called wireless access mode where it didn't do anything but offer wi-fi and we put that old wi-fi router in between our bookmobile garage and our meeting room and that's how we served wi-fi to that area the bad thing was is if you were in the main library you'd be connected to the wi-fi network in there if you moved in the meeting room that connection would drop out and you would have to connect to the network we had in there which was SPL meeting room and if your device couldn't float between the two you had to pick the one you wanted to be on so if you walked back out of the meeting room and that you know we had that fire barrier because it used to be a garage that network would would get really slow or quit working you had to connect back manually then to the main network some of the devices now you know you can say to automatically connect if it sees a big drop from one network to the other it will make the switch for you but it was kind of a pain in the butt so what the mesh networks do is they make it look like one complete wi-fi network you don't have to worry that you've gone from this end of the building to this end of the building because the devices that make up the mesh they hand you off from device to device when this device starts performing better than the device you were on and the mesh stuff has gotten fairly affordable too the Orbi I have at home when I first bought that was one of the early mesh devices available it was expensive but I had a house that had plaster walls and I had to have something like that to be able to get one good wi-fi signal throughout my house when you set those mesh networks up there's you have what we call back call between the devices so what a lot of homeowners do is they do what's called the wireless back call so if you look the two little pictures I have down here in the corner where we have main deco and other deco that dotted line signifies that we're using a wired back call which is an ethernet cable from the main wi-fi router to the satellite we're using a wired connection between those devices to communicate and that's the best way to do it so if your library has some existing cabling that we can take advantage of doing that wired back call between from your main router to the satellites or the WAPS gives you really really good connection between the devices so then all I have to do is serve the wi-fi to the devices that are in range of them if you're on you know the second floor or the basement and then they're taking that wired connection and dumping it that wireless connection and then dumping it to a wired connection back to your main modem router in your internet gives really really good performance people can move throughout the building with their wireless device and they get handed off from device device and they never see any degradation in performance or anything now unfortunately a lot of homes unless they're recently built and somebody had it wired with ethernet all through the house you don't have those ethernet cables to do or you know you're in an older library something those cables may not be a run that are going to let you do that wired back call so what a lot of these satellite units also have the ability to do is what we call a wireless back call so what they do is they actually they look and see okay I'm the satellite unit I'm talking to the main router and they will look at that wi-fi connection and they will actually carve out a piece of it and reserve it for the back call traffic so you are paying a little bit of performance hit because it's using part of that wi-fi performance to carve out and do the back call connection so it's not being able to make that available to your devices but it allows you to have that mesh network in place without the cost trouble or expense of having to have ethernet cables run between your waps your satellite units so the one got you there is if you've got a really weak area in your library you can't just drop a satellite in that area because it won't really help devices in an area will see the satellite and it looks like they have a good wi-fi connection but that back call is problematic because it's a weak wi-fi connection from the satellite back to the main router and that'll again cause the performance to be poor so what you want to do is when you place those wireless back called satellites out you want to make sure they still have a pretty good wi-fi connection back to the main router and what you can do is you can buy those devices you can buy them in sets of two sets of three and what you can do is you can space them through the building so they're kind of acting as what we call a repeater so you go from let's say your your main router for your mesh setup is is unfortunately maybe in a closet in a workspace or it's in the office behind the front desk you put your first satellite out in the part of the library where it's still got a really good wi-fi connection back to that router and then your next satellite can be placed out where it's still got a good wi-fi connection back to satellite number one and you can kind of use that to extend that wi-fi network out and still maintain a good wireless back call. Again it can take a lot of experimentation to kind of know where to place those and get the best performance with the devices you bought it's probably you know recommended to what you're doing we could there's some things we can take care of advantage of the funding I'll talk to you in a little bit where if we need a penny we have some electrician come in around some cabling there's some some funds available that can assist with that. What a lot of businesses now is they use the wireless access points if you look at that top picture where they've got these a cable run and a lot of times these are mounted on the ceiling in the center of the area or the room that they're serving the wi-fi for and it's nice