Cisco Catalyst Access Point Update

um so my name is fred niehaus i've been with cisco for quite a quite a while i um i started out doing life i'm just going to give you a little history and then what we'll get in this i started out doing pre-wifi it was probably about 1995 when we made a radio that looked like that and that radio morphed into something that looked like this and this was the very first client wi-fi client ever made and we did that in 1995 when i started and along about 2000 or so cisco purchased us and we introduced uh the very first wi-fi certified product it's kind of funny we're a founding member of wi-fi so it was 1995 then we get into in a 97 and start making these cards and things we hit 2000 and a guy that i was working with said you know this is a great wi-fi or great wireless thing but nothing connects but your own stuff there's no interoperability so we helped found the wi-fi alliance in 2000 i think it was uh 1998 or 99 network network interop one of our guys got together with the very first engineers with major companies that were doing early wi-fi and we created this wi-fi alliance called it weka wireless ethernet at the time wireless season at compatibility lines turned into the wi-fi name because you know wireless ethernet was a church up in canada weka was west edmonton christian association so i like to tell that story because it prompted a reason for having a name called wi-fi so so that we we helped found this create the name wi-fi and i think about 2005 or so it got into the dictionary and anyway long story short you know we've we're celebrating 20 years of wi-fi because that's when the standards interoperability happened recently and i've been doing it like i said for about five years before that so my name is fred niehaus ham radio amateur radio guy nhcpi twitter's ohio fred and i want to talk a little bit about some of the new stuff that we've got you know you've probably seen the product line the 91 15 17 20 30. those are our high-end real you know cool aps you know the 9120 and 30 they've got that rf asic and things but but i want to talk a little bit about something we haven't released yet and i'm actually kind of fired up about it and that's the 9105. the 9105 is a very small ap that's just a marketing slick on it's a two by two in both bands it's got an m gig uplink in it on is there's there's a wall plate version of this ap and then there's a standard you know ap looking access point that mounts on the ceiling and things and it um you know the use case on this kind of thing what makes me happy about it you know we're we're talking about coving you know we'll you know some of our other speakers will talk a little bit about that but but this is a very small ap i can't tell you how neat it is because it it's it's really lightweight it it it can be deployed anywhere for like remote workers for teleworker you know the wall plate will work out great for a teleworker because it's got ports on it for other devices you know it's you know the traditional use case are things like you know hotels hotel rooms so that you can plug in the ip phone and all that or dorm rooms but now it's remote workers and you know corning users people like that this is the engineering uh definition of it's kind of a little bit dry but but you know the product name is is catalyst 9105 ax ax for 11ax and like i said it's a wall plate and a a conventional you know looking ap it's got not only is it two by two in both bands but it's also got all the wi-fi six features you know it's got got the iot gateway ability the built-in you know zigbee ble thread it it the wall plate unit can actually do poe out supports about 200 or so wi-fi devices per access point but i'm harping about this size because you know we used to get a lot of grief years to go about the size of the products you know and and you know and the weight of the products this whole catalyst line we changed the name from aeronaut to catalyst because we hired pinafarino the same people that do the lamborghini and alfa romero other car designs to give us a really good streamlined look so you know in the in the past the aps used to look different each one you could look and see and go that's a whatever you know you can just tell by the way it looked now we're trying to get everything to look to be uniform to be as small as possible as most as robust as possible but this 9105 if you look at how little that thing is and i can't you know really pro about that you know enough because when you look at like this product here when you look at the ap 4800 now we want a pioneer award for that product this product is about five and a half 5.4 pounds this ap is about a half a pound it's not even the size of it's not even the size of the antenna array it's really really small probably the best it's hard to really understand the size and cameras because it always fools you but but you know i showed you the very first wi-fi card the last wi-fi card that we made was one of these it was a dual it was a dual band a one but if i look at that size-wise that a that ap is not much bigger than the card and if you if i if i do that same trick with the aed this is a 9130 look at that it barely covers the logo i mean that should give you an idea how small this ap is it's also an hd that's built really well i can take this damn thing apart pull the screws off of it and wing that somewhere and if i pull if i can get this board out of here and i'm sorry for the delay but if i can get it out i'll show you that it is the inside is shielded the the antenna side is all metal so it's got a great ground plane to radiate off of and the radios are shielded as well so you got double shielding shielding on the radio can shielding on the inside shielding on the ground plane you can't really make a more robust ap i mean it's it's very small the wall plate is the same thing