WLPC. The place for nurture in Wi-Fi
Many people ask me how I got into professional Wi-Fi, and how come I seem to know so many people in the industry. The answer, without doubt, is #WLPC - The WirelessLAN Professionals Conference.
2025 WLPC - 400 attendees learning about the community driven WLAN Pi project
If you are working in Wi-Fi and want to grow your community, skills, technical reasoning and confidence, then you should be considering attending WLPC in your local region at some point.
Why?
Well, I’m writing this from the point of view of someone who has experienced the unparalleled nurture which comes out of this event. I’ve been able to benefit from this nurture in more ways than one which have been life changing for me and those close to me. Read on to see how a single event can be so important.
A personal journey
I’ve had a long career in wireless technology and in the last 6 years I found myself needing to move sideways within the Wi-Fi industry and immerse myself into the technical community.
Despite being fairly well connected, I needed to find an adjacent professional circle within which I could re-ignite my deep technical love for Wi-Fi. I needed to quickly meet new people and scratch the itch to improve my knowledge and improve my technical research abilities. I needed to learn from others but I also needed to give myself goals which would push me.
Having just returned from my 4th consecutive event in Phoenix, I’ve been reflecting on what this year’s attendance gave me both personally and professionally and I realised that I should really write this down and spread the word.
There are 4 things that really stand out.
Ambition. WLPC really stretches me
Knowledge. I’m always learning from the real world experiences of others
Community. I make more and more like-minded friends each time
Nurture. This is the place to develop as a professional - without doubt
The very nature of WLPC is to come away having learnt more at a technical and personal level. There is very little in the way of standard product marketing. Talks are centred around findings and solutions where vendors tend to use their products as tools in the generation of this content.
Every year I learn a ton from a variety of people. Some are industry figure heads and others are first timers who have done something interesting and want to share it. I appreciate these talks the most.
In my consultancy role, I help large public venues deliver high density Wi-Fi so it is always a treat to listen to the likes of Jim Florwick talk about how some of the most difficult stadiums in the world have been delivered with rock star Wi-Fi.
Zac Conder talked about how he put the Sidos Wave on a drone and got me thinking about how that would be useful in stadiums.
People get up and talk about things that go wrong or might catch you out and the value in learning that from others before you fall foul on the job is immense.
Jake Synder’s recent talks around overcoming the challenging implementation at Google and the fact that MBSSID might skew your survey data are priceless.
GT Hill talked about the wireless journey of a Tomato which was so insightful and I loved hearing about the backscatter RFID devices which changed their properties with changes to the environment.
I’ll update this section with links to videos from this year’s event when they are published.
A transition made easy
My background is in telecommunications research. I’m a person who is, and always will be, deeply technical.
Right from the start, I was immersed in wireless systems, protocols and RF. I owe a lot to starting my career at Roke where a young engineer had the opportunity to go from writing algorithms for 3G basestations, to implementing OFDM and OFDMA transceivers from first principles. I got to build embedded systems which pushed the boundaries of digitial signal processing in small form factor compute modules. Times were good!
As can so often happen, progression in a career can lead a person away from the deep technical and more into a team leadership role. It was here that I got into Wi-Fi and convergence with cellular. I worked with Comcast & Vodafone to introduce Wi-Fi offload into a strained 3G network. I was at the forefront of Passpoint when it was originally conceived. I had a great team who built a connection manager and partnered with Cisco to deliver into mobile operators. Eventually it spun out and went on a wild journey to introduce Wi-Fi into mobile operators around the globe.
I was at all the conferences where this industry turned - Wi-Fi Now and the Wireless Broadband Alliance. This is where it was at, and I could go there and meet all my customers.
But this industry ran dry for me. 4G and 5G were increasing in bandwidth and ability to deliver internet services, and the need for Wi-Fi offload was reducing. It was time to move on and go back to my technical roots.
WLPC - A way back to my technical roots
The growth in Wi-Fi in the last 10 years has been immense and I knew that a deeper technical involvement was for me.
WLPC was the place where I needed to be and by 2022, 3 things happened which took me there.
In 2020 (during lockdown) I had created the nOversight tool to finally overcome a long term frustration in being unable to understand iPhone devices Wi-Fi behaviour. Keith Parsons discovered this and in February 2021 did an interview with me and introduced me to WLPC.
