Some may say I’m quite difficult to impress, but I’m certainly not afraid to admit that geeky tech gets me excited, especially when I see it solving real world problems for my customers. I love nothing more than when I happen upon just such an announcement and then feel the urge to get out there and start telling all my customers.
This is exactly how I felt last week when we unveiled a killer new capability, and what better place than Cisco Live! Berlin to do so. Operators, buyers and sellers of wireless networking, it’s time to take note – this is going to answer so many questions and with any luck raise some new ones too…
The fuss I’m making is about a simple, sophisticated and glaringly obvious feature, which every wireless network since the dawn of time has needed and never had – Flexible Radio Assignment (I want to claim the new acronym on this one while I’m at it – FRA – you saw it here first!!!) now available on the new Aironet Wave 2 802.11ac Access Points, the 2800 and 3800 series.
FRA is all about dynamically controlling the RF environment to improve, performance, security and capacity. Access points today mostly run in dual band mode, that is to say their radio’s are locked one to 2.4ghz, the other to 5ghz. 2.4ghz is full of interference; it’s crowded, noisy and slow, a bit like the old single-track A11 to Norwich. The future and gigabit WiFi is all about 5ghz, better than wired experience, IoT and in comparison to the A11 it’s like the 26 lane Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas.
Imagine this new world of FRA, where now your radios change their mode of operation in real-time based on the needs of the devices within your environment. Theoretically you’ve just doubled the number of radios, doubling your Wi-Fi capacity – performance and speed, check. Now for security, FRA enables you to layer in wireless intrusion prevention services on top of CleanAir (HDX) – no extra hardware, no extra cost – your business better protected. Check out the blog by one of our product managers to get a quick low down on how this works, he’s used some great images which will help you visualize it in a working environment- http://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/schools-in-flexible-radio-assignment
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