RUCKCast #66: Introducing The ICX 8200

In our latest episode, Jim and John spend time talking with Jeff Sojourne about the new RUCKUS ICX 8200 line of entry-level switches.

For more information on the product line: https://www.commscope.com/product-type/enterprise-networking/ethernet-switches/icx8200/

Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E
and
https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/

Transcript

John Deegan: All right. just like that, we are back with another episode of the RUCKCast.

Jeff Sejourne: Okay. 

John Deegan: So welcome back everybody. How you doing, Jim? 

Jim Palmer: I'm doing good, John. How are you doing? 

John Deegan: Not too bad. Looks like we've got a guest this week. 

Jim Palmer: We do. It's our, it's our first guest. First guest. And I guess for us, it's our first guest. 

Jeff Sejourne: That's an honor. 

Jim Palmer: Have you met us? 

Jeff Sejourne: I'm glad. I'm glad to be the first guest. So, so, thank you for inviting me.

Jim Palmer: Yeah, 

Jeff, I'll let you introduce yourself, but Jeff is actually on, on my team, as part of my day job. And so, we were having a conversation a couple months ago about something that just came out and, I was like, I was like, wow. I said, I really need to capture this. As part of the podcast. And so, so we, we've, it took us a, a little bit with everything else [00:01:00] that's been going on in the beginning of the year, but we have Jeff joining us.

So Jeff, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and let everybody else know who you are. 

Jeff Sejourne: So, I'm Jeff Sejourne and, here at Ruckus I am, doing product marketing for all those switches and aps. Right. I've been doing switching for. Many, many years, at Brocade. and then, Arris, when Brocade, when, Brocade was acquired by Arris and now at CommScope.

So I am relatively new to wireless. I've been doing wire for a long time. And, today we're gonna be talking about, our new wired product, our new switch in the context of wireless. So it's right at the, you know, the middle, the. The core of, what I'm, what I'm focusing on, which is wire plus wireless.

Right. 

Jim Palmer: Well, that's good because John generally focuses on wireless and, and he knows less about wired than I do. It's, I hate such, 

John Deegan: they're mean to an end, you know, at the end of the day 

Jim Palmer: they are, they are not John. So, So since, since, since John, since you're the, the, the, the host with the, with the most animosity towards Wired.

Why don't, why don't, why don't you start off this conversation? Let's see if we can get you educated some, alright. 

All right. All right. So, so, so we, we 

John Deegan: know about this, this ICX 8200 brand new solution. 

Jim Palmer: What, what, what's that? Well, that's where 

the question comes in. 

Yeah, well, no, but what's the, what's the 8200?

What are we talking about? 

John Deegan: It's a brand new switch product, right? Oh, 

Jeff Sejourne: we did? Yeah, we talked. We talk about a brand new access switch that, Ruckus is introducing. It's been intro, you know, in, we introduced that switch about two or three weeks ago, so it's very, very new. and that is, I would say a replacement for the 7150 even.

So we're gonna keep the 7150 a little longer, right? So the ICX 8200 is gonna slot it slightly higher than 7150. still very much at the entry level, so, Our switches. Right. And, so why did we build the 8200? Right? That's, that's, you know, since we had the 7150, well, 7150 had been designed about five to six years ago.

Still a pretty capable switch. But what we've been seeing is, an evolution in a campus network that has been accelerating, with the pandemic. and let me take you through a few of these trends and then I'll explain, you know, what, how, the 8200 is gonna be addressing these trends. Right? So number one is wireless first.

So, I mean, for you guys, wireless first is not new. Right? And, you know, it's been, you know, wireless has been. The primary mean of communicating or connecting to the network for a while now. But with the pandemic, things have really dramatically accelerated. Right? Especially with Flex Works. With. With Flex Works, there's more and more folks that are coming to the office occasionally, and they're not being assigned a cube or an office, so they don't have a docking station.