about the WAPS you can have as many of them as you need some of the consumer grade mesh products only allow you to hook up like two or three satellites and then that's the most they can support because they're more of a consumer grade setup for a house. I just want to make you aware that the router most of your modern-day routers have additional ethernet ports on them so they can also function as a small switch if you have a library where you just don't have enough items that you need an ethernet switch to plug everything into and your router's got enough reports you can utilize that a switch. One thing to think about is one of the challenges I faced at a couple of my libraries is the ethernet cabling we had was old. One library was cat a mix of cat three and cat five another library was cat five unfortunately those old wiring standards cat three can't run any faster than 10 megabit per second cat five can't run any faster than 100 megabit per second so we would have had to rewire the building to get to 5e 1 gig wiring speed and what we chose to do was to use wi-fi to give us the performance we wanted and not have to spend money on new cabling the other nice thing about that was like in my sydney library is we had these ugly cabling poles that came out of the ceiling and were placed wherever computers were at so when you walked in library you know we kind of this beautiful open library and then there was this beige cabling pole here beige cabling pole there beige cabling pole over here and what was nice is when we migrated that whole network to wireless we were able to take all those poles down and it just made the library look just so much better so much nicer and what you can do if you have older PCs and you know you don't really need to replace them but you'd like to take advantage of maybe you bought you buy a new 6e 7 router you can upgrade you can add wi-fi cards to like your desktop PCs or if you have laptops you can add a you know a wi-fi adapter that uses a usb port or something and take advantage of faster wi-fi performance for your computers in the library and they're very tend to be very inexpensive i have one old desktop pc i still use at home mostly some somewhere to help archive and be a backup storage for photos and video and stuff and the pc runs great but it the built-in wi-fi on it is old and only supports a 2.4 mega megahertz 2.4 gig network connection so i put a new wi-fi card in it that supported 5 gig and it runs really really fast now so it can talk to my other computers on my network plenty fast and i can upload files and video backups to it very very quickly and it works really good so it's something to think about you could upgrade the wi-fi in your desktop PCs and things like that to take advantage of the 5 gig the 6 gig speed and be able to bypass that older not so great cabling that you have in place so we're talking about funding if you're an e-rate library or you want to be an e-rate library category two e-rate pays for network gearing cabling so if you want to get a new router you want to get a new switch you want to get waps you need to have new ethernet cabling put in to be the back call between your your wi-fi access points and stuff category two e-rate will help pay for that at whatever discount the library qualifies for in nebraska christa correct me from i think we average 70 for our libraries um 60 i think it was 74 was the actual um i can actually find out sometimes actually it's gone up a little set between 73 and 74 percent this is the average uh for our um public libraries yeah so let's say you decide you want to hey if we're going to do the wi-fi upgrade let's go with seven so we're going to pay 500 ducks uh you know for a a wi-fi seven router or we're going to pay a thousand bucks for a wi-fi seven mesh system if you're doing e-rate you can apply uh and get whatever percentage your library's making so if it's 70 percent 70 percent of that cost can be covered by e-rate um the nebraska library commission also has library improvement grants um it can be used for that i believe they have the 25 percent match correct christa yeah for yeah so for e-rate i just looked at for e-rate in 2020 through the average was 73 percent of e-rate discounts in for nebraska public libraries um so 60 70 80 percent is where that usually goes um for library improvement grants um yeah you need to provide 25 percent of the total project cost so um whatever it costs um you know we'll pay 75 percent of the total cost for everything and then you would have to cover 25 percent of it if you if you went that route yeah and that can be used for new computers also right yep yes yes e-rate is only for your internet service and then the equipment that helps make the network makes the internet work your networking equipment not for actual pcs or tablets or the devices um but library improvement grants you could then use or other grants that are out there as well not just our library improvement grants but our grants to the commission you could use to um buy and upgrade your actual pcs your computers or tablets or laptops or things yep yep so there's a lot of funding assistance out there that can make this and again if you're a small um library that can get by on a consumer grade router or consumer grade mesh um a wi-fi 6 router um you can pick a nice one up these days for 60 to 75 bucks um a wi-fi 6 mesh system they tend to run about two or three hundred dollars so we're not talking a lot of money and um if that would still be a struggle for your library definitely uh contact chris and i and see if we can help you you know come up with the funding to make that happen um so lots of options yeah lots of ways to go because i just can't tell you i you know i run in these i go into these libraries i'm helping out in you know 10 year old 15 year old wi-fi router so not only is the performance terrible but a lot