Here's a long (9 minutes) but extremely informative video on Hotspot 2.0 from David Stephenson, a principal engineer at Ruckus and currently the Chair of the Wi-Fi Alliance Hotspot 2.0 Technical Task Group.
Dave explains how Hotpot 2.0 works, who's working on it, what they are doing, it's value and what to expect going forward.
Take a watch.
Samsung launched the new Galaxy S 4 with great fanfare, but the greatest thing about that device is buried rather deep in the user's guide. It is the world's first smartphone to ship with Passpoint enabled!
Passpoint is the Wi-Fi Alliance's designation for devices and network equipment that support the Hotspot 2.0 standard. There is almost no amount of hype that goes far enough when talking about the impact that Hotspot 2.0 will have on the wireless world. Seriously.
Hotspot 2.0 has been a work in process by the Wi-Fi community for better than half a decade. The goal being to make the process of Wi-Fi roaming as easy to use and secure as with cellular. It's not an easy proposition, but that standard was finally completed in June of last year, and network equipment with the Passpoint certification began to ship in the fall. Then came the wait for smartphones vendors to start shipping Passpoint certified devices. Now that wait is finally over!
With Samsung starting to ship Passpoint on the Galaxy S 4, we can expect the other major smartphone vendors to follow suit in short order. Users will now be able to enjoy all the benefits of Hotspot 2.0 technology, and it's a long list.
What makes Passpoint such a big deal is that it heralds in a new era where users no longer have to think about SSIDs or authentication or fumble around with passwords. Instead they just get connected. Just as in the cellular world, all the complexity of roaming and getting connected will be hidden from the user. That's a network and device problem, and not a user problem.
All users care about is an always best-connected wireless experience. And Wi-Fi roaming can go far beyond the cellular experience. You don't need to leave the country or even leave town to enjoy the wonders of roaming.
A user can roam at a local coffee shop, at a football stadium across town, or an airport on the other side of the world. Roaming partners can include mobile operators, cable operators, wireline operators, large and small enterprises, large and small public venues, consumer brands, and the list goes on. Roaming is simply the magic behind the curtain that makes everything happen.
Think about a huge web of millions of Wi-Fi access points owned by tens of thousands of different entities, all of which can be accessed by the user courtesy of a web of behind the scenes roaming agreements.
And not only does it make the user's life a lot easier, it solves the network densification problem for mobile operators. With the arrival of Hotspot 2.0, Wi-Fi will begin to so weave itself into the fabric of the mobile experience that it will start to disappear from view.
Hotspot 2.0's magic doesn't end with seamless roaming, the technology also provides an encrypted airlink.
Now when a user sits down in a coffee shop or airport they don't need to worry about the security of their over-the-air communications. This is a problem that plagues a lot of public hotspots.
Congratulations to Samsung for being the first vendor to ship Passpoint capable devices, and now the entire wireless user community worldwide can begin to enjoy an entirely new and even more compelling user experience.
Carriers are excited by the prospect of Hotspot 2.0 (HS2.0) not least because it takes many of today’s manual Wi-Fi tasks, like authentication, and automates them; it lets users roam without hassle and network operators to focus on more important things than simple administration.
It achieves this through a truly revolutionary overhaul of the Wi-Fi connection procedure. Using the new IEEE 802.11u protocols, HS2.0 allows the Wi-Fi client and infrastructure to have a pre-association "conversation" about the capabilities and AAA interconnects of a particular Wi-Fi network. The client then makes an automatic decision about whether or not to connect to this Wi-Fi network, or to another that might be in range.
The shared vision for HS2.0 is for the Wi-Fi user experience to replicate the cellular phone experience through secure connections, automated, and conforming to user and operator policy. The development has considerable multi-industry muscle behind it from the Wi-Fi Alliance (WFA) for certification under the Passpoint™ programme and organisations such as the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) for interoperability.
Hotspot 2.0 makes possible links to a huge network of effectively random Wi-Fi access points through a web of interconnections, so that users can enjoy a seamless experience as they move between Wi-Fi networks from almost any location. It achieves this through a revolutionary overhaul of the Wi-Fi connection procedure, automating the manual configuration and decision-making process, as well as effectively automating security through the implementation of advanced WPA-2 airlink securing and client isolation. HS2.0 eliminates the hassle of users fiddling with their devices in order to associate to the hotspot. No more ‘SSID surfing’ or having to ask the barista for the Wi-Fi passphrase.