Dan Jones was a huge advocate for nOversight and had submitted a talk to WLPC 2022 on using nOversight to help with troubleshooting Wi-Fi on iPhones. I needed to be there.
In 2021, my new angle for developing Wi-Fi tools got me introduced to the WLAN Pi project where I got involved and contributed a little bit to the development of the WLAN Pi Pro. They were going to WLPC 2022 to run a deep dive and so I was going to know a few people. I had to go.
As it happened, Dan Jones could not go and deliver the talk, and so I got the opportunity to take his place and do it myself.
As a consultant I was so excited to go and learn from the journey’s of others. As a tools vendor I wanted people to know about my product.
I quickly learnt that WLPC wasn’t like other conferences and vendor push was not encouraged. To me - this was great as I’d become tired of hearing the same marketing talks over and over.
It would be easy for me to stand up and talk about the features of nOversight each year but I realised this particular community would not want that nor vote for it. Instead I set out to answer questions which I think the industry needs to hear and as a developer of a tool, I’m in the fortunate position where I can expand the tool into that problem space as a way to provide these answers.
I decided to do talks that provided general information about my investigations but also went deep to allow others to look back at the recordings for deeper details.
Proposing a talk around a question I want to answer pushes me!
I have ambitious product development goals but I’m also a consultant. The two go hand in hand but often the consultancy consumes my time and I’m behind on getting new features out in nOversight.
I’m going to fully admit that the run up to WLPC (and first day) is stressful for me as I need to ensure I have the consultancy in a good place before taking a week off while working to prepare new WLAN Pi features and content for the very popular deep dives we deliver. I’m one of those who needs to work on the slides while I’m there.
The WLAN Pi Deep Dive had 55 attendees at WLPC who all got to take a WLAN Pi home with them.
As a consultant and researcher at heart, I’m able to collect a lot of data and insight over the period of a few months. My presentations are about sharing that.
For me, going to WLPC also allows me to question my findings and test on new hardware often running pre-release firmware. I’ve been able to use early Wi-Fi 7 from Ubiquiti, Ruckus and Aruba and incorporate it into my talk within the same week.
To those of you who think that doing a presentation might be something you are interested in, my recommendation is to push yourself and do it. WLPC provides a fantastic opportunity for everyone and anyone to talk about a topic they learnt, discovered or have a deep interest in.
WLPC is a stage for nurture
Now onto something which is dear to me - nurture.
As someone who ran a development team, I always look back and kick myself around what could have been done better. What might have happened if I nurtured the people more rather than tried to push on product deadlines.
This year, it came home. My 16 year old son, Dylan, has an interest in coding and through my involvement in WLAN Pi, had an opportunity to get involved. He put himself forward to develop the new WLAN Pi app using cross platform development in Flutter and it’s now on the app stores.
If you have a WLAN Pi and want to try out the new app you can find it on the Apple App Store and Google play store. now. You will need Software version 3.3.0 though.
Now here is the thing about Keith Parsons and WLPC. Nurture is ingrained in the very meaning of this event. When I told Keith that Dylan was working on the WLAN Pi app, he offered an opportunity of a lifetime and invited him to WLPC.
As a community project, WLAN Pi likes to make sure that recognition is given where it is due and Dylan was no exception. He was offered the opportunity to use part of the WLAN Pi update to talk about his app development. For a 16 year old, getting up in front of 400 people to talk about what he developed was the opportunity of a lifetime and something we will both be truly indebted to Keith for ever. This is nurture at it’s very core.
Dylan presenting the WLAN Pi app at WLPC 2025
But it goes further. This community immediately recognised this and the amount of people that came forward and offered Dylan support and acknowledged his bravery was outstanding. I’ve been presenting for years and it is fairly normal for me, but to witness the nerves of a young first-timer dissolve away as he was taken under the wing of Nick Turner and his WLAN Pi presentation was something else. The evidence of relief and elation as industry veterans patted him on the back was life changing to him.
We definately shared a proud dad moment. Thanks to Jason Beshara for capturing this.
Go and develop at WLPC
As you know by now, I owe a lot to WLPC and the reason for writing this is to tell this story so that more people in this industry can benefit.
If you’d been thinking about this conference or just discovered it through this post and want to develop yourself as a Wi-Fi engineer then I encourage you to sign up for the next one. Maybe we will meet there and I can learn something from your experiences.