It is now March. It actually hailed here in Huntington Beach, but we’ll call it snow for the novelty. It’s always neat to see things like this happen here in Southern California mainly because things like snow rarely seems to happen. We freak out on rainbows. Get the picture?

Well to keep things sane here locally, I asked my brethren Wireless Product Manager, Nasser Tarazi to take a few minutes to talk about his new Cisco WAP131.

Here’s a few nuggets about the new WAP131:

The new WAP131

• The WAP131 supports concurrent dual band radios for improved coverage and performance
• Designed for Desktop/tabletop deployment
• It can be powered by a PoE Switch using the WAP131’s PoE ethernet port, meaning less cabling demands for deployment
• Works out of the box
• Quick and easy deployment
• Free feature upgrades
• Limited Lifetime Warranty
• A good product to replace the popular WAP4410N

Simply put, this new wireless access point is a perfect upgrade for those who were previously using a single wireless router (network-in-a box) for their small business networking needs. Nasser adds, “We are providing our customers with affordable yet highly reliable, secure wireless solutions. The new Cisco WAP131 is yet another example”.

Quick note, Nasser’s son used his GoPro to video this piece, pretty good for his first attempt. Maybe the next video we will show Nasser snowboarding!

That is all for now. Thank you for spending some time with us.

Marc

Tags: Cisco, network, PoE+, port, rout, small business, wireless

It is Friday the 13th and we have a full moon, perfect time to provide a quick update from the Cisco SMB Team.

First off, we have posted a Teaser Announcement providing a quick view of some new products that are coming out later this month. The entire Cisco SMB Team has been working hard on this new launch so look for more information that will be coming out.

220 Smart Plus Series

The Switching Team currently has a cisco.com for the new 220 Smart Plus Series.

Ivor Diedricks posted a new Blog earlier this month called Understanding the different types of Ethernet Switches. He explains the differences between fixed and modular switches, and goes into the details of what makes an Unmanaged, Smart and Fully Managed models. It is a good read, if you haven’t already, please take a look.

Finally, I have a new RV325 emulator on our Cisco Emulator Page. These emulators provide you the chance to take a test drive through our device user interface. You can take a look at our easy-to-use configuration wizards, configure features such as VLAN’s, Single-Point-Setup on our Wireless Access Points, and even configure VPN’s on the routers.

Make it a safe Friday the 13th!

Tags: blog, business, emulator, ethernet, Flexibility, Manage, network, PoE ports, PoE+, rout, scalable, small, spatial stream, switch, VLAN, vpn, wireless

Quality wireless is already considered a base expectation by consumers across industries. At Cisco we aim to provide our spectrum of customers with a whole range of high performing products, so they can select the product best suited for their organization. If you were to stop by the Enterprise Networking booth at Cisco Live Milan, you’d be able to examine our full portfolio of access points and notice that there are two that stand out from the others: the newly designed, 802.11ac integrated 3700 AP we introduced at Interop New York and one more, except this one can fit in your hand.

We are pleased to announce Cisco Aironet 700W Series Access Point, a wall mounted wireless and wired integrated platform. 700W Series is the industry’s FIRST and ONLY dual radio, dual band 2.4/5 GHz Access Point with 4 GigE Ethernet ports for wired connectivity, like IP Phones, game consoles, entertainment devices or other connected devices. 700W Series can be powered either by Power over Ethernet (PoE) or by a local power adapter, while it also provides PoE out on one local port to power an additional connected device. Read More »

Tags: #CLEUR, access point, AP, bracket, cells, Cisco, cisco live, deployment, design, device, Dual Band, ethernet, form factor, GHz, GigE, high density, local port, mobile, mobility, PoE+, power adapter, Power over Ethernet, Prime Infrastructure, right-sized, roaming, RRM, wi-fi, wifi, wireless

Cisco’s newest 802.11ac product, the Aironet 3700 Series Access Point is now orderable and shipping in the next few weeks.  The AP 3700 features an integrated 11ac radio with a 4×4 architecture and Cisco’s High-Density Experience (HDX) Technology.  HDX is a suite of features specific to the AP 3700 that delivers the best possible user experience, especially in high client density networks.  HDX is enabled by a combination of  hardware and software features on the AP 3700, features including:

• CleanAir 80 MHz – Interference detection and mitigation
• ClientLink 3.0 – RF link quality
• Smart Roam – Intelligent roaming handoff
• Turbo Performance – Performance with high client density

Aruba recently launched their 802.11ac access point, the AP-220 series, featuring a 3×3 design.