it's just you know it's it's kind of you know i'm kind of excited about it because the last ap that was that size was the 350 that we made years ago and it's about the same weight by the way too you know just about a half a pound it's real small the bracket on this ap is is called an air bracket eight it does not use the conventional error bracket one and two that we have with every other ap and i hated that but but here's the problem the bracket from the original ap is much bigger than the ap is right so we made a new bracket smaller tiny that will go on the back of the unit and um if you if you take a look at the side of it you know the port's got a gigabit ethernet port a console port on it's got a reset button on very you know same flow and look and feel of the other aps when we look at things like the wall plate this has a kensington lock on it too but if you look at the wall plate the wall plate unit's got a side kensington lock it's got a usb port we did not put the usb port on the axi we only put the usb port on the wall plate because i want we're trying to get size thermals and everything as tiny as we possibly could so this particular ap the wall plate is better suited if you have some application for usb or if you have a hotel mobility or hotel uh or college dorm something like that because you can mount this wall plate right on the wall and there's an uplink port and that uplink port will take take you in fact that's a that's an mgig port and not a gigabit port it's an uplink port and then there's a pass through port you plug the the ethernet connector into that and that if you have an ip phone or something that you want that's in that wall jack you know wall jack's got two ethernet some cables sometimes plug the secondary one in there and it pops out on the bottom so it's nice because if you have a dedicated ip phone ethernet drop or something in a hotel room you just flow it right on through and then plug the phone in the bottom of the evp this access point also has a console port and it's got three ethernet ports the first port can do power over ethernet 802.3 af which is 15.4 watt power provided you power it with 30 watts dot you know dot 380 if you can if you can give the the wall plate full power it can replicate you know poe out that port as well so that's kind of neat the one thing about these aps that are amazing is if you look at the 9105 axi that small small ap that i just whizzed that it's 11 watt draw i mean this thing has got full wi-fi six functionality it's got the faster processor more ram all the hardware that you know that you want in in the ap for performance you know but it doesn't have it's not a four by four there's not four transceivers in each fan there's only two transceivers in each band so we were able to really optimize the this this product at 11 watts so i think that's amazing and even the wall plate ap will run on af power now around 13 watts if you don't have requirements for usb power out and you don't have requirements for poe out so you know the the id here is is everything at 11 watts now i've got kind of a busy slide just to eliminate the questions well what do the other products draw well i've got a reference slide here where i put all the products down and exactly what their poe consumptions are i'm going to dwell on that but have it the 9105 wall plate and you know infrastructure ap the mtbf mean time between failure i want to touch on a little bit i'm always getting pushback on that because the competitors the competitors mtbf is higher than yours i'm like well hell yeah they measure it at 25c you know if you if you measure an mtbf at room temperature or 77 degrees you know that's the longest best time you could get move that thing to 104 degrees where it's going to be in a hot warehouse or a manufacturing environment and then see what your mtbf is and so so i give you the mtbf here on 25 40 and 50 just so that you have them and if you're ever looking at spec sheet readers that kind of noise from the 25c i suppose if you're a spec sheet reader this is just a list of all the software versions that line up with all the products i kind of thought that would be a little bit helpful especially since this 9105 is a brand new ap so that that kind of introduces the ap tells you what it's about why i like it i'm really thrilled about it because it's just so small and has so many opportunities to you know if you you know you got a garage you know a parking garage throw that damn thing up in there and people in the in the garage can know when it's time to go their doctor's appointment or just you know there's lots of different things you can do with it so i'm going to stop for just a second and if there's any questions or anything you guys want to ask about that ap we'll hit that and then i want to start talking a little bit about some antennas uh i have a quick question fred um fred we're given your deployment scenario for this access point in dorms and things like that that's a lot of unplanned networks and 802 11ax is very suitable for unplanned networks what features have you deployed in this access point they're specifically you know arc ax pacific yeah the a lot of the elements of 802.11 ax is more complex modulation so you can get more data through in a given radio so so when you've got an you know a phone you know know you talk they talk a lot about these aps being it's an eight by eight and it's a you know four by four and all you know it means it's four radios or eight radios but a lot of times that phone's got one radio because the maker of that phone at the time is told look if you put a lot of radios in here you're gonna eat my battery life gonna make my phone bigger heavier get it hotter blah blah blah so the features in 802.11 ax are things like more complex modulation being able to get more data through at a given time you know there's