Cisco has announced an end-to-end wireless-first infrastructure based on WiFi 6 (also known as 802.11ax) and a campus core switch purpose-built for cloud-scale networking.
Beyond being significantly faster than the previous generation, WiFi 6 delivers up to 400% greater capacity and is more effective in high-density settings like large lecture halls, stadiums and conference rooms. Latency is vastly improved, allowing for near real-time use cases. WiFi 6 is also easier on connected devices’ batteries and provides an overall more predictable user experience.
Cisco is rolling out several products and partnerships so that businesses can deliver a genuinely unplugged and uninterrupted experience.
* WiFi 6 Access Points: New access points across the Catalyst and Meraki portfolios go beyond providing the new Wi-Fi 6 standard. With custom, programmable chipsets and access to industry-leading analytics capabilities, Cisco’s latest APs deliver a smarter and more secure wireless network. The new access points are also multilingual, with the ability to communicate with multiple IoT protocols, including BLE, Zigbee, and Thread.
* Core Switch for the Campus Network: Cisco raises the bar with the Catalyst 9600 core switch family, which will serve as the foundation central to any network’s successful operation. To deliver the most secure and efficient wireless experience, organizations need a single networking fabric that brings wired and wireless together. Built as the next evolution of the Catalyst 6000 — the most successful networking product in the history of the internet — the Catalyst 9600 will be the bedrock for the next generation of intent-based business networks.
* New Developer Resources: Wi-Fi 6 and 5G represent an incredible opportunity for developers. To enable them to create the immersive experiences that these new levels of connectivity promise, Cisco DevNet is unveiling a new wireless developer center. DevNet, Cisco’s developer network, offers the learning labs, sandboxes and developer resources needed to create game-changing wireless applications. The Cisco Catalyst and Meraki access platforms are open and programmable all the way down to the chipset level, allowing applications to take advantage of network programmability in new ways.
* New Ecosystem Partnerships: Prior to the launch of its Wi-Fi 6 access points, Cisco completed interoperability testing with Broadcom, Intel and Samsung to address the inevitable gaps that come with a new standard. Samsung, Boingo, GlobalReach, Presidio and others are expected to join the Cisco OpenRoaming project to solve one of today’s biggest wireless pain points. The Cisco OpenRoaming project aims to make it easier to seamlessly and securely hop between Wi-Fi and LTE networks and onboard public WiFi.
“Every leap in connectivity enables the next wave of profound innovation. 5G and Wi-Fi 6 represent a new era of connectivity,” says David Goeckeler, executive vice-president and GM: networking and security business at Cisco. “Developers are already creating the next generation of wireless-first, immersive experiences. With billions of things connecting to the network, this growth will create unprecedented complexity for IT. Cisco is building a multi-domain network architecture to simplify complexity for IT, allowing CIOs to deliver against their innovation agenda.”