of times the device that old is what we call end of life where the manufacturer no longer supports the device which means they're not providing uh software firmware upgrades for it which means they're not providing security fixes for it so it's just like windows where microsoft retired windows 7 they're no longer providing any security so any time a hacker discovers a new security flaw if you're running old old stuff they can take advantage of it because the manufacturer or the software um firm is not even providing any updates anymore to plug those holes so that's the other thing to keep in mind when you've got really really old stuff in use is you're probably looking up could very well be looking at some severe security vulnerabilities too because it's so out of date so here's what we're talking about so if you look at that picture new wi-fi router this is the model that i really like from tp link um but if you look at the back where we see those ports so that blue port that's where your internet connection comes in we refer to that as the wan port and then the orange connections are just ethernet connections so this would be where um it's just a little ethernet switch so a lot of times what you see in the libraries you see the the wan connection comes off the modem from the isp plugs into that wan port and then they may have just one cable plugged in to one of the orange ports and then that cable may run out into their main library where they have a little ethernet switch that all their public computers are connected to and then they may have another cable that runs out to maybe the front desk where they have a couple computers at so if if you're a small library and you don't have a lot of devices connected you have an old switch one thing to think about is if the wi-fi router you upgrade to has enough ethernet ports on it you may not need to worry about upgrading the switch that goes with it to the right there's an example of the mesh wi-fi kit where you've got one of those as your main router and then the others are satellites to it that spreads that wi-fi network out down below is what we refer to as the WAP these are the you buy a company called ubiquity they're super popular i see these all over the place these are made to mount on ceilings with an ethernet cable run to them and they use a technology we call poe power over ethernet so not only is that ethernet connection connected back to the router but um somewhere in there we have a poe setup so maybe it's hooked back to a switch with poe ports or an injector so what you do is you hook your ethernet cable into that poe has a power supply there's another port that comes out and then you're actually supplying the power to that WAP over the ethernet connection so you don't have to have electrical connections in the ceiling in the old days with WAPs you did you would have to not only have an ethernet network connection run to that spot in the ceiling you would have to have a power feed also at that spot in the ceiling and the WAPs would plug into the ethernet connection and then have a power supply that would have to plug into a power outlet with the power over ethernet those days are gone all you have to do is pull an ethernet cable and you can use it for both the network connection and the power connection and a new construction that's what they're doing it if you've got a new phone system that's voice over IP those phones can use the power over ethernet so again anywhere you have an ethernet connection you can drop a handset for your phone and you don't have to have power it's powered by the ethernet cable this is super popular now also with security cameras so you know the days of the old cctv coax cable security cameras and then everywhere you have a security camera and you have to have a power connection run to it those days are gone a lot of these security cameras now are have taken advantage of power over ethernet so that ethernet connection that runs through security camera that feeds the video back to your security cameras base station also is providing the power to that security camera so it makes them much more flexible much cheaper to install and so one thing you need to be aware of if you're looking at doing power over ethernet is different devices draw different power levels so a WAP doesn't draw much power but a security camera a phone can so what you'll see when you go to buy a poe injector or a poe switch is reports have a power rating of how much power that port can provide and what distance that ethernet cable can be for successfully deliver that power and network connection so if you have low power poe devices you can buy at least a less expensive switch that has lower power poe ports if you have high power devices like security cameras you'll need to have a switch that can deliver enough power to power that security camera and that's all documented you know in what you're purchasing and what you need to do but we've kind of got away from where your phone system used the phone cables and it was an independent system your security camera system used coax cables and it was an independent system and then your data network now it's all been unified to use that wired ethernet data network to run everything run your computers run your access points run your security cameras run your phones it's all done on one system now it's and the prices come down considerably it's a very very affordable setup if you're you know doing a big remodel or new construction you should definitely want to look at taking advantage over that power over ethernet technology to have a good wi-fi network have super phone service have good security camera setups it just works fantastic and it's a great great technology platform so now we're going to talk about accessing the wi-fi network and this is definitely something that is really what works best for your library and your