When golf fans tuned in to watch coverage of the 119th U.S. Open Golf Championship at Pebble Beach, California, last week, they saw the world’s best golfers and spectacular coastal scenery. And, although they might not have known it, they also witnessed the world’s first large-scale trial of a new wireless standard called Wi-Fi 6.

Cisco Systems Inc. and the U.S. Golf Association teamed up to deploy 350 Cisco access points throughout the championship grounds, using Meraki Wi-Fi 6 equipment.

“Wi-Fi 6 means faster and more reliable; that’s fundamentally what it’s all about,” said Tony Carmichael (pictured), product manager of API and developer platforms at Cisco Meraki. “On the developer side, it also opens up completely new potential opportunities.”

Carmichael spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in San Diego, California. They discussed continued enhancements to the Meraki platform for Wi-Fi 6, how the technology supports video surveillance cameras, and cultivating involvement of Cisco’s growing developer network (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Cameras leverage faster connectivity

Meraki was originally started as a mesh networking project on the campus of MIT. It was acquired by Cisco in 2012, and the company has steadily built its functionality in cloud-controlled Wi-Fi routing, including the release of two new Wi-Fi 6-compatible MR45 and MR55 access points in April.

Cisco Meraki has also been focused on new features and functionality for its connected camera line. The Meraki MV cameras are designed to be easily managed from a single console while taking full advantage of the faster Wi-Fi 6 connectivity standard.

“It’s really us taking the architecture of a typical video surveillance system and flipping it on its head, making it really easy to deploy, making it really simple no matter where in the world you are to connect and see that video footage,” Carmichael said.

Meraki is also benefiting from Cisco’s DevNet program, which has significantly grown over the past two years to include nearly 600,000 developers.

“It’s allowed us to see what our customers are trying to do, how they are trying to do it, and how we can enable that through APIs,” Carmichael said. “We’ve seen our API adoption and usage just absolutely shoot through the roof. We’re at 45-million requests per day, and it couldn’t have been done without DevNet.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE