Cisco announces big push into Wi-Fi 6

Cisco is making a major push into Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) with the launch of access points and core switches for building the next generation of campus networks.

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. Latency is vastly improved, allowing for near real-time use cases. Wi-Fi 6 also promises lower power usage in end devices.

Cisco said Wi-Fi 6 offers many of the benefits of 5G for driving business transformation.

The rollout includes:

• Wi-Fi 6 Access Points: New access points across the Catalyst and Meraki portfolios leverage custom, programmable chipsets. 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: The Catalyst 9600 core switch family is built as the next evolution of the Catalyst 6000. 

  According to the datasheet, the Cisco Catalyst 9606R chassis is hardware ready to support a wired switching capacity of up to 25.6 Tbps, with up to 6.4 Tbps of bandwidth per slot. Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series switches support nonblocking 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP+, QSFP28) and 1, 10, and 25 GE Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (SFP, SFP+, SFP28) The switches also support advanced routing and infrastructure services (such as MPLS Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs, Multicast VPN [MVPN], and Network Address Translation.

  The platform’s ASIC is the first to support double-width HW tables.

• 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 is unveiling the DevNet Wireless Dev 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 and exciting 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 Technology, 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 Wi-Fi.

“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. “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.”