While HS2.0 has been developed and promoted predominately by carriers and equipment suppliers, it will have its greatest impact and appeal within the enterprise. That’s what will make it a game-changer.
HS2.0 will be about much more than the technology enablement of a better mobile user experience – it will shift relationships between carriers and building owners; those who want to provide the uninterrupted service as part of their continued strategy to deliver better subscriber experiences, and those who own the locations essential for providing the continuity of service. This commercial/cultural shift, combined with an important leap forward technologically is going to give HS2.0 its place in the Wi-Fi hall of fame.
Whose Line is it Anyway?
Two principle parties are interested in the provision of Wi-Fi services: the owner of the venue or building, and the service provider. Now their interests are coinciding. The balance of power is shifting; the ‘power’ being the ability to offer robust Wi-Fi connectivity with no signal drop-off.
The widespread and growing use of Wi-Fi across public venues such as hotels, schools, shopping centres, retail outlets, public transport, sports venues – in fact, anywhere where people gather and expect to use their mobile devices without encountering any problems – is both a responsibility and an opportunity for venue owners, and for the enterprise. These are usually the owners of the network infrastructure. Since operators want the Wi-Fi network access, the real opportunity will emerge for any enterprise or venue owner to wholesale their existing wireless LAN capacity to operators; charging them recurring fees for that access.
Mobile service providers want to automatically connect their subscribers to their own ‘branded broadband’ service through the venue’s available high-speed Wi-Fi network, and it’s this connection that HS2.0 will make possible; giving the Wi-Fi network an interconnection with subscribers’ ‘home’ service providers so the devices just carry on functioning in the way we all expect in the 21st century. These back-end connections might be direct, but more likely will be indirectly provided through third-party hubbing services.
Hotspot 2.0 at Work in the Enterprise
A single SSID will advertise automatic authentication to a large number of “home” service providers. The Access Network Query Protocol (ANQP) then lets the devices know which providers have roaming arrangements with the venue. Some providers will be included in the ANQP advertisements from the AP, while the mobile device may request the complete list. Providers may be listed using any or all of the following identifiers:
An essential element in the roaming process, the HLR (home location register) is the database within a GSM network that stores all the subscriber data. If the home provider is a fixed operator, the request could be cleared through their RADIUS infrastructure and subscriber management system. AAA accounting records can also be provided from the local WLAN to the home provider AAA server for billing purposes.
Enterprise WLANs involve large capital and operational expenses and HS2.0 offers the chance both to gain a return on the investment and to secure an on-going revenue stream. The WLAN will become a profit centre. As it does, enterprises will need to build out their wireless LAN networks – driving new requirements for higher capacity and more industrial strength equipment. Where it gets really interesting is when Google, Facebook and Amazon.com come into the picture as home provider, using HS2.0 to authenticate users anywhere against their own databases.
Most expect HS2.0 to go live around late 2013 and early 2014. Once it hits, full monty, enterprise Wi-Fi will never be the same again.
One of the hottest areas of interest for the mobile industry at this year's Mobile World Congress isthe integration of Wi-Fi access points and LTE small cell radios into a single box.
Integrating these different radio access technologies into a single platform or node provides big value, such as greater densification and a broader set of services then either technology could provide on its own.
Yet obvious concerns remain:
While mobile operators are rushing Wi-Fi to address their capacity needs in very high-density (primarily) indoor locations, small cells are also viewed as a good way to boost cellular densification in high traffic outdoors areas. But is it really that black and white?
Deploying a multi-RAN access points outdoors is typically much more challenging than deploying Wi-Fi indoors. Why? Because power and backhaul (fiber, microwave or spectrum) is scarce, costly and cumbersome to provision - needlessly stretching out deployment schedules. And in both cases, there is a
requirement to get permission to install equipment from the entity that controls the site.
Some of the very best places to mount small cells are on street furniture, specifically traffic lights and light poles (see picture below). These are highly desirable locations because they are almost everywhere and come with AC power. However, they almost never have Ethernet or some fiber connection for backhauling traffic.
This introduces the potential for Wi-Fi APs to backhaul small cell traffic to a "wired" aggression point in close proximity. That addresses the first challenge with many outdoor small cell deployments, but certainly not the last.
