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Human Infrastructure 447: Inside an AP, Hidden Costs of Replacing Engineers with AI, and More

AuthorAuthor

Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
May 07, 2026

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Eva Santos looks at the core components of a wireless access point and outlines why it’s helpful for network engineers to be familiar with those components. She also includes an excellent visual of all the hardware layers. Good stuff! - Drew 

Gutemberg goes deep on testing a Ubiquiti Enterprise Fortress Gateway (EFG) router to see if it can actually push 25Gbps of Inter-VLAN traffic. According to his tests, it can’t. His report “analyzes both bottlenecks. It reproduces both problems in a controlled lab environment on x86 hardware, identifies the specific software architectural choices that cause them, demonstrates fixes whose effects can be measured to a precision of a few hundred Mbps, and documents in detail what happened when we attempted to apply the most surgical of those fixes — adding the missing nftables flowtable module — to a real production EFG.” - Drew 

Pat Allen reckons with the true costs of replacing human employees with AI using some back-of-the-envelope calculations on a fictional project to reduce headcount in a NOC. He shows where hidden costs creep in that absolutely sink the business case and makes a strong argument for why replacing humans with AI tools isn’t going to yield cost reducations. - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

  1. How incidents can teach us about what’s already working well - Surfing Complexity

  2. Vendor PSA: A Field Guide to Field Day - Router Jockey

  3. D2D (Starlink’s Direct-to-Direct) - Potaroo by Geoff Huston

NANOG 97
The North American Network Operators Group, NANOG, is one of the premier NOGs on the planet. NANOG 97 is June 1 through the 3rd in Bellevue, Washington.

At NANOG you get educational talks from people that have done it, are doing it, or who are figuring out how to do it. All the content is by and for engineers. You’re hearing from people you might not otherwise have access to, and you get to talk to them afterwards. The hallway track is a highlight of these events.

Speaking of talks, program talks include “Designing for Constrainted Environments”, “From CLI to AI: A Network Engineer’s Guide to building Useful Agents”, “DWDM Optical Networking Concepts and Technologies,” and  many more.

Register for NANOG 97, happening June 1st through the 3rd at nanog.org.

TECH NEWS 📣

There’s a grab bag of satellite-related news here including Blue Origin applying to launch a space data center. “The application asks for approval to launch 51,600 satellites that would constitute a huge AI data center.”

Lots of other notable events happening in this busy sector. Click through if space-based packets intrigue you, as they do me. - Ethan

As a species, we create an inconceivable amount of data, and it costs a lot in power to keep it all stored and accessible. Doug Dawson reports, “The solution to this is to find other ways to store massive amounts of data that don’t require a lot of electricity. There are several potential data storage methods on the horizon, and we’re going to need more.

One interesting possibility comes from Peter Kazansky, working at the University of Southampton in the UK.”

He continues, “When writing on glass with ultrafast femtocell lasers (a light pulse every quadrillionth of a second), the light traveling through the glass scattered in a way they could not explain.

It turns out that the researchers had discovered hidden nanostructures within silica glass created by micro-explosions from the lasers. The lasers had created tiny holes 1,000 times smaller than a human hair throughout the glass. The eureka moment came when researchers realized they could take advantage of this phenomenon by using lasers to print complex patterns inside the glass.”

Absolutely fascinating, but there’s more to the story, of course. Click through for the rest of the details. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared by Jeff in the Packet Pushers Community Slack

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Ed Horley, co-host of the IPv6 Buzz podcast and hexadecimal savant has shared a list of IPv6 tools, both free and paid, available from Hexabuild, his company. Ed’s looking for feedback, so get in there and let him know what you think. - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS 🍕🍻

A curated list of near-future meatspace events of interest to network engineers. Sometimes a Packet Pusher or two will be there (noted below).

Subscribe to events.packetpushers.net in your calendar software.

MAY 2026

NLNAM Meetup 2 | NL Network Automation Meetup
13 May | Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands

Wi-Co Brussels
21 May | Brussels, Belgium

(NH)NUG | New Hampshire Networking User Group (USNUA)
27 May | Londonderry, NH (Ethan co-organizing)

Wi-Co Memphis
29 May | Memphis, TN

Cisco Live US
31 May - 4 June | Las Vegas, NV (Ethan attending)

JUNE 2026

Wi-Co Oslo
3 June | Oslo, Norway

AUTOCON5 | Network Automation Forum
8 - 12 June | Munich, Germany (Packet Pushers attending)

Wi-Co North Carolina
11 June | Jamestown, NC

HPE Discover
14 - 19 June | Las Vegas, NV (Packet Pushers possible)

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Acquisition News

Lumen buying Alkira grabbed my attention the most. Alkira tech should translate into interesting Lumen offerings related to Network-as-a-Service (punch in a credit card, stand up a circuit) that folks such as Megaport have been succeeding with. - Ethan

Extreme Networks News

Extreme Networks announced new Ethernet switches and new APs, new features in its Platform One management platform, and an AI agent that runs in Platform One. Ethan Banks and I attended Extreme Connect 2026 and posted lots of videos and blogs via our LinkedIn profiles related to these announcements and other topics. We’ll put out a summary post that gathers all our coverage in a single location, but in the meantime you can hit the links above to see what Extreme is up to. Yes, Extreme makes lots of noise about its stadium Wi-Fi customers, but they are making a bid to compete more vigorously for your enterprise wireless and wired business. - Drew

OpsMill makes Infrahub (open source, go try it), a network automation platform & source of truth with versioning. OpsMill has landed some investor capital. So what’s next for Infrahub? Damien reports, “This funding lets us accelerate on multiple fronts:

  • Growing the team across go-to-market, product, and engineering

  • Big things in the works we can't fully share yet

  • The intent layer is just the foundation — what's next will change how teams work with automation and AI”

OpsMill will be at AutoCon 5 in Munich, Cisco Live in Las Vegas, and ONUG in Dallas. Swing by and see what they’re up to. These folks built a platform to solve the network automation problems you’re going to run into the longer you travel down the automation road. - Ethan

At a glance at the headline, you’d think HPE’s acquisition of Juniper has finally resulted in the autonomously operating network of fantasy and legend. It hasn’t.

Where a few networking vendors are actually at with AI is training a model to have meaningful knowledge of your specific network. There are a few AI agents that, when properly scoped, can gather information or interact with your network. There’s an AI that’s also munging telemetry coming into the network that can make recommendations or…(drumroll, please)…act autonomously.

For the most part, you don’t want the AIs acting autonomously, because you can’t trust them to take wise actions. Language models don’t think like we do (or at all, in fact). So if their model decides shutting down a port is a good way to make the errors stop, it might do that without proper training & governance.

So when you see breathless announcements about autonomous AI, you’re seeing specific use cases that models and agents have been trained on. They’ll be low risk tasks. They’ll be low-hanging fruit. They’ll be time-savers (hopefully). They will not run your network for you.

If you’re in the Juniper Mist world, click through to see what’s itemized. They are all…fine. At a glance, all wireless-related. But a lot of it is stuff we’ve had around for a while in some form or other. A lot of you freaking LOVE Mist, so you tell me if anything here is especially noteworthy. - Ethan

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

  1. Everything Is Broken (2014) - Quinn Norton via Medium

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared by Kaj in the Packet Pushers Community Slack