there's there's this thing called ofdm and ofdma and basically the the fastest way to describe that would be in previous generations ofdm a train pulls in all the doors open up and maybe one guy gets in a car two guys getting the other car girl or two go in the back car off that packet goes with ofdma and wi-fi six you're like packing all the cars and that one packet is being sent out at its most optimal performance you're getting more data out so the idea here is is you know and i'll when i talk about the antennas a little bit i'll talk about why you can create two different cells and things the idea is to get less users on the band or get the utilization lower for faster so the nice thing about this ap is as a 2x2 ap it has all the features of wi-fi six that help with spectrum enhancement to be able to to stop that jitter and stop that delay just get to pack it out so if i can jump in their friend just as the clarification so is supporting 120 1024 quan is doing bss coloring and what size resource units is it going down to on your ofdma systems the the oh you can have up to 32 ru's i believe off the top of my head i'm not sure when you when you scale down the radios how many i'm going to have i can i can get back to you on that i'll tell my head i haven't looked at it okay that'd be great thank you sure hey fred we we talked earlier about the uh the new aps they've got spectrum intelligence uh i don't believe they have an rf asic in them correct th this particular you know the 9105 series does not have the rf asic this was designed mainly to be a low-cost easy to pop out you know like popcorn you know drop these things around you know it's it's designed for campuses hotels things like that you know if you're going to put something in a hospital something like this could you know the wall plate could live in a hospital room right but i would want conventional aps in the hospital like 91 20s and 30s with the rfasic to be able to do full spectrum intelligence know when i've got interference things like that you know this is going to have to use the wi-fi chipset built into it for any sort of spectrum intelligence awesome thank you okay with that i'm going to talk a little bit about antennas the reason i broke this into two sessions just because or two different topics the first one i wanted to cover that 9105 because we haven't released it yet i think it's really cool to get that out to you guys early to see it and then in the field when you deploy products people don't always understand a lot about radio and antennas and i just kind of wanted to try to you know go through a little bit of that if you don't need an external antenna if you're in a carpeted environment you're just putting it in the ceiling you're better off without external antennas because you know it's more attractive it's smaller it's easier to install you know a lot of things that that are positive with units that don't have antennas however units that don't have antennas are limited they they radiate in a 360 degree pattern you can't focus it you can't change the cell size i mean you may you can change the size from a big size to a little one but you can't cover different areas you know when you go into an external product you know you can use higher gain antennas that are on you know the the antenna on the internal one is limited like four or five dbi i can use a 13 dbi a much higher gain antenna with the external models and that allows for farther range you know when you have an antenna and you focus it in a given area it's got two benefits one is it goes farther it can hear the client better and at a far distance but because it's focused there it's kind of like your vision if you're looking one place you're not seeing the noise behind you you know so other aps and other you know rf problem problematic things kind of go go away and a lot of times the directional antenna because it's focused in only one direction it's not picking up crud noise everywhere so a lot of good deployment places for these things are high ceilings manufacturing environments where you want to aim an antenna one way and then and aim another one to cover two different areas if you've got a hazardous area like maybe you're a you know a coal mine or a place that's got not you know you know hazardous gases and things sometimes you can't have active components in that area so you could put the access point you know inside you know away from that area and put the antenna outside or the same with like a maybe you're a freezer and the tow motor drives into the freezer and the freezer's all metal and you know as soon as it goes in there it's dead you know where you know because it's a it's an rf cage well you can put one of the antennas in a freezer out of a freezer there's just lots of reasons why you want external antennas and fred real quick could you could you just explain a little bit because i think it's important i think a lot of people overlook it the distance of ap is off of a slower um could you just go into a little bit about like how high is too high and maybe specifically for these particular aps sure when you when you look at a product like the you know the 9130 or any of them you've got an antenna that that's very fixed okay it's this and you know this this little element right here and when it when the antenna is mounted the way it's supposed to be on a ceiling like this it radiates down and outward in a 360 degree pattern but it's limited to whatever the gain that antenna is and once you start going higher and higher and higher part of the problem is that if i've got more than one access point say i've got you know that you know i've got the access point here and another one here and we're way up high on the ceiling the strong signal from this one is at the same exact plane as the other ap way up there 35 feet in the air however high it is so they start