Cisco Delivers New Enterprise Wireless Opportunities with Wi-Fi 6 Solutions
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.
About the Author
Becky Nagel is the vice president of Web & Digital Strategy for 1105's Converge360 Group, where she oversees the front-end Web team and deals with all aspects of digital projects at the company, including launching and running the group's popular virtual summit and Coffee talk series . She an experienced tech journalist (20 years), and before her current position, was the editorial director of the group's sites. A few years ago she gave a talk at a leading technical publishers conference about how changes in Web browser technology would impact online advertising for publishers. Follow her on twitter @beckynagel.