Juniper expands WiFi 6 access point family to support remote workers

Taking aim at helping enterprise customers support tons of remote workers, Juniper this week extended its family of Wi-Fi 6 wireless access points.

The access points feature integration with the Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance cloud service to help customers with automated WLAN configuration, anomaly detection, performance and service-level metrics to ultimately make wireless networks more predictable and reliable.

An optional package includes Juniper’s Virtual Network Assistant, an AI-based engine called Marvis that features dynamic packet capture and machine learning to automatically identify, adapt to and fix network issues.

The four new Wi-FI 6 wireless access points :

• AP63 – Includes location services and is aimed at outdoor environments
• AP33 – Has an integrated vBLE antenna array and is designed for smaller enterprise offices, retail sites, K-12 schools and medical clinics
• AP32 – Includes integrated omni BLE antenna and is targeted at remote workers, smaller enterprise offices and K-12 schools that do not require advanced location services
• AP12 – A compact wall-plate unit that supports the connection of multiple devices and aimed at home offices, remote workers, school dorms and hotel rooms

The new access points join Juniper’s flagship Wi-Fi 6 device, the AP43, and offer customers a number of new deployment options.

WiFi 6 is designed for high-density public or private environments. But it also will be beneficial to IoT deployments and in offices that use bandwidth-hogging applications like videoconferencing. Products bolstering the Wi-Fi 6 rollout have been coming from players across the industry with HPE/Aruba, Cisco, Arista and Extreme making Wi-Fi 6 upgrades.

The new Wi-Fi 6 devices follows  its expansion of its artificial intelligence program to wide area networks. WAN Assurance, a new cloud-based service that will gather telemetry data from Juniper SRX, Contrail and other WAN gear and pass that information to Marvis. Marvis understands what’s normal activity on the network, looks for anomalies, and offers suggestions to fix problems and ensure WAN service levels. In many cases Marvis can respond without human intervention, Juniper says.

Gaining information on how the WAN is performing and quickly handling fault resolution or anomaly-detection issues from branch offices and cloud connected systems such as AWS or Microsoft Azure helps customers optimize the network, Juniper stated.