to hear each other and then rrm says hey you know i got a great signal over here i'm gonna start turning power down well it's turning power down it's killing your client down below that's 35 feet trying to get up right so so sometimes it makes sense you know if to use a directional antenna like a patching thing they got got antennas like this one it's basically a 6dbi patch and you could put something like that up on a ceiling and angle it down you know 35 feet to cover a long aisle way there's no one way to do this you know it's you know if if you use use the the features that i'm going to talk about a little bit called flexible radio architecture to create you know like two five gig radios things like that you can do that up in a manufacturing area and cover it and uh you know but but these antennas use conventional uh what they call rptnc connectors right there's different different kinds of connectors out there in the industry you know there's end connectors rpt and c connectors and you're trying to make a decision as to what to do it's kind of hard to really understand that so let me let me dig into that just a little bit all right let me ask a quick question and i think you're probably going to cover this and and you can absolutely tell me that and and i'll and which i don't know one of the problems i see with a lot of access points and i'm curious on if cisco's this this way is you guys have you're adding a lot of extra radios in right you're either adding radios in for diagnostic purposes for 802.15.4 you know all of those other radios but often those radios aren't actually hooked up to antenna lugs or or anything else right so as soon as you put a directional antenna on that the the reception and and the the signal coverage that you're getting for those for those uh additional radios are not what you're getting from the client serving radios so so i'm seeing that on on aps across the board and and i'm not putting it specifically on cisco i'm curious to hear from cisco about that um that obviously creates its own problems right sure couple things if you are if you're using a feature like ble right ble requi you know you know it it it beacons right so so you you want the ap in the in the near field of the person in beacon right if you go to a directional antenna it's going to be going where where you're pointing it right so you have to look at it you have to take into consideration that we did an awful lot of things with the 9130 because the 9130 if you if you take a look at the two pictures here the 9120 has four rptnc connectors and then there's a four port dart on the side of it that allows that to to bring it out so so by default you have 2.4 gig and 5 gig on the 4rp tnc's that way you can take that antenna i just described to you screw it right in and go now in that case what happens is you have a 2.4 gig radio that's in 4x4 mode when you decide gee i'd like to use the iot functionality and or beaconing or zigbee or whatever what we do is we shut off port d you know one of the ports on on the 2 4 side of the ap turn the ap into a 3x3 for 2.4 gig and then a 1x1 to do the ble beacon so in that case if you screw this this uh you know patch antenna 6 dbi patched to this antenna and you pointed it in a given way that's where your beacons are going to go because i don't have the ability to beacon from within the ap while you've at because you've asked for external antennas when you go with an internal unit i can lay all those elements inside there and i can keep them to where they're all in a uniform 360 no focus or anything mode right but but we to take it one step farther and i don't have a slide that covers i'm just going to talk about a little bit when you go and you switch to a when i decide i'm going to take that bottom one that 9130 and i'm going to plug this antenna in boom plug it in now i've got two sets of four cables the first set a through d do all of the 2.4 and 5 gig wi-fi the secondary set will do the 5 gig in 8x8 if they're together covering the same cell or you can say i'm going to break it up and i'm going to do a 4x4 wi-fi 5 gigahertz ap this way and maybe a four by four wi-fi five gig and two four that way when i do that the two four is only going out the primary you know four so i can't send anything zigbee or or out to secondary five gigs so if i have two antennas going two different ways the ble and stuff is only going to go where the primary one is and one thing that's not documented too many places is the rfasic that listens for things like interference and determining whether or not a channel is clear to use or not and all of that well what do we do with that we actually use two ports on the rf asic and we mux out the last port antenna on each connector for the rfa6 so even if the rfa stick is pointing two different directions you know we know which antenna hurt it and we can respond to that five gig only without trashing the whole damn thing you know so so there's a lot to it but but what question specifically do you have if any on on how it works well i think i think you actually answered that really well and it's also really useful to know about the way you're attaching the rfasic that's uh that really kind of changes design methodology in my opinion and with antenna placement i do have one follow-up question um i know in the past um it's been this way and i'm curious to see if it's still that way with with with um with ax and the latest aps um cisco in the past is only beacon for wi-fi out of the the first antenna log right is that still the case and and my um the argument i often make with other wireless engineers is if that's the case we have to be absolutely certain that we're orienting um the um the the antenna that's on that first lug correctly or we end up cross polarizing do you feel like that's a challenge and is that something that we have to uh yes and yes and no i mean i mean we beat it out the pro primary that's more in a 2-4 world you know what i'm thinking out loud is is that you know is yes if you're doing the legacy data race we beacon out that way i believe we still do it with wi-fi six but we've changed a lot of the radio we're using you know my cisco badge says no technology religion right well that's true we started out making aps using a marvel chipset because we could take our cognio acquisition that what was basically the the genesis of the rfa 6 if you will and build that right into the marvel you know silicon and so we were kind of like tied to the axle there you know and but the thing is is there's a lot of as these chipsets go out right you know you you know we made a 91 17. 