Wireless Access

The SDN movement today is all about controller-based networking.  I can't help but wonder if wireless got ahead of this game a while back.  Wireless companies saw the need to have visibility across the entire environment for control and management.  After a generation, most wireless companies figured out that having a bottleneck in the middle of the network really impacted performance.  Now, you see most vendors (Aruba included) using products like Aruba Instant for distributed forwarding and centralized management.  Which is where I believe SDN will eventually end up once they figure out the lessons that wireless has already learned.

What do you think?  Are there parallels with SDN?  If you had to give advice to the networking folks, what would you say?

interesting thought. though my knowledge of software-defined networking is limited, i see parallels, but also differences.

that bottleneck you mention, i sooner see them build better controllers with more power to overcome the issues. sure solutions like instant have there advantages, but will they become the dominant solution, doubt it. also typical to see how back in the days there was a similar trend with the fat APs without controler, which then got replaced with the control based wireless network.