They, they have, best case scenario they have, Display a keyboard and a mouse, and they connect their laptop to the network wirelessly because the, you can't have a dock a docking station for every type computers that, is being used in the company. And, and most computers without a docking station, I mean, most, many computers with a docking station, don't have any internet ports anymore.

Right. take, you know, for example, on a MacBook today, all you have is essentially USB-C and HDMI. Right. And so if you didn't bring your dongle, you're not gonna be connecting to no, to the network through wire, right? So really the trend for not just the phone and tablets, but also laptop now is to connect wirelessly, right?

So, the other trend that I wanna talk about is in, and that's for certain key verticals, is the move to fiber to the room, right? so. Ethernet on copper has been kind of stuck at 10 gigabit per second for a while now. Right. 10 G based T was introduced early, I think 2002, 2003 roughly. So it's been almost 20 years.

And today there isn't any really viable roadmap. You have 25 G Based T and 40 G Based T, but these are essentially designed for the data center with a limit of 30 meters. It Cat8 cables, right? And anyway, today there, there isn't any, products for 25 G based or, or 42 based, right? So, some. Organizations, especially, in, hospitality and MDUs and, and also education, when they put together, like when they built a new hotel or when they built a new MDU on your new schools.

And those are built a little different that the typical office, well, where you could. Lay, cables in the, in the ceilings. You have to, in these new buildings and new hotels, you have to put cables into the walls, right? When you start putting things into the walls, you know that you're making an investment for the next two or three or four decades, right?

For the life of the building. and this is why they are interested in fiber, cuz fiber is. Pretty much in terms of bandwidth, it's pretty unlimited, right? I don't think we have found the limit in terms of, the capacity of fiber. so. They are looking at deploying fiber to the room. also fiber has become especially single mode fiber.

The part that was expensive to deploy was the transceivers, right? The fiber itself, isn't very expensive, but the transceivers on the map both and of the fiber link, so far has been, in terms of cost, it's been the highest, right? But over the last five years, price have dropped dramatically under receivers.

Like sometimes even divided by, you know, like 10, 10, 15 times less than it was, thanks to, a lot of the Chinese manufacturers that entered that market, right? So now, A lot of companies are looking, a lot of organizations are looking at fiber to the room as a viable alternative, especially when they have a long term focus, right?

So, if you take these two together, this is changing the way campus networks wired. Campus networks are designed, right? The access layer of the campus networks is used now. It used to be in the old days, like let's say five, seven years ago, essentially, you had at least two ports in every cube or in every in, in every, office, where one port was for your V O I P phone, and the other port was for your laptop, right?

Now with wireless first you have less and less of those ports that connect directly to end user through a wired connections, right? Most, I mean, a good half of the ports likely actually used to connect wireless aps. I follow wireless connections and I would say the other half is used to connect. the other half, but I mean at least, a third of, of the ports for, IOT devices that are connected through wire, right?

Like, smart buildings, security devices, you know, access, badge readers. HVAC elevators or lights. you know, all of this is also essentially all these wired connection that were used by users, little by little, they're being used by smart devices, right? and users are connected are connecting wirelessly, right?

So what that means is the access layer is really changing and it's becoming essentially a wireless aggregation layer. With a set of requirements, for this access layer that is evolving. The network itself is, is collapsing in terms of layers because you don't need such a deep funnel when you don't.

You have less ports at the edge. it's actually you have less ports at the edge, but better, smarter, faster ports at the edge. Right? Because now you have. Requirements to deliver higher bandwidth at the edge and also more poe power for all these very high end access points that keep, drawing more and more power, right?

Every generation of access points almost double the power required, right? So that means that access layer now is again, becoming smarter, higher requirement. And, even so they're less port. They need to be faster, more intelligent and deliverable power. Right? So, I sort of, you know, for the, what I call the new campus network really at the edge, we need.

Higher scalability because you know, in the old days you had maybe one or two users, or you know, essentially each port would see maybe a couple of Mac addresses, right? The Mac address for your laptop, the one for your phone, and if you had virtual form machine, maybe a third Mac address. Now each access port at the, you know, wire access ports, can see hundreds of users through, you know, that connect wirelessly, right? So that requires greater scalability, greater. These, these, Mac addresses are, they, you know, they, for layer to switching, they, they are known by the switch and they are in the switch table.

