Cisco Delivers New Enterprise Wireless Opportunities with Wi-Fi 6 Solutions

• By Becky Nagel
• 04/30/2019

This week Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled a line of offerings that will help enterprises successfully engage with the new "Wi-Fi 6" wireless technology (aka 802.11ax or "high-efficiency wireless").

"Every leap in connectivity enables the next wave of profound innovation. 5G and Wi-Fi 6 represent a new era of connectivity," said David Goeckeler, EVP and general manager, Networking and Security Business at Cisco, in a prepared statement.

Some of the products and features that Cisco announced for Wi-Fi 6 include:

• Catalyst 9600 Series switches: "The future of campus core" and "purpose-built for cloud-scale networking," these switches are designed for enterprise campus use with full IPv6 and Wi-Fi 6 support, for always-on use cases, running Cisco IOS XE.
• Access Points for Wi-Fi 6: Cisco's Catalyst and Meraki access points are being updated to support Wi-Fi 6 and offer programmable chipsets. The access points are also multilingual, "with the ability to communicate with multiple IoT protocols, including BLE, Zigbee, and Thread."
• Cisco OpenRoaming Project: A joint partnership with other manufacturers like Samsung, Broadcom and Intel to make sure any wireless pain-point issues are addressed and solved on an industry level.

Cisco says that companies can expect big things from Wi-Fi 6. "Beyond being significantly faster than the previous generation, Wi-Fi 6 delivers up to 400 percent greater capacity and is more effective in high-density settings like large lecture halls, stadiums and conference rooms," the company stated in its announcement of the new product line. "Latency is vastly improved, allowing for near-real-time use cases."

802.11ax was created in 2013 and is expected to launch later this year. More information on the standard can be found on the project's Web site.

The Meraki and Catalyst access points and Catalyst 9600 switches are available to order today, according to the announcement.