“Good Enough.” or “Give Me More!” – That’s the Question
Every Wi-Fi vendor claims to be able to do everything these days. ”Can your system debug my client-side driver issues and fix them on the fly?” “Sure!” Oy.
First, let’s separate between lie and marketing exaggeration…
1) Lie - a vendor doesn’t have it, and they say they do.
2) Marketing - a vendor calls their feature by the same name as other vendors when that feature isn’t in the same realm with the industry standard functionality for that feature.
To me personally, these two things are both B.S., but dare I say that aggressive young companies don’t often see it this way. :(
/Soap-box on
Aerohive strives for the highest integrity in Marketing, and if you feel that we’re goofing something up, please call us on it.
/Soap-box off
Now, I will ask you some thought-provoking questions. :)
1) Does fast/secure roaming matter to you?
* If your voice call, video stream, or FTP session hiccups for 1-5 seconds, but will re-establish after a slow roam most of the time, would that be worth paying 25% less for your Wi-Fi solution?
* Is L3 fast/secure roaming an imperative or could you just rearrange your network design a bit to get around the need in order to have a simpler GUI?
2) When you see “spectrum analysis” on the spec sheet, do you think, “Meh, maybe…I don’t know anything about that crap anyway”?
3) When a manufacturer’s representative says, “we have distributed, synchronized, stateful, policy-based, per-user, OS-and-application aware, follow-me firewalls”, do you respond by saying “booyah!” or ”huh?”
* Do you think “I don’t understand that. I just want Wi-Fi.”?
Obviously I understand that there are different requirements in the various vertical markets, different types of buyers, and different budget requirements. I’m just looking for feedback from the audience - YOUR opinion – generally on the state of things in Wi-Fi.
The reason for asking these questions is to try to get a picture of Wi-Fi market maturity. Do complex features REALLY matter to most people or will a “back to basics” approach win the day? Do we need more “automatic” stuff or do network administrators want more manually-configurable bells and whistles? Is less more or is more more?
What do YOU want?
Thanks for your feedback!