The entity that controls access to street furniture (usually a city) often has very specific conditions that must be met for site acquisition:
This suggests an approach that allows the mobile operator to lead with a Wi-Fi on the street furniture, as it is just easier to get that approved by the various municipalities that control access to these poles, and then add small cells where and when needed to further increase cellular densification.
Another even more intriguing options is to have a 3rd party deploy the Wi-Fi APs and then lease space on the back of these APs to different mobile operators - effectively segregating and wholesaling wireless capacity. Small cells have much greater range than Wi-Fi APs, and could thus support an interleaving of small cell services from different MNOs on the same Wi-Fi footprint.
Most mobile operators are moving to a model that gives them the most flexibility such as deploying devices that provide mechanical separation of the Wi-Fi APs and small cells. This ensures "flexible deployment options" as these units can effectively evolve at their own pace. And as faster 802.11ac radios emerge, they can be easily integrated into a multi-RAN node with virtually no impact to the small cell. And the converse is true. As small cells are enhanced they don't impact the Wi-Fi AP. It also makes it very easy for a 3rd party to deploy the Wi-Fi footprint and lease space on the back of these AP's to different MNOs that might use small cells from different RAN vendors. The small cell bolts onto the back of the Wi-Fi AP and gets power and backhaul from the unit. The Ruckus SmartCell 8800 (above) is just one example of this new category of the multi-access RAN nodes.
Ultimately the convergence of Wi-Fi and small cells is a very compelling idea with lots of industry momentum, but it is probably best if Wi-Fi leads in this dance.
But when he rears his ugly nose into our business we get, well....all up IN it.
Sometimes things can get a little complex, technical and confusing. We're big on simplifying things and being brutally honest about technlogy and it's real value - whether it's ours or not. So here goes.
Cisco's new whitepaper "All_Beamforming Solutions are not Equal" is at best misleading and at worst mythology.
In this paper, Cisco effectively got two things right:
1) they spelled the word "beamforming" properly and
2) they used the appropriate Cisco corporate logo.
FUDDING UP
Cisco is clearly going out of their way to give the impression that Ruckus-patented BeamFlex and digital signal processing (DSP)-based beamforming (often called chip-based transmit beamforming or TxBF) techniques are categorically similar. This is patentedly false.
BeamFlex and TxBF are radically different in function, benefit, and usefulness. What’s more important is that product vendors with only DSP-based TxBF would like to suggest that adaptive antenna switching somehow prevents supporting chip-based TxBF as well.
Ruckus supports both. The benefits of BeamFlex sit on top of those brought by chip-based beamforming. The gain of these techniques is cumulative. Why pretend that customers must pick one or the other when they can get both?
For IT managers, administrators, and engineers alike, 802.11n’s MIMO techniques and all this other WI-Fi technical mumbo jumbo can be both complex and confusing – making vendor marketing (admittedly) an opaque fog. To that end here's some absoute truth (facts that are true for all people, at all times, in all places) that should help.
Customer have LOTS of choices and can be easily deceived by supplier marketing. Yet at the end of the day, customers just want the truth.
SAFETY TIP: If you want to avoide reading further, just download, read and memorize this document.
FOR THE TECHNICALLY MINDED
(you know who you are)
Cisco’s ClientLink uses a type of chip-based beamforming with implicit client feedback. In theory, implicit transmit beamforming (TxBF) such as ClientLink allows an AP to create multiple downlink beams that constructively add together at the client to improve the overall signal. To do this successfully, the AP relies on what it hears from the client (the “implicit” feedback, which is really no feedback at all) to determine how best to steer the beams.
Perhaps the actions of the IEEE’s 802.11 working group— removing implicit beamforming entirely—speak the loudest. For more evidence on this topic, researchers from leading universities readily acknowledge the problem of non-reciprocity and the faults in implicit beamforming.
For beamforming to work successfully, transmitted signals from the AP must constructively combine at the client’s antenna(s).
What happens if a client device has more than one antenna? In such a case, it is not possible for the AP to determine which client antenna(s) the AP heard from. Given that almost all notebooks and tablets as well as most mobile phones (even ones with a single Tx/Rx chain) have multiple antennas, ClientLink is becoming applicable to an ever-dwindling minority of clients— SISO devices without antenna diversity—such as the old iPhone4 with the well-documented “antennagate” problem.