So, You need to have, larger tables, more scalability at the switch level, at layer two, to be able, I covered it. a lot more users, therefore on devices, therefore a lot more, more mac aggregators, right? you need a significantly higher capacity for each of these, access ports, because these, wireless access points, now they are 2.5, 5 and 10 gigabit of uplinks, right?

So one gig is no longer enough. So these new switches need to have a lot of multi gigabit capacity, right? we talk about power delivery, right? PoE plus, PoE+ at minimum at 60 watts and PoE++ at 90 watts, has become the norm, right? You need some room for the next few generations.

Also, something I wanted to. Mentioned as well is, is the, the wired layer isn't upgraded as much as the wireless layer, right? Typically every two to three years, there's a new duration of Wi-Fi APs that come out and you upgrade your Wi-Fi, right? It's not the same for the switches, customers. Don't wanna upgrade the switches as often as they upgrade their Wi-Fi APs.

You know, at a minim they want to keep it, five years, many of them about seven years, right? Which means you need some future proofing built in your switches, whether it's for PoE delivery, for, uplink capacities, right? So PoE today, 60 watt is a minim, right? And 90 watt is a must, right?

Also you also need, a lot of connectivity options at the edge as well. I mentioned fiber to the room, but we also have wireless IoT, with Zigby and Bluetooth. of course we got Wi-Fi. So all of this needs to be managed, through a single interface, Wire, wireless, IoT, and even, private LTE in some cases need to be managed.

It's just one network, right? So these are really the requirements for this new World Campus network, right?

Jim Palmer: Wow. You, you covered a whole lot of topics in, in it looks like 12 minutes. So, I kind of wanna circle back into a lot of this stuff and, and let's kind of break this down in little, little segments. You know, John and I aren't as smart as the average bear, so we have to have things sort of explained to us, a little bit.

So there's some things that you said that kind of want to, and they're, my notes are kind of, jumbled. So we're gonna come back around to some things. One of the things you were talking about was PoE versus port count at the access layer. Can you just kind of quickly, you know, go back into exactly what do you mean by the PoE versus port count?

Are we looking for a lot more PoE? Do we, or, you know, is it, is it by ports? Is it switch budget? You know, what are we looking at with that? 

Jeff Sejourne: Well, so PoE, really started, About 20 years ago or so, and it was, introduced by Cisco to power their V O I P phones. Right? So the requirements were, you know, V O I P phones about six or seven watt max.

Right? and, so, and, and that was the only device that was parted by PoE at the time. So you had, every time you had a PoE phone connected to a switch, you'd had to have PoE. Since then, over the last 20 years, the primary use for PoE now it's really to power, access point than IoT devices.

And, there is more so access point, as I said, have evolved and they need a lot more power than it used to. and given that you have, you can count for at least a third, if not half the ports at the edge that are gonna be used by access points. you are, so, you need now about 50% of your access, access port that need PoE and they need to deliver a lot more power than, what's needed to power a V O I P phone.

Right? Today the average Wi-Fi 6 AP is going to use about 20 to 25 watts, right? So you need PoE+, right? PoE is limited to about 12.3 watts. so you need PoE+, and then the high end, 60 access point or four by four, eight by eight. they go up to 35 to 40 41. So for those you need what's called 60 watt PoE.

It's the BT standards, right? 802.3bt, right? So, and that's, you know, 60 watts gonna take you maybe up to the next generation Wi-Fi 7, maybe Wi-Fi 8 for some of the APs. But if you keep your switch five to seven years, You could be pretty sure that within five to seven years you're gonna have APs that's gonna be drawing or pretty close to a hundred watt right?

The way it's going. Right. And that's just APs, right? if you wanna power things like, smart devices or like, Flat screen TVs, or flat screen signage or that sort of thing, you're going to need that 90 watt, right? Got different level of power for PoE. and so now at the Edge, a, I would recommend, having, you know, 90 watt PoE ports pretty much, everywhere.