community so the big question I get a lot is should we have a wi-fi password set on our network and in the past the reason you would want to do that is if you have a password to connect to the wi-fi network that also encrypts that connection so you connect the wi-fi connect the password that wi-fi connection is encrypted people can't see it it doesn't run what we call in the clear where somebody with a packet sniffer could capture the packets and put them together and see what you're doing or capture that data or whatever it's encrypted so security people always recommend put a password on your wi-fi network don't use public wi-fi that don't have a password on them because your stuff's in the clear and if there's somebody sitting there with a packet sniffer they can collect the packets from your device and they can use it to figure out you know what you're doing passwords things like that yeah those days have kind of gone by the wayside depending on what we're doing we'll get into that a little bit I'm not a fan of wi-fi passwords even as strong as I am on security just because it hinders and limits the use so much if you have people that are outside of the library and want to use the wi-fi network and it's outside your hours and you're not open they can't come in ask you for the wi-fi password it blocks and limits you so I was never a fan of doing that and there's some options available to to to really allow that and make that work one thing that's come up if you're using internet a lot you know the days it used to be just HTTP and then the url for the website now we have htqbs which is secure so when you connect to a website that's utilizing HTTP htqbs which is pretty much all the websites now it's definitely financial email things like that once you connect to that website that connection becomes encrypted with htqbs so again it kind of really gets rid of one of the big issues for that open no password wi-fi network because that connection to that bank website or that email website is now encrypted because you're using htqbs so in my setups that I've done we use secure wi-fi just for the staff use and that gives you some other advantages like quality of service you can make sure that staff use so the wi-fi network gets higher priority than the public's use so if you're using wi-fi and computers to connect to the catalog the ios and things like that you can say these devices get the bigger chunk of the bandwidth higher priority to do their stuff over the devices the public's connecting to the wi-fi network some libraries they change their wi-fi password regularly just so it kind of limits the use if you're in a library in a small town where you've got homes or maybe apartment buildings right next to the library and you've got a good wi-fi network you may have people using the library's wi-fi network so they don't have to have their own wi-fi their own internet service at home there's some libraries that see this issue they change their wi-fi password on a regular basis kind of combat that you know that person can come over the library hey what's wi-fi password go home and they're back in business again the other thing that wi-fi routers have been able to do for a long long time is enable the guest network so a lot of times you walk into a business a coffee shop a library and when you look at the available wi-fi networks you'll see like lpl staff 2.4 lpl staff 5 lpl guests 2.4 lpl guests 5 and the reason for that is they have a password encrypted wi-fi service for the staff to use and then they're using the guest network for the public and a lot of the routers automatically will prioritize between what you said is the encrypted staff network and the open public guest network they will block guest devices that are using too much bandwidth or they'll slow them down they'll throttle them to make sure that the the staff devices are getting the connectivity they need to do what they need to get done a lot of those routers also have what they call an isolation feature on the guest network that's a little box that you check on and off and that's great for security what that does is if you have the guest network enabled and you have isolation enabled or whatever your router uses for that term what that does is that device can only use the internet connection it does not allow it to communicate with anything else on the network so if somebody came in gone in your guest network hoping that they would then be able to you know reach out and maybe hack some of the other devices get access to a file server or something like that that isolation feature blocks all that it only allows that device to use the internet connection and get out to the internet it blocks all that it's a great security feature the only issue is it because it's doing that if you have somebody comes in on their phone and they're on the guest network and you have it enabled they can't see any printers if you have a meeting room with a tv that people can screencast to they can't see it they can't see anything because of isolation so again it would depend on how your community utilizes the wi-fi network and what you want them to be able to do whether you'd want to turn that feature not printing is kind of the hot app anymore these days so you may or may not want to do that some libraries you may say hey you need to log into one of our computers and then go to your email to be able to print some libraries may say oh you'll need to be on our secured network here's our wi-fi passwords you can connect to it and see the printers and if you're changing your password on a regular basis okay so they have our wi-fi password but we're going to change it at the end of the month or we're going to change it next week so it's not that big a deal what usually worked for me as a librarian is people come in they want to print something off they have no idea how to do it they