9117 you know is an 8x8 but it's not the 9130 the 9130 can do everything and pass all the wi-fi things but but the 9117 you know they were still making the spec the time they were doing so that chipset was limited right so what i'm saying is these chip sets you know the core chipsets and how they work are very similar so i don't think that that yeah i'm not sure that that beacon thing is going to bite you or not you know i mean i would look at that and do some testing on that you know i not seen it to be a problem but you know it could be you know certainly wouldn't wouldn't lie to you and say no not a problem you know but but i i would i mean the problem with this with this kind of a talk is is you know i'd rather if i know the truth to tell you if i don't know tell you don't know but and and and i'm just thinking out loud that that i don't know that we're going to be doing things a lot differently than our competitors do when we're using this thing absolutely yes yeah and and we appreciate the honesty thank you all right okay so now i'm going to talk a little bit about the 9120 because remember i told you the the the difference between these two here is the 9120x has rptncs and a four-port dart the 9130 we got rid of all the rptncs and we have an eight port dart on the bottom so i want to touch on the 9120 and then dig into the 9130. so if you look at the 9120 you know you you can use a four port adapter that will get you to rptnc connectors and this product has two versions it has a catalyst 9120 and a p version professional install for antennas up to 13 dbi using the the 9130 we don't need to have a special version but but looking at this product here it's very straightforward you know by default you could just put dipoles on it you know make it look you know make it look like the conventional ap put it this way if you want and and they're all dual bands so you don't need the dark if you're running in dual band mode you don't need the dart adapter anything like that if you choose to take this product and say you know what i want it to be fi you know well let's look at the next slide say i take this product in and it's dual band five gig two four but i decide you know i'm willing to sacrifice that two four to get five right so if i do that i can switch it into two five gigs now once i do that i can't have two five gigs on the rptncs on the top of that product because you're at the same band same frequencies you just can't do it so as soon as you switch to dual five we take the secondary five gig and we go out the dart port and now you've got a situation where you have this antenna maybe the patch antenna is on one of the on the rptncs and it's doing two for i'm sorry it's doing five gig only at that point if you choose dual five if you choose two four it does two four and five on that and then the other dart connector allows you to plug in a separate antenna for a different direction so it's a lot cleaner to do that i like the dart we did this whole dart approach mainly to limit eliminate you know 5 000 to doing this you know you know if you've got to install something you know my mom had a oh a minor stroke recently i was at the hospital looking at that i'm like you know that antenna isn't even screwed on one's pointing this way and you know things just kind of degrade sometimes with rpt and c connectors and it's nice to be able to plug in everything with a dart if you look at this product also this does something no other ap i think in the market can do at least none i'm aware of there may be a competitor that does it but i don't think so if i wanted to i could send instead of having 2.4 and 5 gig on the top i could send 2-4 out the dart i could actually split this into single band products why would i want to do that well maybe i'm the military and i want to take that 2-4 and upscale it to a different frequency or i want to go do something else with that totally unrelated to maybe what most people would do but i fought to have that ability to to be able to switch things in and out on rf and and give you the flexibility that you wanted to be able to do it so so that's kind of the 9120 the 9130 like i said that's our flagship that's the best product that we make that product is is a true 8x8 it's got this tri-radio which means it can do dual 5 and 2.4 gig when you ship when the thing ships it looks exactly like the 9130 axi like the internal one except there's a yellow cap there you pull the yellow cap off you now have all your eight antennas and you have 16 lines of digital and the idea here is the single insertion you know if i wanted to install this product i don't have to screw all those rpt and see is do the cable management all the mess you know i just it's a one plug-in i'm done so that's that's really where it it shines if you look at how that breaks down the default mode is you've got five gig and eight by eight two point four and four by four they all flow out the dart if you look at how the dart is and i didn't put the rf asic and the iot and stuff on this this thing it's pretty simplistic chart but a through d is dual band and the iot goes out