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  • Human Infrastructure 431: Salary Survey Results, Avoiding Anti-AI Hype, Wi-Fi 8, and More

Human Infrastructure 431: Salary Survey Results, Avoiding Anti-AI Hype, Wi-Fi 8, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
January 15, 2026

PACKET PUSHERS SALARY SURVEY

Our first-ever Salary Survey is complete! 418 respondents from around the globe participated, and we’re ready to share the results.

How does your salary compare to your peers? Which country has the highest average salary? The lowest? Do some certifications correlate with higher compensation than others? Does an advanced degree lead to better pay?

These are some of the issues we cover. The survey also includes:

  • Global average compensation

  • Average compensation inside and outside the United States

  • Country-level and city-level variances in compensation

  • How certifications and skill sets correlate with pay

  • How educational levels correlate with pay

  • Salary satisfaction

  • Work-life balance satisfaction

  • More

You can download the full report here. We’ll also be doing more coverage online and perhaps a video. Let us know what you think, and thanks to everyone who participated! -Drew

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

The author argues that AI is helping him code. LLMs are taking away the tedium of coding, enabling him to solve problems more quickly. He’s a programmer who know what he’s doing, and is using AI in that context. He’s not a n00b who has no idea what to make of the code the LLMs are generating. Rather, he’s using AI as a tool to save him time.

My personal experience compared to a year ago is similar. I’m finding that the network configuration code an LLM generates in response to my prompts have increased in quality. I haven’t done definitive testing yet to have a strong opinion that I can trust an LLM to write trustworthy config stanzas. But I definitely feel the situation has improved. - Ethan

Tom Hollingsworth sums up what’s going on with Wi-Fi 8 succinctly.

“The focus of 802.11bn is not speed. It’s reliability. When you look at the way that vendors have been pushing more and more throughput for the past several revisions you might ask yourself how much faster things could get. For the eighth release of the Wi-Fi standard the answer is “not any faster.” Wi-Fi 8 is keeping the same speed numbers that Wi-Fi 7 has right now. Instead, the developers are looking to add features like reduced power consumption, extended range, and quality of service (QoS) enhancements.”

Tom also points out that Wi-Fi 8 is in the early draft days. Don’t expect to see a final standard before September 2028. - Ethan

Everyone needs fiber optic cabling right now. Everyone. Those companies that make fiber optic cabling are unlikely to keep up as the demand continues to ramp.

Doug Dawson says, “One of the biggest challenges for the vendors is that there are different kinds of fiber for different uses, like inside a data center, in middle-mile networks, in last-mile networks, for drops, and inside buildings. The challenge for vendors will be to match manufacturing output with demand.

Vendors and industry experts are predicting that some kinds of fiber could experience ordering backlogs as long as a year. Vendors are likely going to satisfy their largest customers first, so smaller projects might find themselves in a bind.”

Something to keep in mind as you’re working on your build-out projects. 😬 - Ethan

AJ Murray, former host of “The Art of Network Engineering” and a blogger, talks about why he stepped away from the podcast, and why it’s been so long since he’s written anything. He also talks about how a different pursuit, photography, has helped re-spark his creative fire. But he still has some healing to do. Take your time, AJ. We’ll be here when you’re ready, and we appreciate you, too. - Drew 

Herve writes about a workflow called Git-based Autonomous Iteration with Tracking, or GAIT. In this post he shows how he used this workflow to have an AI agent migrate a “simulated production network from legacy Arista Route-Maps to modern Routing Control Functions (RCF) with zero human intervention.” That is, using a ContainerLab topology, he instructed the agent to figure out for itself how to convert route maps to RCF. The agent consumed Arista documentation, iterated through changes in the lab environment, and then self-corrected when it ran into errors. It’s a really interesting read. - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

NANOG 96 is coming to San Francisco, Feb. 2–4, 2026

Who Should Attend?

  • Network Engineers + IT Professionals

  • Telecom Operators + ISPs

  • Academics + Researchers

What Should You Expect?

  • Cutting-edge talks from global leaders

  • Hands-on workshops + tutorials

  • Social events + hallway tracks that provide real knowledge exchange, mentorship + problem-solving.

Oh, hey - I’ll be at NANOG 96! Find the Packet Pushers table at Beer ‘n’ Gear Tuesday night @ 6pm and grab some stickers + socks. - Ethan

TECH NEWS 📣

TSMC is a linchpin of (and perhaps a canary in the coal mine for) the entire tech ecosystem. This piece looks at two issues for TSMC. The first is the company’s most recent quarterly results, which were great. 