have no idea how to connect to a printer on their smartphone well I generally would offer is hey here's my email address if you want to email me the document I'll print it for you and then I'll show you that I've deleted it once I have it printed for you and I did that probably nine times out of ten for folks and would get them their document and get them on their way so again it just depends quicker and easier to do yeah what's the quickest and easiest way to meet their need and get them on their way I'm a big fan of having the wi-fi the guest wi-fi enabled so people outside the library that don't have a password connect to it I'm a big fan of the isolation feature just for the security it provides but again that you've got a lot of people coming in printing from their own device or something it can be kind of problematic so it just depends on what works best for you WAP3 we'll talk a little bit about that so again WAP2 was the old security standard WAP3 is a new security standard and again this kind of does a way with the need to have the wi-fi password WAP3 obviously we don't have a lot of devices out in the wild that can actually utilize it yet but WAP3 actually provides secure open network connection so if you're able to utilize WAP3 security it will create an encrypted connection for that device without a password requirement which is the other thing why the security people are so excited about wi-fi 6e wi-fi 7 and WAP3 is it it plugs a lot of the security holes we've been dealing with for a long long time from WAP2 so that's going to take a while really to kind of come in fruition just for the fact you know your community would all need to have the latest and greatest devices to take advantage of it so down the road it's definitely something to think of there's going to be a lot of businesses they're going to be moving to wi-fi 7 just to take advantage of the WAP3 security and they're going to obviously they have the funds to upgrade all their network stuff and they probably have the cloud to tell their employees hey if you want to use your personal phone on the wi-fi network you're going to have to go get a new phone that does WAP3 and that's the rule they'll make and they can get away with it because you know that's the business and that's what they want to do. Another feature that I don't think a lot of people are aware of that we've utilized I utilized at my libraries was there's a schedule feature where you can limit the availability of the wi-fi network by weekday and by time window so for example in Sydney when I at the city council let them know that we were going to be greatly improving our wi-fi network and the advantage to do so my police chief took issue with making it available 24-7 his concern was if that wi-fi available was 24-7 we would have people sitting out in front of the library at two in the morning three in the morning using the wi-fi and if they're sitting in front of the library in the middle of the night his immediate assumptions are probably up to no good or it would be an area where people would congregate because of the wi-fi availability and that would cause us issues so per our police chief's input we limited the wi-fi availability it was available every weekday and we shut it off at 10 p.m. and we didn't turn it back on until 6 a.m. to side step those issues so be aware of that that's something that can be super super nice to use too if your library is not doing filtering people who can connect to the library's network can then use it to you know maybe we do or don't care you know if there maybe they're viewing kind of nasty stuff things like that what we do care about is if they're using the library's network to listen to pirated music or to watch pirated movies what can happen is the library can get a letter and it used to come from like the mpa or the ria or they're saying hey your network ip address is being used to download illegal content we're going to find you ten thousand dollars and you need to fix it so that was the old days i was at a library we got one of those letters so we did if i had a firewall that i was able to go in and put a rule in that wouldn't allow that file protocol that's widely used by pirate sites to work but this is where limitling your availability can help out too we're you know if people are using your wi-fi network after hours after libraries closed you can say hey you know we're going to shut you may tie your your network to the library hours so when the library closes at 7 p.m 8 p.m the wi-fi network goes away too so if people are at home and they're using it to use their netflix to use their max to use their disney um to access content that's pirated um that's again a way to limit and have some control over that which gets us kind of the last thing is you can actually log into your router and you can look at who what when is using your wi-fi network um wi-fi routers have what we call dhcp and that's when you connect to the network um the device gives the the router gives the device here's all the information you need to use our network and here's an ip address and you can what they do then is they lease that um ip address to that device for a period of time you can designate so a lot of routers defaulted to 24 hours most of them you can change it if you're rendered places where like if you're in an airport you use your phone when you first sitting down waiting for your plane and then maybe an hour later you get your phone out put your book down get your phone out you have to reconnect to the wi-fi network again they're limiting that lease time to just an hour or two to make it as available as possible because of how many people they have in the in the airport or wherever you're at um so that's kind of the purpose of that so that's something again the library can do you can limit dhcp leases to two hours 24 hours is a good good number um some