Miercom recently published a third-party evaluation of the performance between the AP 3702i and the AP-225.  The report consists of a diverse range of test cases meant to gauge real-world performance of the access points.  The tests include; multi-client performance, single client rate vs. range, performance in the presence of interference, and performance on reduced power.  Here are some of the highlights from the report.

Multi-Client Performance

The AP 3700 performed very well in the multi-client performance test, thanks impart to HDX Turbo Performance.  With 60 clients, the AP 3702i had a 6x performance advantage over the AP-225.  The AP-225 struggled to serve all the clients and only mustered 40 Mbps total.  The AP 3702i was able to transmit a healthy 236 Mbps, while maintaining fair throughput to each client.

The test consisted of 60 11ac clients, all associated to the 5 GHz radio.  The clients used were 10 Dell E6430 laptops with Broadcom 4360 three spatial-stream chips, 20 Apple Macbook Air two spatial-stream laptops, and 30 Dell E6430 laptops with Intel 7260 two spatial-stream chips.  Clients were setup in an open office environment surrounding the AP.  Distances varied from 10’ to 50’.

Read More »

Tags: #80211ac, 11ac, 3x3, 3x3 design, 802.11ac, access point, AP under test, AP-225, apple macbook air, APUT, aruba, broadcom 4360 chip, Cisco, cleanair, ClientLink, dell E6430 laptop, GHz radio, gigabit, gigabit wireless, high density experience, interference detection, macbook air, mbps, Mhz, Miercom, multi-client, network, performance test, PoE+, reduced power, report, third-party evaluation, wi-fi, wi-fi testing, wifi, wireless

By now you’ve probably heard quite a bit about the newest generation of Wi-Fi, 802.11ac.  I’ll save you the gory details, just know it’s about 3x faster than 802.11n and will help to improve the capacity of your network. Jameson Blandford and I were recently guests on the No Strings Attached Show podcast with Blake Krone and Samuel Clements (Click to listen to the podcast).

I wanted to follow up the podcast with a blog to go over considerations for deploying, testing, and tuning 802.11ac.

Considerations for deploying 802.11ac

Switching infrastructure

The first question you’ll want to ask yourself, is, if your switching infrastructure can handle 11ac?  The answer probably is, yes.  The things to consider are the port speed and power-over-Ethernet (PoE) capabilities.  You’ll want the access point to have a gigabit uplink to the switch.  Each 11ac access point could potentially dump several hundred megabits per second of traffic onto your wired network.  It’s also not a bad idea to have 10 Gig uplinks on your access switches to distribution or your core.  If you have even just a couple access points on a single access switch, you may quickly find yourself wishing you had 10 Gig uplinks.

Next you’ll need to consider how you will power the access points.  If you are like the majority of our customers, you will use PoE from your switches.  While 11ac access points require 802.3at (PoE+) for full functionality, the Aironet 3700 will run happily on standard 802.3af PoE.  In fact, it remains 3 spatial-streams on both radios, so performance does not suffer because you have a PoE infrastructure.

Will you deploy 80 MHz channels? Read More »

Tags: 11ac, 11n, 802.11, 802.11ac, 802.11n, access point, Aironet, chanalyzer, cleanair, deploying, Enterprise, gigabit, infrastructure, macbook, metageek, mobility, network, network engineer, networking, omnipeek, performance test, performance testing, podcast, PoE+, Prime Infrastructure, spatial stream, Testing, tuning, wi-fi, wifi, wild packets, wireless, wireshark