There it is. It’s just another marketing slide in the grand scheme, yet it kinda spun my mind out. Why? Let’s just explore WHY, shall we?
There is a LOT under the hood
All of the Mobility Field Day 12 videos are here, by the way. Watch them. They are worth watching for a number of reasons. But back to that one slide… As I watched the Cisco presentation being made, this introduction to their latest APs hit me like a big ol’ wave washing up hard against the rocks of my enormous cranium. You got your ACCESS radios (This is an ACCESS POINT after all), you got your AI/ML SCANNING radio, you got your 802.15.4 IoT radio, and you got GPS. But wait- there’s more! Whatever “CONTAINER HOSTING” amounts to in this context, you got that, too. And Ultra Wideband. And a couple of 10 Gig Ethernet ports.
Shazam.
Back in the day, an access point was a simple bridge betwixt 802.3 and 802.11. How very far we’ve come. And that’s where the internal tension for me, as a WLAN professional of a certain vintage, started as I tried to process it all.
What if I don’t need or want it all?
I sincerely applaud Cisco wireless product managers for what they are packing these days, alongside with Wi-Fi 7. As a technologist, I can’t help but get all aflutter over that rich feature set shown on the slide. But there are many voices in my head, and the realists and cynics in that group get their say, too.
What if I just want simple client access? And maybe some spectrum health mojo? I have to buy all the other stuff, I would imagine… or is it all licensed separately? But I still gotta buy the whole hardware platter just to get the specific enchiladas I want, yes?
And let us not forget that we’ve got many, many years doing “old” Cisco wireless on WLCs… Cisco isn’t exactly shy about making sure their customers get plenty of bugs on occasion as they play Code Roulette. All those AP features gotta equal more bug opportunities, no?
License, license, license… (This was a chorus of lunatics, kinda chanting like something out of a Pink Floyd song.)
OK- shut up , you voices.
Will it all fit in a single glass of pain?
Again, I have been a looooong time Cisco WLAN customer, back before LWAPP, CAPWAP, give a dog a bone became fashionable. I watched Aironet APs become AireOS APs after Cisco bought their way into lightweightedness, and then feared for the worst when they also bought my beloved cloud networking company. I’ve watched WLSE become WCS and then that become Prime Infrastructure on the management side, and have often marveled at Cisco’s ability to both increase costs from one management platform to another while also bloating it up with stuff I don’t need, want, or trust. (I speak for me and me only here, if you like PI and Spaces and DNAC, etc- more power to ya).
So I can’t help but wonder how all of this feature goodness gets effectively managed as it gets bigger in scope. I have no doubt that Cisco has a good answer to that, but we just didn’t get there in the allotted time at MFD12. Maybe for current Cisco wireless customers, it’s already all known. I admit my ruminations on the topic come from a place of ignorance, as I capped my Cisco WLAN journey at the 8540s and opted not to press on with 9800s, DNAC, etc. (I remain a Meraki branch customer and cannot speak highly enough about that. And yes, I still fear that Cisco will somehow take Meraki down an unpleasant path even a dozen years after the acquisition.)
Wouldn’t it be nice if standards were like… standard?
Ever buy a Mist AP and connect that to a Ubiquiti switch? Someone has… and it worked. And so did the Aruba switch connected to the Extreme router. And the Extreme switch connected to a Fortinet firewall. On the wired side of networking life, you can get away with all sorts of inter-vendor connectivity stuff. Ethernet is Ethernet, routing is routing, blah blah blah. I remember when Cisco’s LWAPP morphed into standard CAPWAP and naively thinking “woo, woo. Now it gets interesting. This new standard is gonna let me put Vendor A access points on vendor B’s controllers if I want because STANDARD.” Then my dad came in the room and told me the truth about the Easter Bunny and wireless “standards”.
So let’s say I’m not a Cisco wireless customer. But I watch the MFD12 videos and I get all fuzzy about wanting in on that weapons-grade feature goodness. It’s not like I can just get an AP and plug it into my existing system. The WLAN industry is built on vendor-lock and hyper-proprietary business models and architectures (no slight intended to those freedom fighters in the OpenWiFi trenches). Which means… as cool as those new Cisco APs are, your choices are to switch vendors to use them or to admire them from afar. That’s just the WLAN world we live in.
For me, even though I won’t be buying those new APs (unless one of them finds it’s way into my Meraki branches, but then I have no idea if I get all the features), I can honestly say that I was blown away by that slide.