If you can afford it at a minim. 60 watts, well, 

Jim Palmer: 90, 90 watts of PoE across, you know, Well, ports, I mean, lemme get out my handy dandy scientific calculator that I keep at my desk. And let's take a look. 90, 90 watts of PoE per port at 12 ports. I mean, that's like a, that's a thousand watts. That's 1,080 watts.

So, yes, I mean, 

Jeff Sejourne: I mean, yes, that's a good point. So you need to have switches that could deliver. That much. you know that, but that PoE budget, right? So this is why we built it. So this is why we built the 8200 to meet all these new requirements, right? So if you, you know, since we talk about periods, talk about PoE, for the 8200 we've got, Almost half of our PoE, you know, more than half actually, of, the 8200 models that support PoE.

Some of them, the, the gigabit switches, the switches that have gigabit, access ports, right, which still bread, the bread and butter for today's deployment. they support, 35 white PoE. The switches that are multi gigabit access ports, which are primarily designed for those high end, Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, and, soon Wi-Fi 7 APs, they have 90 Watt PoE and those which we have actually a model that has two power supplies and with two power supplies we deliver north of a thousand watts of PoE budget. Right. So, we have equipped our switches with the, power supplies that I needed to deliver that PoE budget. 

Jim Palmer: All right. 

John Deegan: So you, you mentioned something else earlier about, fiber to the room. 

Jeff Sejourne: Yes. 

John Deegan: And so I know I, I've, I've heard about it a little bit and some of the customers I work with have talked about it.

What's kinda the vision? Are we talking like hotel rooms? Are we talking like classrooms? What's the application? Or, or, 

Jeff Sejourne: So, the verticals that we, are seeing, being very interested in fiber of the room are verticals that have buildings where it's not easy to upgrade the wires, right? Once you put the wires in the wall, like in a hotel, an MDU or some type of, schools, it's if, if it's difficult to upgrade the wires, they're going to look for.

Connectivity that can last as long as the building. Right? And this is why they're looking at fiber and especially as I said earlier, fiber now is, is maybe a little bit more expensive, but not that much more expensive than a copper connections with the drop in the price of the transceivers. especially at one gig.

But even 10 gig transceivers are, are, are dropping pretty dramatically, right? So, I, you know, I. If you look at the evolution of, copper networking and, twisted per copper, right? Essentially throughout the last started in the eighties, right? Throughout the last 40 years, every time you had an increase in speed, we went from 10 meg to a hundred meg to a gig and to 10 gig, right?

Every time you had an upgrade in speed, you needed to upgrade the cables. You have started with Cat1 at all that sort of, these very early twisted networks. Then we needed Cat3, Cat4, Cat5, and now we are at Cat, Cat6, safe for 10 gig, right? Which is, kind of the minim requirement for, for the 10 gig speed, right?

So, well with fiber, especially single mode fiber, that hasn't been the case. Fiber has been, used for, networking for a while, but really started with the current standards about 20 years ago. Right. And, we went from a hundred meg to a gig to, 20, 25 gig, 40 gig, a hundred gig, 400 gig even.

And then we're looking at 800 gig. All of this works on the signal mode, fiber, right? Or it's two fiber, so you don't need to upgrade up the medium every time you upgrade the speed. And this is the part that is very attractive for these organizations is when they put fiber into the world, they expect.

That all they have to do when they upgrade the speed, is to send both ends of, is to upgrade the both end of the connections, the transceivers and the switch. and they don't have to touch the, the cable. 

John Deegan: Nice. Makes sense. 

Jim Palmer: You said sense, you said some. Yeah, but, oh, so now I want to go, I wanna go even deeper into the switching nerd stuff.

So John, you can, you can sit back and, and relax on this one and try to keep up. You, but you, you were talking about the cam tables. And you know, the, and for those who don't know, a cam table is the MAC address table that is stored on a switch that keeps track of, hey, what are the MAC addresses that are directly connected into, you know, that I see off of my, my ports, not my uplink ports.