The bigger issue for the company is forecasting when the insane growth being driven by AI will inevitably contract. TSMC must decide whether to invest huge amounts of capital to build more fabs, including in the US. Right now, TSMC is struggling to keep up with customer demand. If they spend billions of dollars on projects that take two or three years to come online, that demand could dry up in the meantime, leaving them stranded with wasteful overcapacity. 

The article notes, “After reviewing concrete business results and financial strength—especially among AI-driven hyperscalers—the company is confident that AI is delivering real, measurable value and driving sustained growth…Overall, management views AI as a long-term, “mega” trend that is increasingly embedded in daily life and likely to support strong semiconductor demand for years.”

That seems like a vote of confidence for a larger buildout. On the other hand, would you expect TSMC to say anything bad (at least publicly) about the source of the company’s great fortune? In any case, there’s more detail in the article if you’re curious. - Drew 

This article talks about research from VPN provider Surfshark that dug into what kinds of and how much data various health tracker products are collecting. The article looks the most- and least-hungry of these devices. It also links to the original research if you want to go directly to that. - Drew

The IEEE 802.3dj standard defines Ethernet speeds of 200G, 400G, 800G and 1.6T at 200G/lane and is expected to be completed in late 2026. Up next? New Ethernet speeds that use 400G lanes instead of 200G lanes. I was thinking I’d upgrade the house to 1.6T, but maybe I should wait until 3.2T comes out…decisions, decisions. 😂

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium is also iterating on their 1.0 specification that was published on June 11, 2025. You might remember that day. The Internet groaned under its 562 page weight. Looking forward, Programmable Congestion Management (PCM), Congestion Signaling (CSIG), UET header optimization to reduce overhead impact on small packets, and In-Network Collectives (INC) are all being worked on by the UEC. - Ethan

TL;DR. Network speeds are pushing the physical limits of copper. A copper alternative is to use terahertz radio waves in a waveguide cable. Company AttoTude is making this happen at cable lengths longer than copper and with less power consumption. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on LinkedIn by Ethan (origin unknown)

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Business Insider has built an interactive map to track where data centers are being built across the United States. Business Insider also produced a good (and short) documentary on data center issues including water consumption and noise.  - Drew

From the nice people that bring you the ever useful curl CLI tool is wcurl. From the README. “wcurl is a simple curl wrapper which lets you use curl to download files without having to remember any parameters.

Simply call wcurl with a list of URLs you want to download and wcurl picks sane defaults.

If you need anything more complex, you can provide any of curl's supported parameters via the --curl-options option. Just beware that you likely should be using curl directly if your use case is not covered.” - Ethan

Python podcaster, author, and instructor Michael Kennedy shares a shell script.

He says, “Using a virtual environment is a well-known and important best practice for working on Python projects that use third-party dependencies, i.e. pretty much every Python project out there.

But it’s a hassle to make sure you always have the right one activated, that you have one activated, and checking if there’s even one present. Maybe you haven’t created one for this project yet, yet where you’ve checked it out from source control.

This post shares a simple shell script that will automatically find and activate your Python virtual environment.”

Thanks, Michael! - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

  1. curl 8.18.0 - Daniel Stenberg

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Itential’s William Collins, co-host of The Cloud Gambit podcast on Packet Pushers, shares his thoughts on what the heck we’re supposed to doing with AI. He’s practical and pragmatic as always.

Here’s one highlight that stood out to me. AI will compound your skills—it won’t replace you. William says, “If you’re in networking, pick one or two fundamentals and go deep: TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, Linux, Automation basics (Python helps a lot). None of that is going away. And those fundamentals will multiply the value of everything you do with AI.”

Yep. This underscores something similar we’ve been saying for a while. You can’t automate what you don’t understand. - Ethan

Mark Coleman reports, “NetBox 4.5 brings three major feature areas: enhanced cable modeling with Cable Profiles and many-to-many port mappings for accurate representation of complex passive infrastructure, native user and group ownership for tracking operational responsibility, and a rebuilt API token system with proper credential hashing and enable/disable controls. Beyond these headline features, the release includes UI filter lookups, platform inheritance for config contexts, and support for Python 3.13 and 3.14.” Enjoy. - Ethan

EnGenius has announced a new set of Wi-Fi 7 APs that incorporate a built-in wireless intrusion detection and prevention system (WIDS/WIPS). Called AirGuard, EnGenius says this capability offers always-on “threat detection—identifying and neutralizing threats such as evil twins, rogue APs, man–in–the–middle attacks, RF jammers, and flood attempts—by leveraging dedicated scanning radios.” - Drew 

Cisco has written a timeline of key moments in its development of its custom Silicon One chips.  - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Found on BlueSky. I don’t remember whose profile I saw it on, so apologies for not giving credit where it’s due.