Cisco Access Points with CleanAir Tech Coming

Once again, Cisco is showing us why they're the world leader in network technologies.

I think consumers would rarely need this unless their wallets are filled with 4-digit cash or they're used for enterprise. But gamers are of course, using a wired connection which is no doubt hard-wired and already zero interference.

Cisco is enterprise, this is where the technology matters and makes money, not your grandmas house. These are not simple plug in and use web interface devices.

Finally there is self proactive wireless devices that can fix their own problems and show you what is causing them, instead of figuring out that some one placed a microwave in the cubical.

I would buy one if cisco will give me a 90% discount.

with their current prices, I feel that it's a little too late for a April fools joke.

for $ 995 I can buy 20 wireless routers and on each install dd-wrt or tomato and then crank up the transmit power and then put one in each room of the building and I will get better coverage than the single overpriced access point.

Nice product specially for people like me who can only assume which electronic device is interfering with my wifi and causing the slowdown...

Will it clean volcanic ash?

It cleans the air and serves a hot coffee! I want one!

When I turn on my wireless rear speakers for my surround sound in the living room, it shuts off my wifi network with its signal. Conversely, if someone starts the microwave while my rear speakers are on they start buzzing and crackling like crazy. If this thing could stop either of those things I would be incredibly impressed.. Not that it would make me buy one, but I would still be impressed..

LOL, maybe for one client you will see better coverage, however most people who use Cisco devices don't do so from their fortress of solitude. Having used a lot of access points, including Cisco, I can assure you that there is no equivalent to a good radio if you are expecting a lot of traffic and a lot of clients. Cheap routers with maxed out transmitters will fail you big time in that situation, and by cheap I mean anything less than $500/node. Just because you can't see the value in Cisco devices, doesn't mean it's not there.

I understand that their devices are better but I don;'t see them being $1000 better

it is like when a company comes out with what seems to be their top of the line CPU then a few weeks later they release yet another CPU that cost 4 times as much but when tomshardware benchmarks them, there at most 10-15% faster, sure the new CPU is faster but it is not 4 times the cost faster.

the clean air tech will mainly help improve range, I have been in situations where a access point will be one one channel that seems clear, but changing to a slightly more congested channel will boost the range because something in the area was causing a lot of interference on that channel. The problem is that only their insanely expensive model has it, their super expensive overpriced model lacks it.

You know how they have people who will look at the hardware inside of a device and try to estimate the true cost like they did with the ipad, why not do it with these overpriced access points, I bet you will find something like cisco charging $1100 for only $60 worth of hardware

So many people not realising that Cisco is making products for the enterprise market...

I also would not buy a $1,000,000 heavy equipment truck to drive to work, why get something that has 8' tall tires and can carry 50 tons when I can just buy 100 used Honda's for the same price?

Generally when you're using this class of device you don't have just one. We have 10 Aironet's in our building being controlled by two WCS systems. The ability to have WCS control transmit power of each access point on a dynamic basis is something you're not going to find in consumer grade access points.

Enterprise class hardware also has the capability to support several different WLANs at a time. We have four running throughout our building, with some hidden in different parts of the building.

There are many features enterprise class equipment has that just aren't available in consumer grade equipment. It may be possible to unlock consumer access points or routers with hacks, but that's not something you want to do in a production environment.

it depends, if you only need to take a lot of stuff from point A to point B then a giant truck can work but if you need to take a lot of things from point ABCDEFGHIJK to point LMNOPQRSTUV then the cars will work

if you own a large building where you have like 5 floors and like 20 offices 20 routers or access points running tomato or dd-wrt will offer better coverage than the overpriced access point that may at most cover 1 floor in the building.

One of my friends owns a small restaurant they have a single router running tomato (I set it up for them, they have a 30mbit connection and open wifi, on a busy day, there can by around 30-40 people on it at the same time and it still runs fine. (they use the ssid to advertise the name of the place)

while a professional access point will work better, I don't feel it will work $1000 better than the wrt54gl they have set up.

it is just like the whole geforce quadro and firegl thing, the cards are about the same as the gaming cards, a software hack often allows them to get nearly the same performance (quadro's and firegl's will sometimes store slightly higher in memory intensive tasks due to the faster memory and more memory, but overall the performance boost is not worth paying 5 times more, unless you buy into the whole reliability thing which gaming cards handle the stuff just fine. for my college, The professor had me build a render fox for the graphic design class, the render engine they use are maya and 2 others which support GPU acceleration. it uses 2 GTX 280's in SLI 8GB memory and a core 2 quad Q9550 most of the year it will be at full CPU and GPU load, it runs windows XP and it has never crashed, (no antivirus or any extra software or internet connection, it just has the 3d design software, drivers and the render engines installed, no sound or anything else, stripped down startup, a gaming card can handle being at full GPU load non stop for months on end with no problem)

to summarize what I am really getting at, 1 of those access points will not cover a large area, if you have a office building, you will need multiple of those expensive access points.
Imagine you own a successful oil company supplying oil to most of the planet and then you suddenly go into debt and bankruptcy because your ID department decided to to buy like 20 of these clean air access points, how would you feel?

can even a large company afford more than 1 of these access points?

