Cisco Partners: IoT and Wi-Fi

Cisco offers strong solutions to address Wi-Fi and IoT operational needs in highly regulated environments and in the commercial space.

Regulated Environments

The Cisco Industrial Wireless 3700 (IW3700) Series provides 802.11ac rates of up to 1.3 Gbps, mesh networking, and pervasive coverage in a compact form factor. It is qualified for extreme industrial environments and ideally suited for rail, transportation, mining, manufacturing, and other outdoor applications.

Wi-Fi AC Wave 2 and IoT  for Manufacturing, Utilities, Transportation, Mining, O&G, etc.

Building Wi-Fi for hazardous (Class 1, Division 2) locations requires extensive and time-consuming testing and certification. Given our customer’s current unique requirements in this space, we know the Cisco Catalyst IW6300 with 802.11 AC Wave 2 will satisfy them perfectly.

It offers the same advanced WPA3 encryption as Wi-Fi 6, and provides all the speed, reliability and connectivity they need for their hazloc requirements. Wi-Fi6 is a new standard and as such, current products released today are not as developed and reliable as they will be in a few years. Given our Class 1 Division 2, hazloc customers spend almost 3-4 times the price of an access point for installations.

This huge investment makes them very slow adaptors of newer products and technologies compared to carpeted space customers, which also means they do not have Wi-Fi6 enabled clients/devices today, and therefore, they could not make use of the full potential of Wi-Fi 6 access points.

Why Wi-Fi AC Wave 2 instead of Wi-Fi6?

Meets all the requirements of our hazloc customers today.

Will allow our customers to upgrade ASAP as they are hitting a 7-year refresh cycle, and Wi-Fi 6 for hazloc won’t likely be available until 2021.

Has all the certifications and validations to be a reliable long-term solution for our customers.

Wi-Fi 6 is only just becoming available for the enterprise, which has different certification and testing requirements. If we were to wait to release this product until WiFi6 is available for hazloc environments, it would likely be 2021. Given Cisco’s previous generation hazloc access point was released 7 years ago, we want to offer our customers the best solution for hazardous environments that’s tested, certified and validated today.

What are the advantages of the Cisco Catalyst IW6300 over buying an enterprise access point and putting a C1 D2 enclosure on it?

Single Vendor support

Smaller and easier to install

Purpose built for hazloc•IP67•Cheaper•Flexible connectivity (PoE, USB, SFP)

Multiple power options

Increased temperature range

With more devices connecting to the network and more real-time applications being supported, your customers need an infrastructure that can handle this explosion of data, while providing actionable insights. The Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points are fast, secure and intelligent. Not only that but they adhere to the Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard that will allow for a network to have a great capacity, while at the same time remaining reliable and resilient.

Commercial Environments

Wi-Fi 6 and IoT for Retail, Healthcare, FSI, etc.

Internet of Things (IoT) presents a significant challenge to enterprises: how to securely and easily connect hundreds or thousands of electronic devices to the corporate IT network congruent with their operational and engineering needs.

In contrast with user devices such as laptops, IoT devices have either a need for deterministic wireless service (for example, poll me every 5 months or I will shut down) or low-power service (that is, I don’t talk unless I really need to).

Traditionally, these needs have been met with proprietary, niche, or service provider-specific technology, but enterprise Wi-Fi has been increasingly chosen as the indoor IoT platform because of its significant economies of scale and ease of management by IT.

To address these IoT operational needs, 802.11ax and its IoT capabilities such as low power and determinism are expected to accelerate this adoption.

IEEE 802.11ax is an exciting new step for wireless LANs. This sixth generation of Wi-Fi will not only deliver higher effective speeds, but will enable new business models and use cases, including:

Full-service provider carrier offload

IT/IoT convergence

Real-time applications such as enterprise-grade 4K/8K video or augmented or virtual reality

I would love to hear your feedback in the comments below.

To learn more about Cisco’s solutions for digital transformation and IoT, please contact your Cisco Partner.