No Sponsors Allowed - Wire LAN Professionals Conference

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Hey, you're listening to another episode of the CTO advisor podcast. This is the first recorded session of the year. I know we've published a podcast, but those are in the can. And this is the first one that we're recording for the year. I have a guest that I've been meaning to get on for the past few years. A fellow tech field day delegate and founder and managing partner or or or leader of wireless land professionals. Keith Parsons, another Keith.

We'll try not to confuse the audience. How's it going? OK, I'm the other Keith. So there's there's two of us here and actually there's quite a few Keith's in the industry. Yeah, there is. We interviewed one that's doing some really cool stuff. I should connect you to the nature fresh farms guy that we interviewed at VMware Explorer in Spain last year. It's those are really interesting wireless things. He has sensors on tomato plants on a 200 acre and a 200 acre greenhouse.

I'll link this. I'll link it in a show notes. And I asked him, how was he getting data back to the data center? Doing all kind of cool wireless and 5G stuff. So we'll save that conversation for another day. But I'd love for you two to chat. That'd be really interesting. Yeah, that'd be great. I did an interview on my podcast with a guy who makes a electronic potato. It's about the size of a of a big potato full of sensors, water, moisture, bumping energy gets transferred.

So it can even predict whether or not you have bruises on your potatoes and they plant it with the potatoes in the spring. And then it tells you whether or not you should water and when you should water and how often. And it gets harvested and then it gets actually sent right like the potatoes on their entire trip. And then they can tell what one huge cost savings on water, but also about the potatoes themselves, how healthy they are and all with this little electronic potato yellow so you can see it.

Yeah, that is actually really, really cool. I have to check out that content is this these outside the box thinking uses for technology, specifically wireless. And this is why I wanted to have you on the podcast for a couple of reasons. One, you're. Having a really interesting take on conferences in two, you're you're kind of an anti pattern when it comes to content creation, et cetera. We've had a lot of great conversations in the tech field, a channel, and I wanted to bring some of that to life.

So first off, let's let's talk a little. Let's talk a little wireless. So what what? What elements of wireless do you cover? If it doesn't go on a wire. So so there's there's a lot there for wireless professionals. We didn't call ourselves the Wi-Fi professionals because wireless is broader than Wi-Fi. It includes LoRaWAN, the whole bunch of IoT pieces. And we normally in the people that I deal with normally keep cellular is the is the other guys.

Once you get onto a cellular company. But today we're working a whole lot in CBRS, which is cellular technology, but without the carrier involved. So it's also fits in the wireless category. And I think Amazon kind of made it a little famous. Was it last year, a year before last, when they announced their 5G service? So it's not you know, it's not new to the industry. It might be new to AWS folks that this has been going on for quite some time.

When we talked with the Nature Fresh folks, they're using 5G as a method for getting data from the plants into the data center because this is far flung technologies. Wireless won't necessarily Wi-Fi won't necessarily carry the load. So we're starting to see a lot more use cases and wireless. So from a community perspective, are we seeing these fiefdoms kind of merge where corporations are bringing in cellular experts on kind of on staff to manage the overall wireless capability? It's usually broken down on the lines of who is paid for the transport of the data.

So a cellular company, if they're getting paid to transport the data, then it's their hardware, their frequencies, and you get a per kilobyte kind of charge. One of the beauties of CBRS and private LTE is it's running over corporate hardware, corporate switch fabric, and we're in charge of our own infrastructure. I'll call them APs because the Wi-Fi people call them APs, but in cellular, they're called eNodeBs. The device that talks to the client is hanging on the corporate Ethernet with corporate switches and corporate POE, and the cell company has nothing to do with it.

So that's the big draw for having a private 5G or private 4G is you don't have to go to and pay any charges on traffic flows, and then you can control it however you like. The place where it gets a little messy is what they call neutral host, where you want to use your private 5G, 4G LTE as a cell carrier so you can talk to other people. And it kind of falls apart at that point. No one's got a really clean answer for that.

The technology can do a handoff from private 5G over to AT&T, a cell carrier, but it's kind of messy in who pays at what point. So right now, most of the 5G projects I've seen are all private. They don't do the cell calls, and you let the cell calls go on their own. Yeah, if you've been in IT for any time, you've managed PBX systems. You're kind of used to this. How did you know I started in PBX? You know what?

