I didn’t go out and buy the .11be equipment it was offered to my employer for testing and debugging it in a production environment. In the current beta firmware only WPA3 & above are available.
In my area three ISP’s have a promotion going right now – “Bring us a active ROKU device and exchange it for a new AppleTV device. Limit of 6 devices per service address.”
I work for a Native American tribe in the PNW. We scrambled to get the reservation reliable internet in the later part of 2019. We managed to cover most of the reservation with wi-max and wifi with a fiber back haul configuration. We are now slowly getting more stable and reliable fiber to the home(FttH) service installed to as many homes as we can, but it is slow process covering the mostly rural landscape doing all the work in house.
Our tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.
We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.
First off I despise both Apple and that other evil empire (house of mouse) I want nothing to do with either of them. Now with that said I am one of four individuals that suggested and lobbied 15 other tribal nations to offer a new AppleTV device in exchange for active ROKU devices. Other nations are facing the same dilemma. Spend an exorbitant amount of money to support a small amount of antiquated devices or replace the problem devices at fraction of the cost.
Now if ROKU cannot be proactive at keeping up with connectivity standards they are going to be wiped out by their own complacency. Judging by the growing number of offers to replace their devices for free their competitors are already proactively exploiting that complacency. When we approached apple to see about a discount to purchase a large number of their devices, for the exchange, they eagerly offered to supply their devices for free.
So should I speak up to spark some action to remain relevant -or- should I cut them some slack and watch as they fade into obscurity?
Personally if I have to be labeled the bad guy in order to get some sort of action. So be it! It will be worth more than the bad reputation.
