It’s been a busy five months so far this year.

1) Wi-Fi design for a building with a volume of 4.5 million cubic feet.

2) Converted Internet service from copper to fiber at two different companies.

3) Upgraded a company from a conventional phone system to a VoIP system.

4) On-prem server replacements for some companies with hybrid networks.

5) Many new computer setups and replacement computer setups.

6) Updated course material for my Windows Server Management class (upcoming job with a public utility).

7) Remote tech support calls nationwide.

8) Account and data recovery of various types, also for clients nationwide.

9) Configured email security (server side) for some companies.

10) Servicing monthly contracts for server maintenance, firewall monitoring, and backups.

What do you need help with? One-time gigs requiring expertise you don’t have in-house, or ongoing monthly contracts, or...? I’m here for you.

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

BOLO – Be on the lookout for malicious phishing emails that closely resemble legitimate emails from Network Solutions.

I received an email today that, at first glance, I thought came from the real company. I knew it was fraudulent because the subject line warned of email deactivation – but I don’t use Network Solutions for my email. I thought, “Why are they sending me an email – how strange!” Then I looked again, and realized the domain contains a misspelling: networksoluTOINS. And the cybercriminals have a valid DKIM signature for their impersonating domain.

You might want to add the fake domain to your email filter.

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks +1 206-465-2422

#email #phishing

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

In terms of physical penetration testing (i.e., property and building access), a bright fluorescent safety vest and a hard hat will get you into a lot of places.

I’m doing cell site inspections this month under contract with a client. I’m carrying my Letter of Authorization with me, but I haven’t had to show it once. Three of the four sites I’ve visited were urban properties with people milling about.

At each property, after working for a few minutes I introduced myself, but I enjoyed doing the test to see if anyone would stop me and ask what I was doing there. And that Letter of Authorization? Even when I introduced myself, I never had to produce written proof. They took my word for it.

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

Microsoft can still surprise us. Yesterday a client scheduled for a remote support call at 9am today. The problem was that he was receiving error messages from Microsoft saying that his mailbox was almost full. At the appointed time I connected remotely to his computer, and watched while he pulled up the message. It was an email, rather than an in-app Outlook message, so the first thing I did was examine the header to make sure it was real (it was).

Here’s the surprise: Microsoft’s “mailbox full” messages come from an email account that has no DKIM signature and no DMARC policy! This is a classic first-blush clue that an email may be either malicious or spam.

Next, I looked at File – Options, and the in-app message was there, too, so it was indeed legitimate.

I enabled autoarchive, with message deletion from the mailbox after archiving, to fix the problem. BTW, I did this as a two-step process. First, I verified that archiving was working, and the location of the archive file. With that assurance, I enabled deletion from the mailbox.

So the issue was easy enough to fix – a simple configuration error – but, Microsoft, why are you using any email accounts with no DKIM signature and no DMARC policy? Set a good example for us!

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks

#TechSupport #HelpDesk #ServiceCall #Email

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

You finally get a seat at the table, literally. You become a senior manager, or a director, or a VP. Now, you’re in the conference room, sitting at that table with a group of your peers for some regular weekly meeting.

Something feels off. You recognize an invisible wall, a barrier. You know that there are things you don't know about the culture, the relationships, the "way things work," and how change can be made to happen.

Here's one of the two-sided secrets of power that some people are brought up knowing, but that many people only experience from one side.

As a leader, you should be comfortable with expecting obedience. I chose my word carefully: you should expect obedience, not cooperation.

Have you experienced this kind of leader? They have some aura that radiates outward. They don’t say, “If it’s alright with you,” they just kindly and politely tell you what they want done. They know you’re going to do it, and you know you’re going to do it. They don’t ask your permission or approval. They’re not mean or demanding. They just tell you what they expect you to do, and on your side, you know you’re going to do it.

Obedience is how things get done. Obedience is required.

Cooperation is how the doer feels about the doing. Cooperation is desired.

Now, back to the conference table and that weekly meeting. You'll be asked to report on what got done. You won't be asked how the doers felt about the doing.

Your inner power, your inner confidence, in that hour at the table, comes from all that happened in the preceding week. And what happened in the preceding week is the direct result of your expectation of obedience.

Yes, be humble.
Yes, be grateful.
Yes, show appreciation.
Yes, reward the achievers.
Yes, grow and develop your team.
These things evoke cooperation from the good hires.

But always - always! - expect obedience.

You're the leader. In another week, you're going to be back at the table, and the person you report to will want to know what got done.

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks

#leadership #management

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

Your Microsoft account password should never be the same as your email password. This is a Microsoft vulnerability that has been around for years.

BACKGROUND
This morning I received an email from a past client with a link to a document. We ended my last project on good terms, but they haven’t contacted me for a couple of years, so I was cautious (but not cautious enough, as you’re about to see). I looked up the contact’s email in my own Contacts and sent a new email to ask if the email with the link was legitimate. A minute later I received a reply, from the contact’s email address, saying “Yes, that was me, and it’s legitimate.”

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
With that assurance, I opened the original email and clicked on the link. It directed me to a page that looked like it was from Microsoft, and prompted me to enter my email address. I did. Then, in what looked like a real Microsoft account dialogue box, it prompted me for my Microsoft account password. I entered it. It told me the password was incorrect, and everything stopped. The hyperlink to “try another way” was non-responsive.

I opened a new tab in Edge and logged into my Microsoft account, proving to myself that I did in fact have the correct password.

I sent a new email to the contact: “It won’t let me in.” No response.

I called my contact and left a voicemail. He called back and said, “It wasn’t me, sorry, the same thing happened to me yesterday and it sent out emails from my account.”

I logged into my Microsoft account, checked the login session history (it was clean), and changed my account password.

