 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE Live at Cisco Live in San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, and I did a little switcheroo on you guys. I decided to upgrade my co-host, Susie Weas, my co-host, the SVP and CTO of DevNet. Susie, it's great to have you here. Thank you, it's great to be on this side of the table. It's exciting, I'm amongst Cisco royalty and partner royalty, so to my right is Ramon Alvarez, the director of strategy and business development from Samsung. Ramon, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. And one of our alumni, it's great to have you, is back as well, Matt McPherson, the wireless CTO from Cisco. Matt, welcome back. Glad to be here. So we're on the DevNet zone. Susie, the last three days have been electric, to say the least. The energy, the interest, what you guys have built, you can feel it. I mean, I was telling you, from 9.30 this morning, we started to have to yell into our microphones because there was so much interest in every session here. We've been talking a lot about Wi-Fi 6. Yep. The capabilities, the excitement, the opportunities that it brings. It's so exciting. It's so exciting, it's so exciting. So no, so we've had, you know, just all of the excitement around Wi-Fi 6, around 5G. We know that here at the DevNet zone, you know, we've been really pushing forward with our developers, the programmability of the network. But what we wanted to do here today is to bring you some of the making of Wi-Fi 6 and some of the making of 5G that happens. And what's interesting is Cisco, as a networking company, has been working very closely with Samsung as a overall networking company, as a device manufacturer. And basically, as we've been together to develop Wi-Fi 6 and 5G, Ramon and Matt have been working together as we created all of that technology and had some interesting releases. So we thought it would be great to just kind of share what's going on here. Awesome, super exciting. Matt, let's start with you. Talk to us about this creation that you guys are doing, leveraging the power of Wi-Fi 6. Well, you know, Wi-Fi 6, I mean, it's really revolutionary compared to what we're used to when it comes to Wi-Fi. It's really broadening the market. This capability to do more deterministic type applications and services, we're really excited about it, right? Everybody that's deployed Wi-Fi has the positives and have had the struggles. And as we go into this next generation, we can actually make it easier as we add intelligence to the network. But of course, when you make this type of transition, what happens? New technology, new standards. And so there's always these little rough edges, right? And getting that new technology out. So what we did is we reached out to our good partners here in Samsung and we started this very early. You're hearing about Wi-Fi 6 now, and you're hearing about some of the things that are happening in the industry now, right? But we started working way back, way back, right? And in fact, it's kind of interesting. You know, how do you get these new devices in people's hands so that you can test what Wi-Fi 6 can do in real environments, in a university environment, in a hospital environment, in an airport environment? So working with Samsung, what we did is we actually had 170 covert devices. They were literally Galaxy S10s and they were dressed up as a Galaxy S9 because it was before they released these devices. They didn't want to let all their secrets out. And so what we did is we put these early on into these new ARF environments and we got to test. We got to do interoperability and we got to really iron out the spec so that when they released their Galaxy S10 and we released our APs, guess what? It works, right? We don't put the customers through the initiation of a next-generation technology. So we're really excited to be working with Samsung and really collaborating on multiple different levels. So you said you've been working at this for a long time. We started talking about Wi-Fi 6 with you guys, I think at DevNet Create just six or seven weeks ago. Talk to us before we get into some of the meat with Ramon about some of those drivers that Cisco started seeing a while ago in terms of the evolution of the network. And we think about some of the numbers that we're seeing for the massive amounts of mobile data that's going to be transitioning off of cellular networks into Wi-Fi. Talk to us about what you guys saw, that vision a while ago that led to all of this cool covert operations. Yeah, you know look, a lot of people you say, look, Wi-Fi works, right? So why do we need a sixth generation of Wi-Fi? But you know when we look at the trajectory of traffic, it can be a little bit daunting, right? In 2023, Cisco's VNI index that shows these trends, right? We will transmit more mobile data in 2023 than every year before it combined. Wow. Combined. So this is what we're seeing, this is what we have to deal with, right? So it's very important that we get together with these partners, whether it be Intel at the chipset level, whether it be Samsung at the device level, because you know what, we can't just answer today, we have to answer the next three, five, seven years, right? And that's, Wi-Fi 6 is going to give us that platform. All right, Ramon, tell us about some of the cool meat here that we really want to dig into. Yeah, so actually one of the things that you kind of