places let it go longer but what you can also do is you can go look at those dhcp leases and you can see how many non-library devices are using your network it's a good metric good idea of how many devices are using your network you know it's our router good enough when i look at the documentation line for routers that they say it's best for 10 devices 15 devices 20 devices that router that dhcp lease will give you account um some routers have some really nice networking um reporting kind of baked into them where you can just say hey show me my usage give me the report on usage on my wi-fi network and it'll show you some really nice reports on how your wi-fi network's being used the other nice thing is if you have that ability to get in the router the routers also have the ability where you can block devices so this kind of comes into the parental controls that a lot of routers have the idea of being used for home use where you can set a schedule your kids can't use the wi-fi you know when they should be in bed um you can block devices so let's say um your kid did something you want to ground them and cut them off from the wi-fi you can block their devices on the wi-fi so you and the rest of the family could still use it but their devices are blocked until you know they're one week suspension or something like that is up if you're a library and you have a building next door and you go in and look and you can see you've got roku's fire sticks google tv's apple tv's that are using your wi-fi network to um obviously they're using it to to watch movies and stuff and if you have one that's doing it all the time and sucking up a lot of your bandwidth you can go in and block that device so it can't can't do that anymore so this all comes down to my last bullpoint at the bottom every library needs to have admin access login for all their technology and have it documented um you should have the admin access to your router um or if it's a router modem provided by your isp you should have the admin access it to be able to get into it set your rules do what you want to do look at the devices that are using it um i have run at isp's that do not permit their customers to have that it's it's just a big issue to not have it um if your isp is like you can't do that then i would you know what are my options for having my own modem or router so i have that access so i have that kind of control over my network and my security so i highly highly recommend it um this is something that if you want to take advantage of um stay the dns filter that we offer here at the nabrasco library commission for e-rate compliance and stuff if i have you have the admin access login you can share with me i can go into your router i can set it all up really quick and easy um if we have to get your isp involved because they want what you have it we can do that i can provide them the information they need but if we would need to make a change or something we're dependent on one of their texts you know being available to do it and a lot of the isp's because which you know you're paying for that support as part of your internet service you know but could you run into one or if you have an outside it company that has that and they won't share it with you and you have to pay them an hourly rate to do anything um yeah just really really really it's something that you should have that admin access to those devices that your library is utilizing um whether you want to manage some of the stuff yourself um just want to be able to pop in and look at stuff uh it's it's just so valuable to have i i can't have that yeah kind of in-house control and then you understand it a little better too and i know we have many libraries who are single person or very small staff and they don't think i can't keep up with all of this but um that's all we have shirm now he can help you figure all this out that is part of his job is reaching out to you all and help you don't have your own it version or if you do want to have a little bit more control and knowledge and not have to be like you said dependent on the isp um with the system that we have for the open dns uh we can help you do that and shirm can help you with all of your other keeping track of things yeah so a good another good example for having that level of access you know when we do the survey every year we'll ask you how many devices i believe are using your wi-fi network if you have the ability to go in and look at your dhcp leases and stuff it makes it very easy to kind of extrapolate that to how much wi-fi net how much use your wi-fi network gets over years time and it's a great number to have so if you're at your you know your city council meeting for budget time and stuff being able to stay the bit you know tell the the city council you know we have 60 people using our wi-fi network a day or a week um it just it's super super great information to have if it's something you know my assistance to to show you how to do it or maybe once a year you want me to help you pull that number out so when you're completing the survey it's again it's something we can assist you but we have to have that admin login to be able to do it so that's pretty much all i have did we have any questions uh nothing has come in yet while you're talking sure that's fine does anybody have any questions you want to ask um so this has been really great lots lots of information here obviously for everyone i'm sure um uh some things you may have not known about not thought about before uh and as i said before we're in kind of the big transition phase here now so the six gigahertz frequency is out um the WAP three new security protocol is out so we're kind of in a big shift that's going to start this year um with the devices yeah so this like you said this why you said you want to do this now there's a big change just coming that everyone needs to be aware