With most wireless folks, when you're talking carrier class stuff, you have a pretty good handle on PBX systems and even telco systems and how the telco folks stuff. I cut some of my teeth in PBX world and doing handoffs between, you know, especially back in the beginnings of IP telephony. And, you know, we had to, you know, when we got as far as doing zip lines straight from the telco, you need to kind of have this D mark. There's not that clean D mark yet.

It sounds like for the cellular world, especially, you know, when you get a number on a cell phone device, who who manages that? That connectivity, that that backhaul is really clean when I just want fell over. Hey, I have a fell over from I have 5G fell over from my data center. It's really clean. The very, you know, I might have an SDN device that fails over to a cellular connection and I'm billed per piece is when I want to erase that D mark a little bit and have, you know, a device talk.

And this is strictly IP. You have a device talk straight IP from my infrastructure straight to the traditional telco network without, you know, going through my having to have to go through my infrastructure. I guess I can see how that gets complex, but we'll save that for what we're talking about, which is your event. What's the name of your event? It's very generic and boring. We just call it WLPC, but it stands for Wireless Land Professionals Conference. It's a conference for people who consider themselves a wireless land professional.

And why I wanted to talk about this, we're thinking about putting on an event and I've talked to you quite a bit about the logistics of putting on an event. But you folks have this wild idea that conferences are there for the conference goers to learn. And I'm a little confused by that simple statement like, oh, the reason why you go to conferences is to meet with your peers and learn stuff. That seems like the core principle of the conference. It is and you should.

Actually, since you're a Tech Field Day delegate, you'd understand this. I remember the first time I was at one of Stephen Fox's Tech Field Days as a delegate. And well, actually, before I was a delegate, I watched a couple and I was so jealous of the guys. They get to go to the room and they get to hang out together with other people who they who have the same feelings they do. And they get to talk really in depth about the technology.

And then I got to try it myself. And I loved the experience. It was fantastic. But the business model Stephen uses in Tech Field Day is the vendors pay for the opportunity to talk to influencers. And it's a fantastic model. It's worked for well over a decade. And I love it. But I was thinking, how do I make that same experience for lots of people who are my peers? And the answer was, if you do it with vendors, the vendors, you know, a lot of times you go to a conference and the vendors pay for everything.

There's a vendor sponsored breakfast and there's a vendor sponsored speaker. And vendors are either a gold, platinum or silver sponsor. And money flows that way. And then they get a booth and they and you feel like you're the target, kind of the old Gmail thing. If you didn't pay for it, you are the cost. You are the product. Right. And so you go to a conference and everyone's trying to scan your badge. Like, I just want to talk.

Let me scan your badge because you're there to be a lead. So I flipped it on its head and just said, what if we had a conference that was just for people in our industry to stay with other people in our industry and talk? And so we said, well, we can't have it paid for by vendors because vendors want leads and they won't come and play. So the first one we did totally without any vendors at all and just said, there's no vendors can do a thing.

And that's that's to be paid for by the attendees. But they get that really robust experience. So every year we've added a couple more things. We did allow vendors back in, but only for evening events. So after the conference is over in the evening, a vendor can since we bought the entire hotel, we let a vendor use one of the rooms we've already paid for and we don't charge the vendors anything. They can come and do whatever they want. They might and most do go to the hotel catering and get food and beverages to entice the attendees to come to their session.

And so or they have to give something away because the attendees don't come to their session unless there is a legitimate reason. And there's lots of fun activities all night long. So if a vendor wants to bring people there, he's got to do something to get them to come. So we do let vendors play in the evening and we've had some great vendor events as well. So it's kind of a backwards conference. We start with sending out a call for presentations like most places, but we allow our own attendees to vote on sessions.

So the conference presentations that we do, the call for presentations, we put a survey out and those that get the most votes get the most time. And so we only have three one hour sessions. We have four 30 minute sessions. We have about 20, 20 minute sessions and then probably 25, 10 minute sessions. I learned this 10 talk is what we call them from a conference I attended in a whole different industry in the church industry. And I loved it because they asked me to come in and give a talk for 10 minutes.

And I was at first a little taken aback by like, wait, I should be your keynote. I should I can talk for an hour. I'm really good at this stuff. And then they said, no, we only have 10 minutes, but we want you to cover this. And it felt like a lot. But I found that you can cover a whole lot of information in just 10 minutes. If you throw out all the fluff, you don't need to introduce yourself.

