It’s that time of year again where a few mobility minded network engineers, designers, teachers, and experts are invited out to the always sunny Silicon Valley to spend time collaborating with some of the best companies in the networking world as a part of Mobility Field Day 4. Over the course of three days, August 14-16, 2019, this group will spend time learning about where each of the presenting companies are positioning their portfolio of products, what new and exciting things are potentially coming down the pipe, and just how all of these things are going to affect our ability to stay connected 25/8. That’s right…for those of us in the networking world, 24 hours and 7 days just aren’t enough.

While most of the companies presenting this year are veterans of previous MFD/WFD events, it is always good to see old friends coming back to the firing squad in an effort to keep the community informed. This year, it’s especially good to see our friends over at Metageek returning to the lineup after a 6 year hiatus. Metageek has been working hard to put out some new products over the last few months as evidenced by their partnership with Oscium to produce a great new device in the Wi-Spy Air. While I haven’t had a chance to look at one of these devices myself, it’s great to see other companies developing tools that tie into the devices that many wireless folks carry around every day. Maybe one day Apple can be convinced that their products are more than just home user devices and allow us more access to do the things we need to troubleshoot networks. 🙂

For the full list of presenting companies check out the MFD4 page @ https://techfieldday.com/event/mfd4/

Especially exciting to hear from will be the team at Mist, post announcement of their acquisition by Juniper, and learning just how that relationship has been to this point and how it affects their plan moving forward. I envision some great possibilities by extending their AI/ML platform into the wired world, where combined with what they know about the wireless environment, could find some very beneficial data to helping increase the performance of the entire network. Imagine a network where an automated system could change QOS settings network-wide on the fly to help handle that sudden burst of wireless data coming in during a spontaneous large event.

You know that the Fortinet presentation will be something to behold as our friend Chris Hinsz has been burning the midnight oil for weeks now putting together his thoughts. I guess that not every person involved in networking waits until the night before to start putting the presentation together. 😉 While it’s known that Fortinet has decided to move on from the amazing technology brought to us by Meru Networks many years ago (see blog here), you can bet that they’ve been cooking up something that will quite possibly be even more special. You can’t own that many patents after all, and not have some pretty smart folks developing new things in the background.

Last, but never least, Aruba returns to the stage to see if they can best the show that they put on quite beautifully last year. I mean who else in the networking world puts on LIVE DEMOS, without making sacrifices to the demo gods well ahead of time, in front of a global audience and pulls them off without breaking a sweat. This was especially true last year, since of course sweat would have ruined the demo of the 11ad AP-387 access point after all. I’m hoping that we see more out of the User Experience Insight (formerly Cape Networks) gear and how they are using that in realtime, along with AI/ML in order to fix potential issues, before they become big problems!

I’m looking forward to each of these companies sharing with us where they’ve spent their time over the past months, and just what their vision is for the future of mobility. So clear your calendar now and bookmark the MFD4 website, where you too can join in with your questions live during the events coming soon!

Oh wait…..how could I forget about “Secret Company” in attendance?!? While we don’t yet know just WHO this is, I would love nothing more than to see a Ubiquiti, Everest Networks (with more on how they cram so much into a single access point to provide such HD capacity), or even someone like say an Edgewater Wireless (showing off just how their tech works with dual-channel wireless). So STAY TUNED to see just who this big secret is!

-Scott