Also, it's important to note that the throughputs in Cisco's plot are north of 200Mbps. This means that the client is at least a three-stream MIMO 802.11n client. But ClientLink can't work with multi-antenna clients because it needs the channel state information (CSI) between EACH antenna combination. And with multi-antenna clients it's simply NOT physically possible to get the per antenna CSI without client cooperation (and client cooperation requires standardization).
Finally, Cisco attempts to dismiss the gains of PD-MRC, but this is simply because their brand of beamforming can't support it. IEEE channel models measure PD-MRC gains in the 7-15 dB range for LOS conditions and in the 3-5 dB range for NLOS conditions.
Ultimately marketing is relatively simple. But building RF features that truly impact real clients in everyday networks isn't. End-users need to review third-party testing that includes both Cisco and Ruckus products. Better yet, test both products in your own environment, with your expected client devices and applications.
At the end of the day, the worst thing about being lied to is knowing you're not worth the truth.
All indications point to full speed ahead for service provider Wi-Fi deployments in 2013. While Wi-Fi has been around for quite sometime as a consumer and enterprise technology, it’s never garnered the kind of attention that it will this year.
The reason? Wi-Fi is seen as the most economical and capacity-rich technology to help carriers address the tremendous acceleration in mobile data traffic – particularly within high-density areas. Most geographies are seeing traffic growth of 50 to 100% year-on-year with no end in sight. It is easy to do the math here and see that this will easily overwhelm the existing mobile infrastructure, even with LTE deployments.
Why Wi-Fi? Why now?
Wi-Fi is rapidly emerging as a credible RAN (radio access network) technology that can be deployed alongside of 3G and LTE in a mobile network. Initial Wi-Fi deployments were all about offload and capacity injection. Now the future is much more about integration into the core. This enables the user to have an “always-best-connected” experience, regardless of location or radio access technology. Users won't need to know or care about Wi-Fi authentication or roaming—it will all be as automatic and secure as in the 3G/LTE world. These charts from Infonetics' 2012 carrier survey pretty much tell the Wi-Fi story.
That said, here are the pieces that are all coming together in 2013:
Make no mistake, Wi-Fi is slated to become the third major standard RAN technology in the mobile operator portfolio. And it looks to be the technology that will do most of the heavy lifting in the very high-density venues from where most of the traffic load is coming.
Wireless architectures are undergoing an identity crisis.
As Wi-Fi gains favor and usurps wired access, Wi-Fi capabilities are changing quickly, causing significant disparity in WLAN architectures and implementation models.
These shifts are causing customers and vendors to assess and reassess network management, monitoring, system control, and optimization of WLAN system that are compatible with yesterday’s devices, optimized for today’s devices, and ready for tomorrow’s devices.
In this state of flux, organizations of all shapes and sizes are asking similar architectural questions to find the best way(s) to deliver a wireless LAN:
The only clear answer today is “yes.”
Though many industry pundits and suppliers are focusing exclusively on a single delivery model, enterprises (each with unique business needs) don’t agree which model is best or that any one model is the ultimate panacea.
Clouding the Architectural Wireless LANscape
Cloud computing is beginning to
play a part in the Wi-Fi architecture debate, because—like many other segments
of computing—it offers highly scalable capabilities that are difficult or
expensive to deliver locally. The central business benefit to cloud networking
is that a business of any size can now have access to an enterprise-class
wireless solution that won’t overwhelm the IT staff or break the IT budget.
Clouds—whether private or public—are also enjoying favor in many business environments where distributed solutions are necessary (retail is a quintessential example). Cloud networks provide a graceful plug-n-play deployment model for remote sites and remote employees where IT staff resources are limited or non-existent. Because cloud management can be accessible from anywhere, distributed or centralized IT teams can easily manage and monitor distributed sites.
Distributed organizations see value in cloud Wi-Fi, but another major cloud formation is simplifying the deployment and management lifecycle by managed service providers (MSPs). If the cloud solution is optimized with MSPs in mind, it can make the business model much more effective, largely because of easy-to-access remote management, monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting.