d you know we'll shut off d on put in three by three mode if you need iot out of it the five gig is the secondary five gig or it's the primary five gig if you're running an eight by eight mode now as i mentioned before with the 9120 you had to have a professional version if you wanted to use antennas 13 dbi or so what we did is we made two a dart today two dart adapters to get you the conventional connectors the first dart one gives you rpt and c and allows gains up to 6 dbi if i want to use a 13 dbi antenna there's a dart with n connectors and that way it'll screw onto the stadium antennas things like that we're designing a lot of different antennas for this product i'll touch on a few of them in a bit but you know why do you want to go from eight by eight to two four by fours that's probably a question what's the benefit of this try radio right well if i wanted to send the signals into two different areas and create two different cells rather than an 8x8 i now have that ability to do it and i'm the only product that i know of that can do that today and you know not all all use cases benefit dual five gig i mean you know you might have have a case where you're in a convention center or something and you have you know tons and tons of wi-fi six clients and you know what i want multi-user mimo to work in its full bang mode with eight by eight and everything running you know i might want it in eight by eight mode you know or i might say i'm going to take part of that convention area when i'm breaking it off into two different cells it's five gig this way and five gig that way you know it's all about you know flexibility you know i mean marketing people investment protection yeah yeah it's about flexibility it's about being able to take that rf and do the things that you want to do it maybe i want to make a five gig sell outside and do two four and five inside i could split it out and cover a park area or something question yeah um so you mentioned earlier that you're working on um a variety of antennas um it still seems like there's every once in a while a missing antenna that i might need for a design can you comment on third-party antennas or compatibility by any chance absolutely let's hit that real quick so i can retire off of the things cisco doesn't address okay and there's a lot of antennas and things out there and we've taken uh you know ventev is a great partner excel tech is a great partner these people you know we we're allowing them to make we've given them the full specs on on this dart connector so they'll be able to make unique antennas as well now what's what's neat about this dart connector is that once it goes in you know i had a picture of it earlier and i showed 16 lines of digital we can read what is inserted in that unit right so we're working with partners so that when you take a partner antenna any and you put it in it'll know it's it's an excel tech or event dev it'll know what its gain is you know we're working on trying to build up a partner ecosystem to work with that but what's nice is that they have that spec when when i do something simplistic like i say these two dart adapters there's very very limited logic in that dart adapter one the the logic in the in the one for six dbi it's just jump so gpio pins and things say this is a six dbi antenna that's all it is right the the 13 is 13 dbi it doesn't tell me whose antenna it is what it is because it's not using all of those 16 lines of digital to be able to do that so some of these end partner antennas will just use that nomenclature they you know the the partner antenna may only be 6 dbi so they just you know they might put the logic in the dart for 6 dbi only you know you plug it in it just runs we're working to try to get them to give us all the data on the antenna you know the gain who makes it all of that maybe even the serial number and get that stuff bubbled into the higher you know management layers and things well with the the 13 dbi dart adapter that you've got there it does reduce the transmit power of the access point to compensate for the assumed 13 dbi antenna correct exactly so the part of the problem is that when you don't do that you're out of bending missions your noise and everything creeps up and then you know if you look at spectrum analyzers like you're not good there's a lot of a lot of our competitors especially the ones that that aren't as big they're not not our big competitors but the lunar ones they just put that stuff out and they get found in violation have to do recalls and you know cisco's got deep pockets last thing we want to hear is that we put 5000 things up at 35 feet and now it's not legal who's going to pay to rip it all down you know we build we build this stuff with built-in safeguards and things to prevent that so now we're no longer responsible for going in and setting antenna gain um it's doing it automatically is there a way is there a way of overriding that so let's just say that we're using a 6 dbi antenna that actually has n-type uh lugs on it so we're using the the 13 dbi dart that's actually only 6 dbi is there a way of overwriting that or is it just just well if you were to plug in a 6 dbi antenna you know a dart adapter you have rptncs if you all of a sudden then put a 13 dbi antenna on it okay you know you could argue yeah well i went in and i turned the rf power down i did you know did these things i'm okay right and you may be okay you may not be okay the the problem with that is is can you defend it right right and what happens is you might do something that's totally legal and defensible for you but then you the i.t guy leaves a new it guy comes in he defaults the ap it's running at full power he's found in violation and the next thing out of his mouth is well cisco sold me this ain't my fault it's not you know so so we do all of the things to prevent you from going