touch upon, but I would like to mention is that one of the reasons why Wi-Fi 6 is here is actually the congestion on networks, right? So when you go with your smartphone, you go to an event, sports venue, concert, et cetera, many, many people are trying to connect to Wi-Fi, the signal and actually the throughput, the grades very, very quickly with the number of people who actually get into the network, right? So Wi-Fi 6 actually solves for that. So that's one of the top pain points that actually we have from our users, our consumer research. The second pain point we actually tried to solve with Wi-Fi 6 in our collaboration with Cisco, it's the battery life, right? So one of the top pain points again, for smartphone users, it's well, my battery doesn't last for a full day. I take lots of pictures, I upload videos, et cetera, that's going to drain my battery. So actually Wi-Fi 6 is a mode where actually the devices can actually sleep and the APs can sleep and only wake up the device and transmit data when that actually, channel is actually available, right? So that essentially for the user, it's actually a longer battery life, right? So at those are two, there's more advantages, but those are kind of the two key points that really focus on. I'm just asking both of you is, as we were testing between our companies, what kinds of things were we learning and how was that going as we were developing it? You know, like we said, it's a new specification, right? If you look really even at the ground level, all previous versions of Wi-Fi were based on OFDM, this next generation's on OFDMA, you know, so what is it, that adds some new complexities, right? But also a lot more capability. Now what happens all the time when you have a new spec is, you know, people can read that spec in different ways, right? How we implement the spec may not be exactly how they implemented the spec. And if we don't do that testing beforehand, what happens is we discover that out at the customer when that phone call drops or that connection doesn't work like you would expect it to work, that AP to AP handoff doesn't work the way that you expect it to work. We found over 60 critical differences, it's hard to say bug, right? But 60 critical differences in how we were interpreting the spec and how the device players were interpreting the spec and you know what, we resolved that so the customer didn't have to go through it, they just get good access. So it's been an amazing partnership as we were kind of working out all the kinks and I remember nobody expects Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi to be different, right? Everyone's kind of like, it performs the way it does, can it be different? And then one of my guys went into the lab and he tried it and he came back, his eyes were this big, it's fast and he couldn't believe it. And so we were able to do it but that makes us be able to do a whole new set of applications. So I think there's some new applications that we can jump into because Wi-Fi 6, it does enable new applications. Sure, so in our case, we are a consumer company so we sell devices to consumers. So the number one application for us is well any kind of consumer application, social media, uploading videos, et cetera, right? So that's our established market but we're also trying to go into other B2B verticals like public safety, like hospitality, financial, retail, et cetera. We're actually having that reliability on the network, it's extremely important. So one of the reasons why hospitals, hotels, et cetera, deploy their own Wi-Fi network versus just using LTE or 5G is because they can actually control the user experience, they can actually control the throughput, they can control the availability, the coverage, et cetera. So Wi-Fi 6 actually enables that especially when there is a congested situation. And we've never had that level of deterministic control within Wi-Fi before. That's right, that's right. So that's kind of at the network level and then in terms of more applications at the higher level, so I think that gets you very excited, right? So we actually have, you know, at Samsung it's a device manufacturer, we have many, many devices. Smartphones is one of them, we have laptops, wearables, VR headsets, TVs, appliances, et cetera, right? They're all getting connected to Wi-Fi. So one of the things that we have seen over the last few years is that the number of Wi-Fi devices in a household, in a typical US household, has increased from five per household to nine per household today. And it's going to be about 50 Wi-Fi devices per household in 2022, just in three years. Fifty, five zero? Fifty, five zero, that's right. So, you know, your door lock. Can I get my jog a smart phone? You're a thermostat, door lock, cameras, in all kinds of devices have a Wi-Fi connection. In a home, we need to be able to support that but also in an enterprise. And that's a shift in the industry to think of those things having Wi-Fi connections. That's right, sensors, motion sensors, open flow sensors, all kinds of humidity sensors, et cetera, they're all getting connected to Wi-Fi. So we need to be able to support that kind of growth. That makes me think, sorry Suzy, of security. Where is it? We talked a lot in the last few days about the integration and the embedding of security to the Cisco suite. But when you're talking about whether it's data from my Nest system or a camera connected to my