You don't need to set the stage. You start with the conclusion first because you don't have time to build up to a conclusion. And it gets very efficient. The other good side of the 10 talks are if you're in the audience and you didn't want that topic. Wait 10 minutes and you'll be a whole new topic. So you don't even have to leave. In our early years, we tried some things like tracks. There's a track for the people in different industry segments.

Or did you did you want to learn from a vendor? Then there's a vendor track. And did you want to learn about, I don't know, design? And there's a design track. And we split the audience into multiple rooms. And then we had them moving from room to room. And then we found out some sessions, even though we tried to balance them. One room would be full. The other room would be empty. And then people got all embarrassed.

So we just instead went to shorter time slots and then pushed really hard to say, you know, somebody gets a 30 minute slot and they blow it. Next time they're not going to get voted. So they got to work it out. And we found I think 10 talks are the strongest piece because they force people to focus on the thing they're trying to deliver. The more time you give them, they start talking about other things. Or they break the cardinal rule, at least in my cardinal rule, is they start with the setting the stage.

In the Wi-Fi industry, it was BYOD, just the term. You're going to bring your own device. And so some would start up and they might take 15 of their 30 minute time slot talking about what BYOD is and why it's so terrible. And I'm like, everyone in the audience is living the pain you're talking about. You don't need it. You don't need to set it up. It's already been preset. Just jump right in with your solution. So we've done 15 of them now.

Sixteenth is starting in about three weeks. So help me understand, how do I navigate this? So if I'm coming to it new and I'm a participant in the, you know, at the beginning of the conversation, we've whet the whistle on doing private 5G or whatever. And I want to learn more about that topic and going to a conference with a bunch of wireless LAN professionals. How do I navigate that? That's the learning. That's one of the primary things that I want to do.

Is there like a content catalog? You said you guys are not necessarily taking the track option. How do I navigate wanting to have that outcome? Well, part of the benefit of having lots of shorter talks is we get to cover more topics. So this next one that's coming in three weeks, we probably have 25% of the talks are on 5G. But they're also intermixed with other talks on using a drone in your business. Or there's a lot of different topics that have to do with day-to-day work as a wireless LAN professional.

So you just pay attention to those. One of my pet peeves in a conference is people hanging out in the halls talking. And so we make sure that either you're in the session listening and being focused. And because it's fast-paced and high energy, you're not getting bored. So yes, we still get some few people. I'm talking to you, Bender. He's a guy who never comes in sessions. He stands in the hall the whole time. But you just come to hang out in the halls.

But if you want to come and focus and learn, you just sit in the main ballroom, and you will get a boatload of information. Additionally, we did something extra. And every year, we do surveys back to our attendees who come and ask what we could do more. And many years ago, we came up with an idea of a deep dive. We just call them deep dives, and people sometimes complain. But it's more about focus. And we have hands-on labs of something.

The first one, we built a little single-board computer, and everyone built them. And they were headless, so there was no monitors for them. And we had a couple monitors in the front of the room. You'd have to get yours built and then go to the front to even test to see if it worked. But people liked building and doing things. So now we have a variety of deep dives. A couple years ago, we started on a little – we call them WM-Pi.

It's a Raspberry Pi that has special software to do testing for wireless folks. And we started using those, and then we branched out to a bunch of different categories. We have 11 different deep dive topics from actually flying a drone. And if you sign up for that one, you get the drone. If you sign up for the class on WM-Pi, you get and build the WM-Pi. You leave the class with the product. We have them on LoRaRan, where you actually build the LoRaRan setup and test it.

We have Wi-Fi security, where you build – you get a little single-board computer that's focused specifically on hacking, and then you use it to do hacking classes. So those are on day one and two afternoon for three hours. So basically, you get a six-hour class all hands-on in using something, and you take it home with you for whatever the topic you chose. So we try to have – listen to what the audience wants, and they wanted more of that. They also like being part of the community.

So some – I mean, we have early-morning yoga. There's running clubs that run during the time. There's an early-morning prayer meeting that some people come and do prayers every day. We have Lego-building contests at night. There's a group that likes doing retro gaming. So they bring all the retro gamings, and we put them in a room, and they play old-fashioned games. So it's kind of – if you think back to the original Tech Field Day, why Stephen Fosker did it, he made it like the field day when you were in school and you went out and got to play all day.