left to center okay can you go left to center oh hell yeah i could take that 9105 and take it apart and bring the antennas out and do all kinds of things that may or may not be legal you know and sure and that's why i love that 9105 because it's so little and it's just you know you know i can put three of them in in an area and take no space you know right yeah but a good rf engineer will make sure that you're in regulate regulatory domain compliance at all times right right absolutely yeah and it's not so much i'm not so much concerned about whether or not i can exceed you know compliance it's more about if for some reason i'm using a lower dbi antenna that happens to have say n-type connectors can i you know can i enable it to put out that that higher power in general let's be honest in general if we're if we're coming close to matching our clients we're not going to get close to that anyways but that was just kind of the i just wanted to know if that was a software setting if i gave you that knob it would be hard for us to defend it if it was running that way right not like like rx sop which did to get off tangent a little bit rx sop you'll receive start a pack and i i i call it receive squelch you know you know because turning up the squelch so it doesn't hear right and and you know if you do that you know you can run in environments i've got an ap that's you know 40 feet away or when i make all this damn noise i can rxsop that thing all the way up so i don't hear that thing and i keep running and you know is that a good thing to do well you know what happens if you're your last day at work you turn rx sop on all the ap is so high they can't even hear them and you check out you know how you're going to figure that out right you know we try to do things to keep you from going left to center uh if you got if you throw money at it and time at it and skill you can do damn anything you want okay thank you hey fred i have a question for you um on the um the 9130 data sheet published by cisco and i hate to put you on the spot with this question but it says on there that the try radio mode and uplink multi-user mimo will be available in a future release can you confirm that it's actually available today in today's release yes i believe i believe it is available today you know with the latest code um you know i i'm not a lab rat i mean i haven't tested a lot of the things on the end of things but uh but yeah if it's not on by now it's it's a fair browse then it must be a documentation the problem with the spec sheet let me hit on that every time you write a doc and we do this all the time we create matrixes and we say this works with this works in this one you know two weeks after you've done that it's old right and and and and i i think that that spec sheet likely needs revised you know and and if i'm wrong and it's still not in there when i get off this call i'm gonna make sure it is and and push it hard if it's not the compatibility matrix seems to indicate that it's currently supported in shipping yeah i believe it is cool thank you okay so i explain why you might want to try radio why you might not you know a lot of different things uh this is a slide that's older than i am i think but it kind of it it tells you a little bit about before there was wi-fi six you had to do things that would make channel utilization get lower right so you know if if you're on a single channel on an on ap with omnidirectional antennas everybody's on connecting at whatever speed they connect at the people close in connected a fast speed far away people slower speed in that kind of a scenario you got like the channel utilization is like at 60 and you know for just to put a number on it right if i can take the ap and use this fra flexible radio create two five gig cells make a micro and a macro then the people close in connected they're more uniform faster speed the farther ones connect away at their slower speed and i've taken two channels now instead of one so instead of one channel sixty percent i'm on one channel at 20 and another channel say 24 so i've dropped it from 60 down to 44 and also split it across channels so the takeaways the user gets less retries it's a better experience you know now bss coloring a lot of other things are trying to do similar things by turning power down if you're a client you know you know the you know we did this on the ap side unfortunately we had no ability to change it on the client side so bss coloring will will kind of let it know about things let them coexist turn power down a little bit on them and it's a more granular and probably a better way of doing it than this but this today with legacy clients is still a huge thing so you know it's important to be able to do those kinds of things so i mentioned the antennas and the fact that you could take an antenna like oh like this this can antenna here in the middle and with one insertion plug it directly into the ap and be done that's that makes installations easier it makes a lot of things you know better to work with we've got three antennas that came out the gate when we released the ap the 9101 is a ceiling mount omni in other words instead of putting the ap in the ceiling you could put the ap above the ceiling in a metal lock box and put the just the antenna down below you know that's one option then there's a pole mount omni the middle one where where you in a manufacturing environment you might put that on an eye off of off the left of an i-beam to cover a 360. and then there's that 2566 patch i told you about you know anytime i was waving around that flat panel one you know instead of having a flat panel antenna like this and then a cable mask go into the ap what we did was we created this new look we made the the antennas actually look like the aps we put an led in them so that they flash we you know so it mimics the led on the