The Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points includes the 9115 and 9117, and designed to meet high demand network access.
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Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller
Score 9.1 out of 10
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The Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller on Catalyst Access Points (EWC-AP) is a next-generation Wi-Fi solution, combining an advanced controller – the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers – with a Wi-Fi 6 access point – the Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points – to create a wireless experience for evolving and growing organization.
Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points are well suited for dense Client solutions. We have used these in areas where we have a large number of guests that need top-notch connectivity without ever losing connection. The one area where we do have difficulty is in outdoor deployment, where large areas need to be covered, but we do not have physical connectivity in order to get the access points connected. This is not an access point issue but more of a physical connectivity limitation.
Overall I could see myself recommending these to others if they have the right set of circumstances at their place of business. Those would be like ours, if they had a location that couldnt be served by a WLC. Once setup they are easy to manage and self healing as in they wont go down when one is offline.
So this product actually helps in healthcare facilities where we have a wireless, we call this WOW monitors. It's Wireless On Wheels. So we use those monitors to the patient's room to room. So in that case, rather than connecting it to wire, so it really helps us to connect through the WIFI and access the patients whenever we be needed.
They could definitely download their code faster. When we first get them out of the box and join them on the network, it takes probably 20, 30 minutes per access point to download the new code from the wireless controller and then reboot itself and then come back online.
When you're configuring it on the controller, if you want to switch access point groups, we have them broken out per site. Every time you add it to one of those groups, it also has to reboot. That's like downtime for us. That could be improved, I think.
The Cisco Catalyst 9120 Access Points have been a solid deployment for me. Using their interface is a mix of new and old. They run IOS, so if you know the CLI, you can easily navigate around them. You can join them to an older controller if it supports a certain version, you can join it to a new 9800 controller--very straight forward--and you can run the embedded wireless controller on them directly. I've found this to be very useful at smaller sites. The Cisco Catalyst 9120 Access Points are not limited to feature sets like the older generations' mobility express platform.
Using Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points you can expect good performance, if not excellent. Coupled with other tools and managment systems you can easily gain good insight and ease of management. Flexible deployment variations help you adopt the equipment to work for most any required scenario you could think of. It's a well designed and evolved product.
Cisco has been very good at correcting early issues with their code. Their TAC support has been fantastic when I would open a case with issues I was facing. Even though the hardware was new, they were very familiar with the interfaces and issues I was having. In the past I've been concerned about adopting a new product right away because of support issues. That was not the case here. Once I had the deployment up and running, they have had a good run of reliability.
We are migrating from Aironet platform to Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points. That's more flexible, and we do it to sync switching, SDWAN, and wifi under one family.
Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller provides the ability to manage and deploy the wireless network from a web UI or mobile application, and without the expense or complexity of a wireless controller appliance.
These access points offer flexibility in deployment scenarios, supporting both standalone and controller-based architectures. Organisations can choose the model that best suits their current needs and scale as their requirements grow. Cisco Aironet Access Points are compatible with Cisco's Wireless LAN controllers, allowing for centralized management and monitoring of a large number of access points across the network. With the recent changes, it will even support cloud base controllers.