THE LESSON
Do you see the problem now? My contact’s email is through his company’s Microsoft account. His Microsoft account password and his email password are one and the same. That’s why the cybercriminal was able to send emails to all his contacts. There was probably also a little social engineering involved, in order to bypass his Microsoft MFA, but reusing the same password for MS email and the MS account is a long-standing Microsoft vulnerability.

If you know a way to separate the MS email and account passwords, please let me know, because I have a lot of clients that I’d like to make more secure by fixing this.

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

Now is a really good time to think about what information your company should have connected to the Internet.

Yesterday was a better time. Last year was better still. But, now is a really good time.

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks

#DataClassification #InformationPolicy #PrivateNetworks #AI

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

Wi-Fi 7 is good – but not that good.

Over the weekend I replaced the wireless router for a small business in Washington State. It was an emergency replacement; they need it for several routine business functions. It turned out they didn’t have a spare. They took my advice and let me provide two routers, identically configured, so they can swap cables and get back online even when I’m not there.

The new routers I picked up were 802.11be, commonly referred to as Wi-Fi 7. The product literature says, “Leverage the power of WiFi 7 for speeds up to 3.6 Gbps at 1.2X faster than WiFi 6.”

Wait a minute. Hold up. Take a look at the ports on this thing: the WAN port is 2.5 Gbps, and the four LAN ports are 1 Gbps.

They’re not exactly lying, but you need to understand what’s going on, so you don’t have unrealistic expectations about Wi-Fi 7.

1) You can’t get Internet speeds higher than what’s provided by your ISP, and what your WAN port is capable of. Those are hard limits.

2) You can’t get wired LAN speeds higher than the ports and cabling on your wired devices are capable of. Those are hard limits.

3) On a wireless-to-wireless transfer, the physical port speeds don’t matter. BUT... that 3.6 Gbps number is only possible under laboratory conditions when two wireless endpoints are connected to each other on a single aggregated stream using all the radios: 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz. In a real-world home environment you’re more likely to measure 1, maybe 2, Gbps.

For a family of five, will Wi-Fi 7 perform better than Wi-Fi 6? It depends. Are you doing a lot of internal wireless data transfers, or is everyone constrained by the same 500 Mbps data rate from your ISP?

At your place of business, should you rip out twenty Wi-Fi 5 access points and spend the capital budget to upgrade the Wi-Fi 7 infrastructure? It depends. Let’s take a look at your data flows and usage patterns first to see if it could make a difference in your situation.

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

Here’s why the Wi-Fi coverage was inadequate in the Washington Hilton Hotel ballroom during the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) annual dinner on April 25, 2026.

It’s not because the Hilton is being cheap. It’s simply physics. In this post, my goal is to help people who aren’t RF engineers understand why high-density Wi-Fi is so hard to get right.

BACKGROUND
The dinner was interrupted during the salad course by loud noises, and the Secret Service rushed into action. The President and many other people were evacuated and the building was secured. I was watching a Breaking News segment on TV. The journalist who was covering the event for the TV station I was watching was using a Wi-Fi VoIP connection to talk to the newsroom, and it wasn’t working very well.

It’s easy to say, “Wow, the Hilton should have better Wi-Fi in such an important ballroom,” but it’s not that simple.

WI-FI IS HALF-DUPLEX
Refer to the picture. The IEEE 802.11standard, more commonly called Wi-Fi, uses half-duplex communications. It’s bi-directional, but only works in one direction at a time. When the smartphone is transmitting, the Access Point (AP) is receiving, and vice versa.

The reporter I was listening to estimated that there were 1,500 people in attendance. This number may be low; the WHCA official report on the 2025 dinner lists 2,600 people in attendance, in the same ballroom. Television coverage inside the venue showed several guests using their phones to video record the scene. No doubt some of them were live-streaming, or at least attempting to.

In a modern football stadium (another high-density Wi-Fi environment), wireless APs are located under a seat or on a seat back, operate at low-power, and serve a small cluster of nearby seats. In a hotel ballroom this type of fixed arrangement is harder to do. We might imagine a low-power AP under every table (that would be wonderful!), but the tables aren’t permanent and it isn’t practical. Instead, the ballroom has APs with directional antennas mounted at various points on the walls and/or ceiling.

CONCLUSION
When the AP is receiving, and several phones transmit simultaneously, the AP gets interference and decodes very little. The 802.11 (Wi-Fi) standard isn’t designed to accommodate that scenario. The solution is to plan many low-power APs, each serving a very small area. This is difficult to do in an environment with moveable furniture for hosting different types of events.

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks +1 206-465-2422

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP

Recently I was given the contract to evaluate the Wi-Fi system in a huge, gargantuan building. Hundreds of feet in each direction, one big open space, thirty-foot ceiling. The existing system wasn’t working well, and my job was to make recommendations for improvement, or design the replacement system.

On the day of the initial site survey, I discovered that the wireless access points were mounted on the ceiling, pointing down. Not good! That will work fine in an office with a ten-foot ceiling. But not thirty feet.

This meant that the absolute best Wi-Fi service in the building was in the top half of the space, where there were no people, no computers, no smartphones, no IoT devices. Their system provided good coverage to randomly moving air molecules between fifteen and thirty feet above the floor.

Between three feet and six feet above the floor, where coverage really matters, there was massive interference caused by clear line-of-site to multiple wireless access points.

The situation reminded me of a conversation I had with another client some time ago.
Client: “How much will it cost?”
Me: “Do you mean for my analysis and design, or to fix the problem? Because the price of my services will be tiny compared to what it will cost you to implement the fix.”

#CallMeIfYouNeedMe #FIFONetworks

Cybersecurity - Networks - Wireless – Telecom – VoIP