The actual ports itself, it's called a cam, cam table. And Jeff, you, you touched on the cam table, a little, a little bit ago, and I'm curious. How is the 8200, cuz you were talking about, you know, we're talking about, you know, wireless at the edge and, and, and pushing more towards that. And so definitely having, you know, I, I can see the benefit of that, but let's talk about and try to explain just in a very brief detail, cuz we could, we'd spent a long time talking about this.

What exactly is. You know the upgrade and why do we need the upgrade on these cam tables on the 8200 compared to some of our previous generation switches? 

Jeff Sejourne: So typically, The closer switch, you know, you get different categories of switches at the access aggregation and core, right? And typically, the closer your switch is to the core and the larger the tables have to be because the switches at the core are seeing a lot more Mac addresses than the switches at the edge, right?

And then the way switching works is when the packet comes in, you have to log, you know, the switch looks up for the destination MAC address, and it looks up and it's stable. And figure what port in this packet to be forwarded to, to get to is and, and destination at the layer two. Right? When you run out of space, the, the table gets flushed, right?

The older entry gets removed, right? So, if you got a lot of market rest, you keep flushing your table. And when the tables are flush and there's no longer information about, the ports that, the packet needs to be forwarded to, to, reach that MAC address, then it's, it's called flood and learn.

Right? Then you flood. The packets are sent to all the ports, until the switches rediscovered. What ports actually, has. that market rest behind it, right? So, that is very inefficient. If you use a switch with, you know, small amount of memory for these layer two tables, you are going to be, flooding the network with a lot of packets in a very inefficient way, right?

So, again, at the access level, it wasn't really necessary to have big, Layer two tables until we get, to the wireless first era where now, you know, every port is gonna be seeing, it's actually every user connect connected to an access point is gonna be visible as a Mac address to the port the access point is connected to, right?

It could be a hundred or 200 users, right? So, What we did for the, 8200 is we, we doubled the size of these Mac address tables. This, layer two, and actually it's the same memory is used for layer three table if you, if you're writing packets right. But we, so we have twice, we have 32 K MAC addresses, 32,000 mac addresses, that are.

There's the size of the tables for the 8200 right? There is twice as much as the 7150, and, twice as much as many of our competitors as well. Right. you know, if you, this is where you need to know what the use cases are when you built a new switch. Right? 

Jim Palmer: Right. 

Jeff Sejourne: If you just, if you just say, oh, it's an access switch, doesn't need a lot of, table space, it's not true anymore. 

Jim Palmer: And you know, 

I wanted to talk about this because, you know, when we talk PoE, especially for people like. John, who, no offense, John is a Wi-Fi person, and every time I try to talk to him about switches, he gets all glassy-eyed and he's like, I don't know. He goes, I just know that's what I plugged my APs into.

But, at my last job, 

Jeff Sejourne: it's like a power strip. Yeah, 

Jim Palmer: It is. And we, we, we make that joke all the time that our switches now are just a 24 port power switch, you know, power strip and, and oh yeah, by the way, it does data. But, my last job I was forced to actually deal with the switching network, and so understanding the, the CAM tables.

And so it's actually a good thing that I didn't know is that, that, you know, I mean, 32,000 Mac addresses on an access layer switch is just massive for anybody who's, you know, who doesn't know that. I mean, think about it as all of your APs, you know, then all especially, and this becomes really critical when we start throwing in some of the features that came out with Wi-Fi six with stuff like Target Wait Time, where it's like, Hey, the AP is going to store this client MAC address in its table, you know, for, you know, years, you know?

It's not, but, well, it can, I guess if so, if the client asked for it. But anyway, I digress. And so when we have these APs, when they go on the spec sheets where it's like, hey, we're, we can support 2000 clients, it's, that's what the table is on the AP. So, so this is where I, I wanted to talk about this because it really does represent an idea of building a switch that does support that because when our, when our APs have more radios, they're supporting more clients and the client table on the AP gets bigger than we need to have a bigger table on the switch. So, yeah, it's, I learned something today, so we can call this one a win. 