ap all three of these antennas have leds on them we changed the design of the 6 dbi so that you could use a bracket 9 behind it stuff the ap right behind the antenna and have a have a directional you know a directional 6 dbi intended to go down a hallway or in a manufacturing environment other places and have it look like the ap it's just a little bit bigger looking ap and then all the cables are hidden behind it and it stops this rat's nest that you see over on the right you know where you got cables going one way another way and and all that so that's that's kind of the need uh there's a list of approved antennas for this product you know i just put up just took this right out of the hardware installation guide you know just so you if i'm going to give you the po dramas i'll give you the antenna you know approved antennas to go back to sam's question about third-party antennas as long as the third-party antenna lines up with one of these in other words if you know because these are the antennas that we took to the fcc and certified for compliance right so if if a third party company makes a 13 dbi antenna that's great if they make a 14 dbi we didn't submit that for qualification right and you know and it's possible that you know we can through the dart connector have a a 20 dbi antenna and dart it up so that the ap you know turns everything down like it does for 13 down to the 20 or whatever but that's more futuristic that's more you know what we're going to do in software later you you know when you make a piece of hardware and i've said this a lot of times it's like making cupcakes you pulled out of the oven if the center of that cupcake's gooey you can't go back and re-cook it okay so the hardware is able to do many many things and you and you'll hear things like you know our basic our fingerprinting and all of these other you know you know we tell things that are hardware capable and then time tells whether we put the energy and the software to do with it right so so right now this product supports these antennas any third-party antenna that's of like designing game may be used and it's and it's really simple to to look at the chart and see if if somebody decides to make something in a much higher gain we probably have to submit it for qualification or work with them in a third-party lab to do it but but that's that's the antennas and then i got one last slide and that's that's just in theory kind of stuff it's kind of a goofy slide here but but what i wanted to say was if you can split that connector and go off into two different directions with two different antennas if you can don't put them so that they aim into each other don't put them too close together you know you get rf isolation a lot of different ways you get arch isolation by getting distance away from from each other you get it by height separation if i have two omni antennas remember an omni antenna you know looks like it looks like this radiates in a 360 degree pattern it doesn't end fire right it doesn't send the signal out the top of it it goes around so if i put an antenna here and then i go up five eight ten feet on the tower put the second one off they're not going to shoot down at each other i'm going to get better isolation using height separation than i do side by side the side by side they're both going into each other right you know so when you do this you get isolation by turning transmit power down and that's what we do with the internal use when you look at an internal ap and all the antennas are inside we we create a micro and a macro cell because the micro i gotta turn the power way down to get my isolation you know so you know you don't want to do a dumb mistake by doing an install and pointing the antennas too close to each other or pointing them into each other you know keep in mind the farther away frequency wise the antennas are better isolation the lower the transmit power on one of them better the isolation polarity if if something is vertically clear polarized which is normal maybe on an outdoor link i go to horizontal polarity you know maybe i've got a vertical polarity doing clients in the near field and a horizontal backhaul link or something you know you know so so polarity can help you height separation physical separation things like that there's no one way to do it you know you kind of have to test it and see what works and in the picture over to the right they took this is a like a 3800 they basically took a patch antenna to shoot up the escalator so it's cisco live if you had your phone you got connectivity riding in the us but the other five gig radio and two force pointing at the registration desk you know so i've got two completely different cells running in that environment or i might take a product you know you'd mention about different gains and things i might take an antenna that's supposed to be this way to go out really really far and i might put it on a tripod put it this way so it shoots right in the ground what i'm doing is is i'm forcing myself to have a much smaller cell and i might litter more of those out there's so you can play with external antennas you know external antennas are a huge deal in my opinion because if you're an rf expert or or somebody with with the knowledge of doing you can do so much when you can control that antenna it's kind of like you know yeah it's like an audio buff right you know there's the speakers and you know they're this big aren't as good as the the you know when you can focus and do things right so i kind of let think of it like the difference between the speaker and your phone and having a big horn out on the stadium or fairgrounds you know shooting out you

Channel: Tech Field Day

Views: 2,847

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Id: PI6LeuMafYc

Length: 47min 40sec (2860 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020