Bob O’Hara, co-founder of enterprise Wi-Fi pioneer Airespace, tells the story of the origination of the controller-based architecture. He discusses the challenges of managing a multitude of access points and how a controller helped bring metrics and manageability to that market. Airespace built a centralized hierarchical system to control Wi-Fi access points in the early 2000′s and was purchased by Cisco in 2005.

O’Hara retired from Cisco and became an advisor to Aerohive Networks. In this video, recorded as part of Aerohive’s presentation at Wireless Field Day 1 on March 17, 2011, O’Hara links his controller concept at Airespace to the distributed model at Aerohive. He concludes that Wi-Fi is the first technology to make the Science Fiction concept of “instantaneous, ubiquitous wireless communication” available to everyone.

This video is part of the “Best of Tech Field Day” series.