News

Cisco Embraces Wi-Fi 6, Launches New Products and Resource Center for Devs

• By Becky Nagel
• April 30, 2019

Cisco this week announced a new line of solutions to help enterprises embrace "Wi-Fi 6" (a.k.a. 802.11ax or "high-efficiency wireless"), as well as a new resource to help developers create solutions that take advantage of the connectivity improvements Wi-Fi 6 and 5G will offer.

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 here.

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."

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

• Catalyst 9600 Series switches: "The future of campus core," 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.
• 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.

The company also announced its new DevNet Wireless Dev Center, designed to offer enterprise developers a wide range of resources for working on Wi-Fi 6 projects. Current resources include videos, a learning lab and code samples. More is expected to be added to the portal as time goes on.