of and figure out how what you want what you need to do to um to be able to use them to can comply with them and have things that you're you're actually getting the internet service you're paying for to your devices and yeah and it plays back let's say you're looking at buying new computers um make sure those new computers if they have wi-fi built into them support wi-fi seven you know if they don't then maybe you want to hold off a little bit until the devices that are available um to support the new standards so you know if you're going to buy new computers and you're going to get a new router you know you've got all the latest and greatest and kind of did a little future proofing there for your stuff yeah um we do have one question that came in if anybody has any questions type in the questions section of your go to web in our interface um we are um we're a little after 11 o'clock but that's okay i should jump in earlier but i was just listening um we um whatever questions you have we'll go to you we'll get them all answered today if you don't have a chance right now you can always reach out to shirm there is his contact info as well and this full recording will be available along with the slides for you to have access to probably by the end of the day tomorrow um i'll get all that posted up um we do a question says shirm what did you say is the best um wam is from w a m wam i don't know wand w a n that's the wide area network so that's yeah and comes from your isp so depending on what kind of service you have your isp will do what we call the handoff to you so in the days with dsl and cable you have a dsl or cable modem that he meant wap wireless access point oh wireless access point so those are called waps and they've been around for a while um in really in use in large buildings in large businesses um when i was with bud wiser we had waps through our warehouse because we used handheld devices um throughout the warehouse they used to be expensive um and like said they've really come down to very simple the ubiquity ones are available for like a hundred bucks they do make outdoor ones too that are waterproof for just a little money more and i see those all over the place now so if you walk into a business or a coffee shop or a library and you see that white disc on the ceiling with kind of the blue ring glowing around it that's like the standard that's what almost all everybody has these days and what's nice of those is we talked about with the ethernet connection the power over ethernet you can place those anywhere so if you've got a basement meeting room you can hang one of those in the middle of your ceiling in the in the meeting room um if it's they do make wall mounts so if you want to have it just kind of hang on the wall and then it extends out so because they're made to hang um flat let me flip back to that picture yeah you had some pictures of that yeah so ubiquity would be the brand to look for yeah let me get back to that so this wap here the ubiquity that's um that's like the standard and during the pandemic they got really hard to find because of all the shortages and stuff we're having they're readily becoming available again and this this tends to be the standard um a lot of your your routers um have the ability so if you have a router from tp link or link sys have the ability to put them into a wap mode where you can use maybe if you have your routers not super old and it's a link sys and you buy a new link sys and your old link sys has the ability to support their implementation of wap you might be able to turn your old router into an access point rather than purchase something new but like I said these ubiquity ones and they're made to hang from the ceiling and the way they're built is they're broadcasting out in a circle from that device so I've been in the libraries where somebody's just stuck one on the wall so it's not really broadcasting the way it's meant to um or they've got it um stuck on a desk or something somewhere they're meant to be out line of sight to get the best possible connection and stuff so like you said I think it's thinking of it go they're around think of it as that that's it's going to be around coming out from that point yeah they're made they're designed to be a circular antenna so if you look at the wi-fi router up above those four antennas coming up from it they have they're flexible so you can kind of move them around and adjust them to to beam your service where you want it to go those waps are made to just beam out in a circle and they have a limited amount of range so depending on the square feet of your library maybe you have one at each end of the library maybe you have one in the middle and one in the meeting room and maybe an out gore one that that beams wi-fi to the park next door something like that it just really depends on your setup and you know I can definitely assist with that on what we think is going to be the best way to go yeah anyone to clarify he would need that um that injector there the yeah so those are made to be powered over ethernet so then you have to have either a switch with poe ports if you have an older switch that is one gig throughput you can buy those poe injectors they're only like 15 bucks a piece and you can use that then to inject power into the ethernet connection to your wap so you may be able to get a switch it would handle on its own but if not you can get an injector right so if you're looking to having to buy a switch and you have especially if you have voice over ip telephones and security cameras you'd buy a switch where all the ports have poe also and you just plug them in and they feed power to your wap to your phone to your security camera so check the stats on a switch a new switch you might buy and you just need that it would work fine and then like if you're going to be using it for security cameras you'll probably