So we like that idea. People just want to come and hang out together and play whatever their hobbies are. So off hours, it's just hobbies. And there's also a whiskey and wireless podcast that gets a little – I mean, an hour of just drinking whiskey, it gets a little wild sometimes. So the last question is, like, so there's this model that everyone pays. So even if you're presenting, you still pay to attend the conference. You're just – Even CTOs of companies who come and want to present, they're just an attendee.

And there's no vendor, like, sponsorship in the traditional model. The last couple of the questions around, like, okay, making sure I'm not the product. What type of information do you collect for registration? Just enough to send them an invoice. Because, one, we don't share their names with anyone. So other than we send emails out, if you're signed up for the XYZ Deep Dive, we have to order that many of that product. So we send you – make sure you pick your deep dive, and we make sure you're going to show up.

We follow up with – we have on the day of registration, we get about 80% of the registration slots sold in the first hour. So people are waiting for it. So if you're a presenter, you get early access, so you're guaranteed a slot. We contact them that way. Other than that, we don't use the mailing list for anything. It's just to communicate about the conference. So every single vendor who ever comes asks and says, well, can we get the list?

No. Well, how are we supposed to get leads? Talk to people. Well, what if we do all those evening events? I said, well, you might if you wanted to offer something really good that they want, and then they would give you voluntarily their contact information. But that has nothing to do with the conference. There's no badge scanning. There's no central repository. There's just – Nothing like that. You'll get a badge with your name on it, but that's about it.

There's no QR code on the badge to scan. Right. Yep. Because we don't want you to feel like you are the target. Keith, so for my audience, I'm still in this idea. Keith has encouraged me to try this, and I am going to try this. It's really scary to put on a conference and say that the conference is funded and profitable by the people who attended. But, again, Keith has been doing this. This is what, say your 15th – how many of these have you put on?

16th. 16th show, and he's continued to do it. So I'm amazed by it. Kudos to you for trying something that seems kind of intuitive, like people want to get together. They want to share information. They are willing to pay to learn to do things, and you put it out there, and it's been extremely successful. How many people show up? 300, 325, something like that. Good number. We're shooting for 350 if we can get it. Yeah, I mean the first one was really scary because I didn't know if this idea was going to float, and I had rented the hotel, paid for it out of my pocket.

My wife did not know. I hope she doesn't watch this. She had no clue of what – we would have lost a house if it didn't work because hotels are not fun to deal with. No. Luckily, even in December, I was someplace with my wife, and she's like, why are you all nervous today? I'm like, it's registration day. She goes, they always sell out. I know, but if it doesn't – I mean there's easy three quarters of a million dollars sitting in a hotel, and if no one comes, I just have to eat it.

So it's a little scary. On the other hand, it feels good when people actually come and enjoy themselves and want it bad enough that they sign up early. Some of you even put online a countdown timer to the minute that the registration goes live. Keith, I'm really proud to have talked to you about this. It's a really exciting and different approach to conferencing. I hope to see more of it. We really love the idea. We're trying to innovate when it comes to even virtual conferences in the same way.

I think the last one that we put on was not sponsored by anyone, and it was a great time. It was just a great – I know you're not a fan of virtual conferences, especially when they're sponsored by vendors. I did watch yours though. I was there. Yeah, it's when you offer value without kind of pimping people names. People come, and it's refreshing to see. And just another thing to add. When we're done, we have Prime Image Media, the same team who does all the tech buildings.

Oh, yeah, our friends from tech buildings. Yeah. Yeah, so they do all the recordings, and then within – they give us the recordings like the end of every day. And within about a week, we shoot for quicker, but that's a lot of process. I mean, there's 90-something sessions. Within a week, we have them all up on YouTube for free. So people who – we care about delivering content to the community. Some people can't come, so we shouldn't punish them and sell them the content.

Some conferences, if you can't be there, it's like, well, if you pay $500, you can get access to our videos. And we just go, hey, go ahead. The content is there for free, and we're trying to just share the knowledge. I always say – in fact, every intro is the same thing. Knowledge is like manure. If you spread it around, it helps everyone, everything grow. If you just try to hang on to it, you stink. That's a great way to end the podcast, Keith.

For those of you who want to find out more about Wireless LAN Professionals, what's the website? com or just WLPC. com works too. com. Talk to you next episode.