An additional element of the cloud’s appeal is the perception of resiliency, redundancy, and stability—in a properly designed and implemented cloud infrastructure. All the cloud buzzwords (e.g. high availability, elastic, redundant, seamless failover) make businesses feel warm and cozy. After all, mission-critical Wi-Fi demands mission-critical reliability.
Two Types of Clouds
Today, two primary cloud models are being espoused: (1) customer-owned [private] and (2) supplier-hosted [public].
Private clouds are attractive because businesses own the liability of customer and employee data. They want to own, secure, and protect it themselves, and they don’t mind accepting the responsibility for implementing and supporting it, so they deliver a centralized datacenter model where services and management are accessed from remote sites via VPNs.
Many leading Wi-Fi suppliers today are encouraging this model by offering a high-capacity centralized WLAN controller that supports “remote” or “flex” AP models. Private clouds are attractive for many large enterprises that already have significant datacenter investments, but they can lack some of the scale, resiliency, and cost advantages of public cloud options.
Yet the term “cloud” generally refers to public clouds, which provide all the benefits of releasing control, an attractive gain for smaller businesses. Someone else designs and runs the datacenter, accepts the complexity, secures the information (hopefully), provides high capacity/redundancy, and pays the power bill. The business buys APs, signs up for a service, configures them through a simple and sexy web interface and can remotely monitor and manage the WLAN from anywhere. This changes the traditional WLAN model. The wireless LAN becomes a service and can be effectively accounted in such a manner.
Distributed organizations are drawn to public cloud options, but despite solving the centralized management and monitoring needs, public clouds don’t solve the need for a centralized datacenter within the organization. Remote sites often need access to centralized resources via VPN, but a public cloud leaves this need unmet, minimizing the advantages of the public cloud.
When It Rains, It Pours
Despite their billowy appeal, cloud is not the be-all, end-all solution for Wi-Fi – not by a long shot. Some businesses balk at the privacy and control aspects of hosted solutions (what exactly are you doing with my information?), while others simply don’t buy the pricing ownership model—the perception is that cloud is akin to a rental model with less control and higher costs over time. The pricing reality depends, in part, on the expected lifespan of local alternatives (controllers or other management solutions). If the product lifespan of local appliances is expected to be long, customers may see more value in a “buy once, own forever” approach.
For others, the ownership hesitation comes back to a more traditional philosophy related to in-house expertise, where network staff wants to see, touch, and visibly troubleshoot their network with immediate, tangible responses to problems and outages.
Second, cloud Wi-Fi
architectures either decentralize controller functions (controllerless) or they
move the controller into the cloud. In some environments, this can be a plus
because it removes controller hardware at each site—useful in some distributed
networks. However, the same “no hardware controller” solutions must then find
alternate ways to provide centralized services at each site, when desired.
In a somewhat self-defeating twist, some other local component is necessary to fill in the gap for specific features. This component is often called a gateway, concentrator or some tunnel termination device that provides scalable, centralized data tunneling, which is useful for a number of reasons (avoid LAN redesign for wireless VLANs, securely tunnel guest traffic, provide VPN termination, etc.). Some cloud Wi-Fi solutions also require a per-site appliance for centralized control functions, like roaming across subnet boundaries.
“Controllers” have traditionally been designed for central data tunneling, but new trends are focusing on distributed data planes (data breakout from the AP) while keeping the controller for management and “control” plane functions such as radio frequency (RF) resource management (channel and power settings), AP configuration settings, authentication services (802.1X or captive web portals), layer-3 roaming, and more.
For most customers, how and where system control is performed (distributed, centralized, or cloud) doesn’t really matter. What’s most important is how well system control works. Consequently, when customers weigh various feature capabilities, the “how” argument often becomes philosophical. Moreover, enterprises want choices, flexibility, and most importantly, they want meaningful solutions for their business. Cloud or no cloud, architectural boundaries are becoming less clear.
Finally, a public cloud controller/management solution offers the reliability and redundancy benefits of cloud architectures. But architectural reliability is only one piece of overall wireless service availability. The potential benefits of cloud resiliency may be outweighed by alternative solutions that provide much better wireless stability via better radio design, adaptive RF features, antenna optimizations, interference avoidance, and the like.