[citation][nom]razor512[/nom]it depends, if you only need to take a lot of stuff from point A to point B then a giant truck can work but if you need to take a lot of things from point ABCDEFGHIJK to point LMNOPQRSTUV then the cars will workif you own a large building where you have like 5 floors and like 20 offices 20 routers or access points running tomato or dd-wrt will offer better coverage than the overpriced access point that may at most cover 1 floor in the building. - snip - citation]

I think you may have missed the sarcasm :-) Quite a few posters were comparing this enterprise equipment to their home $50 routers.

These are for companies not home use, as stated before. They are a wet dream for us who work with them daily at work but have to come home to a pos.

Anyway kinda neat it will adjust to interferences other then just another access point.Sadly like all Cisco products it will be a year later before I would truly trust it, until then consider yourself a Beta tester.

As far as the cost goes

Cisco AIR-AP1242G-A-K9
CISCO AIR-AP1131AG-A-K9

They are have different usage but they both cost ~500 and they are several years old. Very high quality.

I worked (and work now) for a large company. Our IT budget SURPLUS at least one year was close to 1 million. That would buy about 10,000 of those things using only the money we did not need to spend. I work at a hospital now, our IT storage had a stack of about 20 unopened SISCO access points from a few years back. Figure at the time those were easily $300-$400 for the cheapest model. So there are plenty of companies that can easily afford to wire a building with those (or I guess UNwire it in this case)

razor512, i doubt you have any actual knowledge of how Enterprise networking works. Cisco's primary demographic is LARGE business. That's where they make their money. Cadillac doesn't aim to sell luxury sedans to the lower class. Neither do Ferrari or Porsche. Cisco is top of the line, workhorse enterprise equipment. They've been on top for as long as I can remember, and I'm very aware that their equipment is expensive, I remember paying almost 1200 bucks for my 1841 series router, and that was used. The equipment is expensive because it's the best. End of story.

"The technology even reduces wireless troubleshooting time from hours to minutes, saving businesses valuable time and money."

Is this something they said? If so, it should be in quotes. If not, this advertisement needs some explanation.

It's been said already, but these are for big business. I work for a very large nation wide company with a couple hundred locations across the US and Canada. We are putting in these units (most sites have 1 for the office and several for production plants) because of security and managability. so you are looking at between 300 and 500 units within our organization all at around $800/unit. Why? First, they can be configured so that they are tied to Active Directory. You don't have an AD account? You don't get wireless! And they can be centrally managed by one server/application. Your signal's not strong enough? I can change the power settings, signal strengths, channels or even send reboot commands to ANY AP in the country from 1 application!

And the 1242 model that somone mentioned above are rugedized for our plant environment. 2 months after being installed and there is 2 inches of dust layering everything. I'd like to see a household wireless AP survive that!

All of you people saying "I wouldn't buy this for myself though"... no I should hope not, that's not what they are meant for.

I use many 1130AG's, very nice and super stable.

Like they say "No one ever got fired for recommending Cisco."

They say that about IBM, not Cisco. If you type it into Google it auto completes with IBM on the end of it by the type you've finished the third word.

TBH though it probably isn't any less true about Cisco.

Oh I've heard it a lot about Cisco!

I recognize the argument for enterprise kit, especially with regard to wifi when you have really high client density...but just a heads up on some of these features you Cisco guys think the dd-wrt fellas don't have:

The wifi auth via AD is as simple as adding the radius server to a windows server and pushing a wpa supplicant to the AD client machines via gpo. Then just set the AP to radius! Easy.

The multi-ssid stuff is old news, including separate encryption and ap isolation options for each network. We've had that forever too.

Webmin has the ability to run ssh commands on any number of hosts from one interface at one time...AP, server, or otherwise. Shell scripts that do substitution in the configs and issue a reboot work the same on 1 AP as on 5 and aren't rocket science.

I've worked under both schools of thought and with both classes of hardware...so don't be so impressed with yourselves and your budgets that you can't appreciate some schmuck on a forum defending a well thought out wrt deployment. Sheesh.

I've got to agree with you but having done both like you, the one thing I can say, hardware quality is still Cisco's best point. I've had more wrt54g's die than Cisco ap's, and I've had a LOT more Cisco's. Functionality wise they may be very similar, but reliability is still why Cisco is champ.

There may be some other consumer routers that run dd-wrt and are more reliable than the linksys ones, but it's still a crap shop. Cisco just works.

Cisco ditch investing in wireless tehcnology long time ago, that let to other companies to show up their stuff, like Aruba and Meru, and gain market share. Cisco now is worry and wants to cath up...

Ruckus Wireless solved the problem of Wi-Fi interference with its patented smart antenna array years ago - unfortunately, they just don't have the same mindshare or marketing muscle that Cisco has. Take a peek at this video, which explains why Cisco's "CleanAir" is too little, too late. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giE2Rg5jMGc

now this is actually good technology. another benchmark needs to be done to show how much this improves performance,

the ruckus AP seems to beat the competition by leaps and bounds

I would like to see how it handles a situation where there clients all around it, will it still offer the extra range and performance?

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 90-13.html