Cisco Systems today announced its new Wi-Fi 7 access points.

During the main keynote at Cisco Live APJC in Melbourne, Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Security Business Group, introduced the products and mentioned that Cisco’s goal with the new APs is to give its customers the ability to “solve for their connectivity, security and assurance challenges while also providing a flexible foundation to future-proof their workplaces.”

Historically, customers had to choose between cloud-managed Meraki APs or managed on-premises through Catalyst Center. With the new APs, customers can manage through the cloud or on-premises and quickly and easily switch if they choose. In actuality, the Wi-Fi 6E APs were the first to be dual-managed, but switching management modes required contacting Cisco and some back-end work being done.

Achieving this level of flexibility requires deploying Cisco’s new unified networking subscription, a single license covering the company’s entire Wi-Fi 7 portfolio. Gillis said this new subscription “simplifies how customers do business” with the company and “allows organizations to confidently invest in wireless and networks that can grow and evolve with their business.”

Matt Landry, vice president of product management for Cisco Wireless, discussed the new solutions in a briefing for industry analysts. He said of the latest wireless access points, “Not only are they Wi-Fi 7-enabled, but they are also packed with additional capabilities, particularly on the IoT front, including Bluetooth low-energy radios and built-in ultra-wideband for advanced location use cases.”

Landry added, “This is the first step in our complete refresh of the Cisco wireless portfolio. We’ve combined the traditional Meraki and Catalyst wireless access points into a unified Cisco wireless product line that can be used anywhere with any management.”

The coming together of the two portfolios is long overdue. Initially, when Cisco acquired Meraki, the idea was that Meraki would serve the needs of smaller businesses, and larger companies would continue to rely on Catalyst.

Over time, many of Cisco’s large enterprise customers would use Meraki in branch offices as the cloud management was optimal for remote locations. The inability to share information, policies, and management tools across Catalyst and Meraki has been frustrating in recent years, and it’s good to see Cisco finally have a unified product.

‘Intelligent, secured and assured’ innovations

Gillis cited three key capabilities that provide customers with what he described as a “powerful, scalable and experience-driven approach” to wireless deployment. He called the new Wi-Fi 7 platform the industry’s “most intelligent wireless offering.” The company said its access points auto-detect location and offer “AI-native performance optimization and out-of-the-box configuration” by leveraging its Cisco Spaces platform with an operating system that turns “workplaces into smart spaces.”

The auto-location capabilities greatly simplify purchasing. With Wi-Fi, different countries and regions mandate slightly different configurations. This created different SKUs, licenses and software images and made deployment complicated. The new APs have the intelligence to detect the location as soon as it’s plugged in and downloaded the proper configuration.

Regarding security, Cisco has embedded its threat detection capabilities, and it can secure every connection with AI-native device profiling, threat prevention, and advanced wireless security and data encryption.

Also, the new APs are powered by Cisco ThousandEyes digital assurance solutions that use AI and automation to “identify and remediate performance bottlenecks beyond the wireless network and across owned and unowned infrastructure.” Gillis said this approach enables its customers to “deliver exceptional experiences to every user, wherever they are.”

ThousandEyes has been an extremely popular product for Cisco, although historically underleveraged. Over the past couple of years, Cisco has embedded ThousandEyes into more of its products, including these APs, collaboration devices and more. This can speed up troubleshooting wireless problems, which is extremely difficult.

For example, if a user has performance problems with video over Wi-Fi, there could be hundreds of possible reasons. With ThousandEyes observability, the source of the issue can be identified quickly and resolved in a small fraction of the time.

Cloud platform approach

Cisco’s latest innovations reflect its commitment to its networking cloud platform approach. That strategy focuses on the continued introduction of products and solutions embedded with AI-native intelligence, operational simplicity and security.

“When customers deploy a next-generation Wi-Fi 7 network,” Landry said, “they will have everything they need to enable a smart spaces experience to get all of the power consumption and environmental data together to view where their people are congregating, where they have hotspots to enable these location services, and add open roaming to guests coming into their environments.”

These APs are the first network products rolled out under the new organizational structure, and all products are rolled up to Executive Vice President Jeetu Patel. In my conversations with him, he said Cisco is now committed to creating a “platform” that delivers unique experiences.

Many consider APs to be a commodity, but Cisco has loaded the products with AI, security and observability capabilities, which is the first step in a long road to fulfilling Patel’s commitment. During his keynote at the recent Cisco Partner Summit, Patel said that “Cisco is a company you won’t recognize next year at this time,” indicating more big changes are coming.

The new Wi-Fi 7 access points, which can be ordered beginning Nov. 13, are scheduled to ship in December.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. 

Photo: Cori Moran/Cisco/X