alarm system, you know, David Privacy is becoming, it's blowing up. Every generation in the workforce today is aware of it. Can you talk to us, I've been a little bit about what you guys are doing, do you ensure that security's faked in? It is, I mean, look, security, there's so many places that you can implement security and the fact of the matter is, is in a good network, you have to implement it in all those places, right? Because you don't know where that breach or where it might be subject to somebody coming in and compromising your system. But one of the things that we're doing that I think really revolutionary is this ability to pull analytics out of the network and actually baseline behavior of that network, right? So we know what's normal, right? We know how devices communicate. We know how that light switch communicates or that light bulb, even in these very simple things, right? And sometimes it's kind of scary to think that, you know, what if someone were to hack into that really simple stack in a light bulb? How many light bulbs are in a building? And what if they actually went across those light bulbs and started, you know, basically spamming into the network? You wouldn't be able to get anything done. Well, you can't just turn off all the light bulbs. Hey, we're going to disconnect all the light bulbs in the building from the network, right? You can't do that. So what Cisco is doing with this digital network architecture and what we call SDA or software defined access is the ability to segment and separate things out based on their function. So we could put all of that building management in one segment. We could put your mission critical applications in another segment. And in fact, if something's misbehaving, don't turn it off, but segment it out so it can't, in fact, or cause problems further in your network. I was talking about a light bulb. What if you're in a hospital and it's a heart monitor? Right, or an MRI machine, right? And you know, you don't want to turn that off, but you don't want it to infect the rest of that hospital room or the rest of the hospital. So move it into a segment, isolate it, let the function go on, alarm the administrator, right, so that they can address it and contain it. And this is exciting because what happens is you think Wi-Fi 6, oh yeah, it's an access point and it's what's in the client, and that's it. But actually, when I was talking about using the capabilities of a whole network to ensure the security and things like that. Ramon, you have an interesting new app or that you have that our viewers might want to see. Yeah, and actually I wanted to just continue this topic about security, right? So sometimes we think about security and user experience as a trade-off, and we don't like that, we want to maximize, especially as an end device manufacturer want to improve and enhance always the user experience. So one of the things we're working on is open roaming, right? So, and I like kind of the model that you guys had was, well it's easy to use, but it's secure as well, right? So essentially open roaming, it's a way for users of Wi-Fi to connect automatically to a Wi-Fi network without having to enter login and password information, any kind of sign in page without going through that process. A user will get automatically authenticated, and of course we have to have some security, so one thing we've done is using Samsung account in our devices as the authentication system for the user to work together. And where are we doing it? Right here. Right here, so I have, I'm actually connected through open roaming with my phone right now. So almost 50% of all attendees that came out to Cisco Live just automatically connected to the network, they didn't have to go to a portal, right? They didn't have to get out user names and passwords, they didn't have to go to their connection manager and pick the right network, right? They just, their device, they're connected, they're transmitting traffic, they're getting their email, they're taking out calls. That'll happen to me this morning on another device I brought in. There you go, and that's a security thing, right? Because what you're doing with that is that, look, Samsung users have Samsung accounts, when they provision their device, they save their configurations there, they save their preferences there, your provision and device, it pushes it out, now you get this profile, this certificate, that allows you to do these types of things, and with partners like Samsung, guess what? They have a pretty big market, right? Go to Mobile World Congress last year, everyone with a Galaxy S9 just connected to the network, right? So this really broadens across the ecosystem, it's changing the way we will experience networking. Yes. It's going to impact every person's life on every level, this is so exciting. So you guys have to come back, because we're out of time, but this is, I feel like we're just getting started, but thank you guys so much. Susie, thank you for being my awesome esteemed co-host. Thank you so much. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to be a co-host. Awesome you guys, Ramon, Matt, thank you so much for your time, we appreciate it. We're just duck, duck, duck. I'm going to hold you, bringing us back, right? Deal, shake on that. All right, from my guests, I'm for Susie Wee, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live, San Diego, thanks for watching.