need a switch that's got the highest power feed rating to feed power to those and it doesn't matter if you've got so you bought a switch that's got poe ports that put out this much power which is more than what your wap or your phone needs that's fine they'll only take what they need but you need to make sure it's scaled to meet the biggest power requirement which right now tends to be those security cameras yeah yeah all right thank you um let's try and uh let's see if anybody has oh god thank you christian thank you sherm yeah anybody have any other last minute desperate questions you want to ask of sherm before we wrap things up this morning you can type into the questions section of your go to webinar interface there is also his contact info which you can always find on our website as well but there is on the slide um I'm waiting to see if anything comes up I'll say as like I said um we will be processing the recording of today's show by the end of the day tomorrow it'll be posted um along with the slides sherm's already sent me his slides so you have access to these with all of the info and the pictures and the links and everything everyone who registered for and um attended today's show will get an email directly from me but then after and then I will also push it out onto our various social media we have a mailing list for Nebraska for our libraries and then um twitter and facebook that we use as well I don't think anything else see anything else coming in so I'm gonna pull back to my screen just to show you where you'll get all this info too and you know if your library that doesn't have an IT person or the IT skill set I am happy to um do a technology audit a lot of times we can just do that with pictures if you can shoot me pictures of the router and the switch and the modem you have I can tell you how old it is what it can and can't do should it be upgraded and I can even give you some links to stuff on amazon that would be here's what I would you know recommend for your situation again we have the ability to provide funding assistance yes to purchase new stuff um I have made multiple trips out the libraries to actually do the upgrade on the router and the switch and anything else that needs to be done at no charge the library so I'm here to help just reach out yeah definitely reach out to us I know a lot of libraries this is one thing that you sometimes don't think about when you're you hear all about update your fibers and increase your fiber speed and that's great but if you don't have the equipment that can handle it and it's a waste of money yeah and I've we I've seen that a lot with the fiber libraries at work where they're going to um you know 200 megabit 300 megabit fiber service but they have an old switch that can't run any faster than 100 megabit yeah so you've just spent a bunch of money and you can never run any faster so really you got to make sure that your internal network can support the speed of the internet connection you're you're upgrading to yep absolutely and you can do that either with e-ray or with direct funding from us or with grant funding that you can get lots of different ways yeah lots of options to do it all right so um if you use whatever is your search engine of choice and type in encompass live you'll come up with our website and our archive page these are upcoming shows for the rest of this month and I've got some remarks you've got to get filled in here too we'll get them added but our archive shows are here there's a link right here to our archives most recent ones on the top of the page here I was I've been out until today so last week isn't here yet but it will be up I'll be getting that up today and tomorrow and then today show will be here too there'll be as I said a link to the recording which goes on to our the Nebraska library commission's youtube channel and then a link to the slides in our slide share account that you will all have access to and I said we will post that also out to our social media we do have links to that you'll see we have a facebook page for our encompass live show so if you'd like to use facebook give us a like it'll be notified when things are coming up here's your reminder to log in to today's show announcement about today's show last week show and then previous one there's a recording from the one before so you'll see that out there we also post it up to the library commission has um twitter account and um instagram as well you see some announcements and we always use the hashtag little abbreviation and comp live a little abbreviation of our name whenever we post anything that's related to the show so if you keep looking for that um you will keep up to things up to the end things as well all right so thank you everybody for being here thank you so much for this is great lots of awesome information hopefully you'll have lots of libraries reaching out to you soon I hope so like I said it's we're in a big transition period now so you need to get on top of this absolutely and making sure you're getting value for the valuable dollars you want to spend to yeah definitely get on the current bandwagon so you don't want to be wasting your money no all right thank you so um that's it for today I hope you'll join us next week when we're talking about connected Nebraska abridging the digital divide through innovative eduroom expansion um a few years ago we had Brett beaver on to talk about this is something done through the University of Nebraska internet um Nebraska statewide education network for k-12 schools colleges and libraries so um he will give us an update on that so please do sign up for that if you're interested or any of our other upcoming shows and keep an eye on this page as I start adding in our um march topics as well all right that's it for today then thank you all and we'll see you on a future episode of encompass live bye bye