Cisco officially announced the availability of their dual band 2x2:2 802.11a/b/g/n access point that supports lightweight (controller based) infrastructures as well as autonomous (IOS) installations. The documents and details of these APs showed up on Cisco’s site a couple of weeks ago, and were certified on Wi-Fi.org’s certification list back in April of 2010.
Cisco officially announced the availability of their dual band 2×2:2 802.11a/b/g/n access point that supports lightweight (controller based) infrastructures as well as autonomous (IOS) installations. The documents and details of these APs showed up on Cisco’s site a couple of weeks ago, and were certified on Wi-Fi.org’s certification list back in April of 2010.
When it comes to available access points in the market, Cisco has a Bugatti Veyron of access points with their 3500 model AP, which sports superior hardware with 802.11a/b/g/n, standard POE, and the most high resolution and accurate spectrum analysis built-in available on the market (If you hear otherwise, ask your vendor to turn on 10 different interference sources within a single 22mhz channel width and classify them all as unique devices, and to do it in a few seconds). If all APs were priced the same in the market, it would hard to justify not choosing this one (software needs aside).
The rest of Cisco’s access point product line has typically had a one-up on competitors hardware due to Cisco’s ability to truly design and engineer their products and work with chip manufacturers for truly custom solutions, where a lot of the smaller vendors typically use off the shelf chips and have to use whatever is available to them. It makes sense; smaller vendors can bring the products to market faster with less financial burden in R&D and try to compete with the market leader on price, if nothing else. Cisco offers legacy beam forming, 2×3, 802.3af power compliance, lightweight or autonomous offerings, short guard on 20mhz channels, indoor mesh, and quality antennas either integrated or external for their 1140 (indoor), 1260 (rugged), and 3500i/e (indoor/rugged) series access points. These would be the Saleen S7 APs of the industry in my mind.
Then you have Cisco’s competitors like Aruba, HP and Motorola. Each of these vendors have nice APs, but most use off the shelf parts with no customization (Which is why none of them have things like legacy beam forming support in the silicon). These vendors probably wouldn’t put the guts of their AP on display against a Cisco AP typically, but they would certainly put the brains and software that runs them on the table. I’d call these APs the Luxury Sedans (Choose your favorite, Lexus, Cadillac, whoever) of the market.
Cisco’s new 1040 comes in somewhere in the luxury sedan line and at fairly affordable price point of $795, or roughly 50% off of their 3500 series. You may think that price is pretty high when you consider Cisco has other small business products out there such as the router/gateway/APs from the small business unit within Cisco, like the WRVS4400N, which are much cheaper. The small business unit in my mind really is targeting extremely small businesses or home power users on a budget. They have infrequent software updates, a different support model, and fast lifecycles on products and a far smaller feature-set than anything that comes from Cisco’s wireless business.
The 1040 is supported like any enterprise class equipment (TAC), has a limited lifetime warranty, can be used alongside all of Cisco’s other high end APs, can be purchased in dual band or single band, and will have software support for many years. The AP has the RAM and Flash needed to have the same code support as Cisco’s other APs. It has an autonomous load if you just want to throw one out there and forget about it, and it’ll connect into your 4400, 5500, 2100 and WISMs.
The interesting piece I read about this AP via a second hand blog is that it won’t support band steering. I can understand it not supporting legacy beam forming, but band steering is an interesting one to not support. It’s unclear to me what in this hardware prevents it from supporting band steering, Aruba is able to do it on their hardware, why can’t Cisco do it on this hardware?
I think with the lower price point on this AP and bundling it with more affordable controllers, Cisco will be able to win over a few more customers that have chosen competitors based on the tried and true “give me whatever is cheapest” logic. I wonder if Cisco’s large customers will also flock to this AP? Will the college and enterprise campuses deploying thousands of APs discard the value of spectrum analysis (3500), legacy beam-forming, band steering and receive diversity/2×3 (1250/1260/1140), in order to have a lower priced AP but still have Cisco software, support, and integration (aka one throat to choke, LAN, WAN or Wireless)?
With the deeper discounts that larger customers sometime get from Cisco’s resellers, the AP1040 could be almost half of their competitor’s price in some cases. Perhaps this will lead to Aruba making a cheaper controller that doesn’t include a huge firewall, so you can get a cheaper controller, more expensive AP and use your existing enterprise security architecture.
If you want to better understand the technical bits of 802.11n and to get a better understanding of things like 2×2, spatial streams, and all things 802.11n, you can put yourself to sleep reading the IEEE 802.11n standards document, or you can read Next Generation Wireless LANs: Throughput, Robustness, and Reliability in 802.11n. It was written by two of the guys that wrote the standard, and while it’s extremely math heavy, it’s still very educational even if you haven’t gotten around to obtaining your masters in physics.
(I’m not a car guy by the way, those references may be terrible cars.. I also realize the masses don’t drive exotic sports cars or even luxury sedans, so it certainly isn’t a comparison of the wireless market)
