Back in February, I attended WirelessLAN Professionals Conference 2022 in Phoenix, Arizona. It was my first time at WLPC and a conference that I had wanted to attend for several years. While I was there, I met several awesome people in the Wifi and Private Cellular communities. People that I had idolized in Twitter feeds and vendor marketing calls. While my CBRS Pi made an appearance at one point, I kind of flew under the radar and just soaked in just how amazing our community and that conference is. I didn’t attend expecting to get attention, but when you build something like the CBRS Pi, attention may follow..
WLAN Pi Podcast: Pi and Coffee Featuring CBRS Pi
As I talked about in a previous post, the WLAN Pi Team released their brand new WLAN Pi Pro. There were so many great Deep Dives to choose from at the conference, that I had selected another that caught my interest. I figured I already had my own version of the WLAN Pi Pro, so I let someone else get a chance to have one. Once I was at WLPC, I knew I had made a mistake and wished I had joined the WLAN Pi deep dive. I knew I needed to get my hands on the new WLAN Pi Pro so I jumped at the chance to preorder one.. I finally got mine about a month later.
Luckily for me, my CBRS Pi Project, building my own Community Edition WLAN Pi Pro, caught the WLAN Pi team‘s attention. They invited me on their Pi and Coffee podcast. About a week after the conference, when everyone had time to get back to normal life, Jerry Olla and Nick Turner reached out.
I had been in Hawaii on vacation at the time, but we scheduled a time a couple days after I got home to talk about what I had built. So about 24 hours after a dreaded daylight savings time change while on a red-eye flight and 4 lost hours jet lag, we met up to talk about the CBRS Pi. Nick was visiting Dubai and could only meet at 7am my time. So needless to say, I was not on the top of my game and said a few things wrong about my CBRS Pi. The modem is a M.2 “B” Key while I said “M Key” at one point and you don’t need a SIM card to start capturing.. I also did the broadcast on Starlink so there was some cutouts of my stream.. I should have used the more reliable CBRS Network that runs as a backup link internet connection for my house.
The Pi and Coffee Podcast experience was excellent. I felt so honored to spend a few minutes talking to those two guys. Go check out their other podcasts on their youtube channel and everything they are building at wlanpi.com. Plus get yourself a WLAN Pi Pro if you can find it in stock or build your own Community Edition on a Raspberry Pi so you can start playing with these tools.
CBRS Pi shout out at WLPC Celona Deep Dive
Another Deep Dive at WLPC I considered was by Celona. Since I have been building CBRS networks, I debated this session, but figured I already had my CPI and passed on the option for another session. Celona dropped the recordings from that Deep Dive at WLPC 2022 today.
Apparently, I had a shout out at WLPC that I didn’t know had happened. While watching part 8, I was pleasantly surprised to hear my name and CBRS Pi project get a mention during the Celona deep dive. JR had found my first blog post and asked me to find him during WLPC. We chatted for a few minutes during the conference. Little did I know until today, that a few hours later he would mention my project to his session audience and later to his frequency.celona.io community. Check it out at 14:50..
I’m really impressed by what Celona is building. I’m not a customer, we are building our Private Cellular network using different vendors and spectrums beyond CBRS. Celona has some awesome solutions that I wish I could recreate with my system, specifically with their integration into the enterprise networks. Our Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) setup attempts to approach the level Celona has built, but it falls short on true integration. If I was designing my own Private Cellular network that I had full control over, I’d definitely be looking at using Celona’s Orchestrator.
Go check out Celona’s videos. The Celona Deep Dive videos from WLPC 2020 give a great foundational understanding for CBRS and helped me begin my journey with CBRS before I got my CPI. The, just released, Celona WLPC 2022 videos dig into some of the CBRS specifics like the Google Spectrum Planner, TDD Subframe Assignment interference issues as I talked about in a previous post, and how Celona Orchestrator works.
Over all, WLPC 2022 was successful for me personally. It has been a great experience to meet Jerry, Nick, JR, and the other Celona guys. I want to send them a special thanks for helping me to get started and for the inspiration. The WLPC, Wifi, and Private Cellular Community is very welcoming and tight knit. They are willing to help anyone succeed in the industry. If you’re wanting to break in, find something that interests you, dig in, share what you’re learning on a blog, and attend some conferences. You’ll find your way.