Jeff Sejourne: So, yeah. So scalability has become, you know, you could summarize it by scalability has become critical at the access layer now that we have, essentially people connecting wirelessly through APs and hundreds of users are using, I connected to the same access port on the switch, right?

Jim Palmer: Yeah. 

Jeff Sejourne: So the other element is like, okay, so we talked about. Scalability and speed, multi gig speed, for these access ports. But then when you have all this traffic, right? So all these now, all these access ports, we actually have for the 8200, I mentioned the 13 different skus. Out of the 13 skus, we have three skus that are multi gig, right?

That have, 2.5, 5 and 10 gigabit ports. and when you have all this traffic, coming into the switch, you need to also have higher speed up, it's called uplinks, you know, going out of the switch, right? So all our 8200 switches have 25 gig uplinks, right? Those are those, uplink ports can also be used for stacking.

And that's, something that, Ruckus and before it, brocade, it has been doing for, for many, many years is, using standard internet ports for stacking rather than dedicated proprietary ports with, short cables for stacking, right? So we used, high, high speed fiber ports for stacking, which means we could stack across wiring closets.

We could stack at the, aggregation and core. that gives us a lot more flexibility, right? So with this 25 gig, port, we got, up to, eight 25 gig ports on the highest end models, for uplinks and stacking, right? So that means you could use four, port for stacking and four ports for uplinks. and, that's also very uncommon for access, entry level, access switches to have 24 gig, links, right?

So, in some cases you could say, well, it's not really needed today. but again, I mentioned future proofing for switches. If you buy switch today, you need to be able to support, use cases up to seven years from now. 

Jim Palmer: It's, it's funny because I was just sitting here thinking about something that, you know, when you said the 25 gig up links is being pretty much a standard.

I mean, I remember in 2016 I did a project and you know, it was like, oh, all, all we need are one gig up links all off of our switch. So, you know, that's. Seven years ago, you know, it was, it was, hey, one gig uplink from my switch to my distribution was plenty. You know, we'd have four or five aps plugged into the switch, plus some other stuff.

And so it's, it's, it's funny to, you know, when you talk about, when we tie it all back together and we say, yeah, you know, you do your switches about every seven years. So seven years ago, one gig up links was. Yeah. You know, with something that, you know, we could live with and now, you know, it's like, well now we can't, with all these other things.

So I just, I just, I had to chuckle when I, when you said that, cuz I was like, yeah. Seven years ago I was putting in switches with one gig up links and we were like, yeah, that's plenty. That'll, that'll suffice for years. 

Jeff Sejourne: Five. Yeah, I'd say five years ago, 10 gig was the standard, right? but that was five years ago.

And now 25, I mean, we're the first one offering a 25 giga link at the entry level, at the, in the, in this price range. Right. but, you could expect that it will become standard pretty soon. Right? 25 Giga links has been pretty standard at the mid range, but not at the entry level like that. So this is kind of a first.

To have 25 gig at the entry level in the price ranges. 

Jim Palmer: Well, you know what? But I think if you think about. You know, cuz you say, you know, five years ago it was 10 gig was the standard. And I don't even think that that's the case. I think, you know, from a lot of our customers perspective, you know, five years ago they were just sitting there thinking maybe I need to go to like 2.5.

Yeah. And so, you know, when you think about the evolution of, of where we've come from, you know, when we think 10 to 12 years ago, you know, just in Wi-Fi in general, and then you to, you go to the switching infrastructure that supports it. You know, 10 years ago, you know, having a one gig uplink was, you know, like the cream of the crop.

And now 10 years later we're, you know, I mean, and, but it's accelerated so fast. 

Jeff Sejourne: Yeah. 

Jim Palmer: So it, that's, that's, I think that's interesting. So, 

Jeff Sejourne: and very much it's driven by Wi-Fi. I mean, Wi-Fi has been on fire, for the last decade or so, right? We went from, what's the max? Why, you know, Wi-Fi 4, what's the max?