Wi-Fi will always have its foundation at the radio level. Customers often understand the challenges of consistent, reliable delivery of wireless applications in high-interference or high-density environments. When customers must choose, the fundamental requirement for good wireless connections often plays a premium above the cloud’s sex appeal. In part, this is why we’ve seen some companies dwelling on the wireless component of wireless LAN equipment, optimizing features that improve capacity, reliability, and range—as well as adaptive features or RF visibility solutions. Ultimately, customer testing proves out the RF capabilities and customer priorities will always guide the decision.
Clearing Things Up
Obviously, customers want the best of all worlds: intuitive management, excellent data analytics, easy implementation, and adaptive, reliable radio performance. What many fail to understand is that Wi-Fi reliability and performance will never be helped by anything that cloud computing offers.
Organizations must look for suppliers that offer a full range of architectural alternatives from controller-based to standalone APs, private cloud controllers to public cloud services. Despite what works best for a given organization, one fact remains clear: wireless reliability and performance must underpin any architectural choice. Without it, you’re left with an easy to manage Wi-Fi network that nobody uses.
Cisco has made another
bold move by announcing its intent to purchase Meraki for $1.2B. Yes, that’s
billion with a “B.”
The hefty price tag represents 20x Meraki’s estimated annual run rate (which IDC estimated in their most recent WLAN report to be approximately $15M / quarter). This compares to valuations of ~4x revenue among the most successful wireless LAN companies (Ruckus included) that are already profitable, debt free and market leaders within their respective segments.
Why the Big Price Tag?
Pundits posit that Cisco has been after Meraki for years and may have been influenced by missing out on aquiring Nicera that was grabbed by VMWare earlier this year for $1.26 billion.
But let’s be clear, Cisco isn’t buying Meraki for its Wi-Fi. It’s buying them for their system management software. The “cloud” glow around Meraki adds a kicker to the valuation, for sure. The fact that Meraki targets the SMB market where Cisco has struggled adds another justification to the hefty price tag.
Cisco’s infrastructure solutions, including their wired, wireless and security products, are notoriously complex. A exclusive club of Cisco certified engineers called CCIEs have benefitted from the full employment act as a result. However the complexity has hampered Cisco’s success in the SME/SMB market where customers can’t afford in-house CCIEs.
Cisco is also in need of a new hot gig. Growth of its core revenue drivers – routers and switches – has been trending down. And new endeavors via organic or acquired means in the consumer, video and server markets haven’t produced the next golden egg. “Cloud” is hot and has the potential of delivering a long term recurring revenue stream.
Meraki is a software engineering company and a first mover into cloud-based networking targeting the SMB market. It has the ingredients that Cisco needs to:
Is Meraki Cloudifying or Clarifying Cisco’s Vision?
To achieve its goals for the $1.2B acquisition, Cisco needs a clear integration strategy for Meraki, which Cisco largely glossed over in its announcement. So, questions remain:
What’s It All Mean?
In the short term it means one less player in the wireless LAN space. Customers and resellers will have to wait, as they always do, as the two companies sort things out. Meanwhile enterprises have real Wi-Fi capacity problems to combat and need help now.
There’s little question that enterprises will be reluctant to purchase any more Meraki products when Cisco’s Wi-Fi APs perform better (but don't believe us, believe this) not to mention the risk that Meraki’s hardware may become obsolete.
Until there is a clear product rationalization plan, Meraki’s channel partners will be left hanging. Those channel partners that had selected Meraki as a Cisco alternative in the first place will certainly be looking to replace Meraki.
Private Wi-Fi companies like Aerohive may get caught in the wake too as they may be the next WLAN player to be gobbled up by Cisco’s competitors. Channel partners wearied of mergers and acquisitions will think twice before they invest.
Longer term the Cisco/Meraki deal means that the cloud will play an important role in the management of network infrastructures.
Despite what people might think, at Ruckus we’re big believers in the cloud and are innovating in this space. Moreover we’re even bigger believers in choice.
Ultimately, different customers have different preferences driven by TCO, budget cycles, security, WAN condition and the need for control. Some will want cloud management and some will want on-premise solutions.
But one thing is for certain: everyone wants reliable and pervasive Wi-Fi performance to deal with the onslaught of users, devices, media-rich communications, and interference that’s threatening to cripple enterprise and service provider networks alike. And that's what Ruckus is all about.
The forecast calls for low pressure to develop over the WLAN industry causing an accumulation of clouds with a strong chance of showers and thunderstorms before it all clears up. Strap yourself in.
