I found my self transported back to Field Days gone by when Cisco started their presentation at Mobility Field Day 12. They dug right in talking about access points and under-the-hood technology and the whizzybangy that is Wi-Fi 7. This was nice… I expected to be hit hard with the now-normalized AI Hype-apalooza that has become almost every vendor’s lead in the mobile space. What Cisco showed off in their Wi-Fi 7 AP offerings was impressive indeed:
As I digested the specs and the various technologies inside these APs (you HAVE to watch the recorded session, there’s just so much here), I found myself thinking damn, I can see why these things are getting so expensive, and the new APs here might actually justify their hefty list prices. Those list prices will likely be in the $2,500 -$3,000 range- and yes, that is per unit. But volume discounts, blah blah blah. My point being that I was impressed by the new models.
The latest models have the the smarts to be Meraki cloud-managed, or to go find a 9800 WLC and be old-school thin APs (that is soooooo yesterday to me, but I get that a lot of networks are still living there). The hardware is impressive. What it can do is also impressive. But as frequently happens, I felt tension building in my brainpan as the excellent Cisco reps regaled us with Wi-Fi 7 knowledge and topics like Ultra Wideband (UWB) and super-duper Ultra Reliable Wireless Backhaul (URWB) . Couple all of that with glimpses of what’s going on with the Meraki and Cisco business units combining, and questions took root in my head. But there was no way to get out all my ruminations during the MFD12 time allotted. So… here it all is for you to ponder along with me.
- What about the low end?
These APs are obviously Cadillacs. They came to play, and are dressed to impress. But what happens at the other end of the product line? Cisco and Meraki are combined now on the data sheets, which still seems a bit weird. I have sites that don’t need half of what these new APs offer with their many technologies onboard… will I still be able to order modest, cost-conscious APs from the MR line, or will the Meraki stuff be displaced by high-end models? - Licensing
I have a long history as both a Cisco and Meraki customer, so I have a real-world frame of reference on this. topic. Meraki licensing has always been rather simple. Cisco’s licensing has always been a convoluted and frequently-changing Mongolian clusterfork. (I have sat in a room where Cisco reps stopped presenting to me and started bickering amongst themselves over what licenses and bundles were needed for various features, and they never quite agreed after a half-hour of sparring- which makes perfect sense for this wacked-out paradigm).So it goes under the Cisco sun. Smart licensing has long been the punchline to a very unfunny joke at the customer’s expense, regardless of which blue-suit guy tries to pass it off as INNOVATION. So where does licensing shake out to use all of the cool things these APs are capable of? I have to imagine it’ll stay interesting on the controller-based side. But will the famous Cisco licensing lunacy find it’s way to the Meraki dashboard? (Please, God- no.) I guess we’ll see in time.
- How Messy, Bessie?
The Meraki dashboard has always been pretty clean, and in my esteem quite effective. Systems like DNAC and Prime Infrastructure have always struck me as quite the opposite. Like somehow being overwhelmed with visual bloat and features you never use are equated to value because the trend is just to get more and more complicated over time. The same basic question applies here as with licensing- will the Cisco-side trend for hyper-complexity in the UI find it’s way to the Meraki dashboard either in general or to take advantage of multi-technology features from the new Cisco APs? Or will the dashboard stay clear of endless footnotes and things that most of us could give two figs about? - UWB, huh?
I found the UWB presentation to be fascinating, as I am well familiar with the basics of the technology but somehow didn’t realize how far it had come for tracking and location stuff. I’ve also not heard any other vendor mention using it in their APs. BLE seems to be the default in this direction, but UWB is fascinating. I have much to read on this, including what the additional radio technology does to PoE requirements on the various AP models. - URWB, huh?
It’s ool to see this application being brought into the new APs instead of needing stand-alone models that do URWB. But is there enough use to warrant making it something you have to pay for at the development level when you buy one of the new APs if you don’t use URWB? How nichey is URWB in the grand scheme? I understand it’s use cases in manufacturing and such, but am curious how that is quantified against the overall WLAN landscape. I’m throwing no dirt here, just showing my ignorance and declaring an area where I need to learn more about it.
I thoroughly enjoyed Cisco at Mobility Field Day 12. It was informative, educational, and fairly unpretentious. That’s refreshing among the tidal wave of AI-oriented marketing that is the current trend when vendors start talking.