It's like theoretical. Max 400 megabit. That's why, see, why eight? 

Jim Palmer: 802.11n on a 40 megahertz wide channel, three spatial streams was 433 megabits per second. Yeah, that's, but that was, that was the PHY rate. So that, but we all know that we don't get PHY rate, you know, actual PHY rate, onto the wire.

Jeff Sejourne: So yeah, 400 megabits per second was the, was the maxim when 11n came out in 2009. 

And now you are at, what, 20 time this or something like that, right? Oh, so I mean, this is, this is, you know, so Wi-Fi being. Evolving so quickly in terms of performance, and scalability is really pushing the, the wired, infrastructure.

Sure. to, deliver, better speed, higher speed, more scalability. everything I mentioned, I, 

John Deegan: yep. I mean, at the end of the day, it, it just makes sense. I mean, I was always a big fan of future proofing, and I remember when mGig became a thing that. I said, well, let's do it because you can never have too much bandwidth.

Yeah, yeah. The argument, I mean, the argent at the time was like, well, we don't have anything that can really thrash it. We don't, we're not, we're not maxing out the gig links from the AP to the switches. I'm like, but when you do, you've got 2.5 or 5, whatever the case may be. And then, so yeah, it's, it's never a bad thing to think ahead, you know, to, to the problem that Jim mentioned, if they had put in mGig instead of just gigabit ethernet, they've got overhead.

They might never use it. and the reality too is a lot of cases, without getting into pricing, cuz we're not a sales podcast, without getting into pricing, in a lot of cases, I mean, it's, it's easy for me to say cuz it's, it's one item, but it's not a huge jump. I mean, I remember I worked on a financial, group at one point and when like a hundred gig, low latency plant was like, the, like, the bleeding edge, and I remember how much that cost, but when you're talking about financial trades, it makes a huge difference.

But when you were getting down to the, the, the, the lower end stuff, I used air quotes that nobody can see when they're listening to this. it wasn't a huge bump to go from like gig to m gig, you know, per switch. And at the end of the day, if it gets you a couple more years out of your, your switch lifespan, that's huge.

So, 

Jeff Sejourne: yeah, I mean, customers don't like to upgrade the switches. It's, it's wild, easy or easier, I would say, to upgrade an ap, like take the AP down. you just replace it by new AP for a switch. It's, it's got a lot more wires coming to it, but also it's in terms of configuration, in terms of management, in terms of setup, there's a lot involved.

And you gotta, you know, proficient with all the VLANs. You gotta, There's a lot involved in upgrading switches, and this is why. Customers don't like to, they like, they keep their switches for a long time because, it is, pretty even. It's not just the cost of the switch, it's just the cost of the upgrade and the reconfiguration of the network.

We sometimes, taking some, some of the switches down that that is problematic for them and this is why they. You want to futureproof the network and, that, speak to 25 gig and multi gig and 90 Watt PoE and all of this, that is really important to be able to keep your switches more than five years, right?

John Deegan: No. Makes sense. I don't think I have any other questions myself, Jim? 

Jim Palmer: No, I think we're, I think we've, we beat this one to death enough. we could go a lot further as, as Jeff and I have in, in some other offline conversations, but I think, I think we've, I think we've pretty much covered what we wanted to on the 8200.

Jeff Sejourne: That's great. Okay. Well, thank you very much. 

Jim Palmer: And this is an, this is an announcement to all the listeners for our podcast. John has now learned what show notes are, and so he is going to add some links to our show notes that you can go to click on to learn more about the 8200 and, you know, you can, you can get some of the more detailed specs that, Jeff was talking about.

So yes, those, those, that's a super inside joke. So, so we we're gonna have, we're gonna have links in there that you can go learn more about the 8200. 

John Deegan: Oh, cool. Well, thank you Jeff. And thank you Jim as always. And we'll catch you guys on the next episode. 

Jeff Sejourne: Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.