Introducing Campus Gateway: Seamless Roaming and Scale for the Large Campus Wireless Network

[tschlafke]

Good things take time and a little bit of magic 🪄, especially for the perfect fit. Meet the newest addition to our Cisco Wireless portfolio, Campus Gateway. Cisco has solidified its vision of providing cloud and on-prem offerings without forcing you into an architecture, management solution or compromise on great performance.

Campus Gateway is a cloud-native wireless solution that provides:

☁️  Enterprise cloud that is large campus ready

🚀 Seamless roaming at scale

👨🏻‍💻 Deployment without redesign

Check the deployment guide: http://cs.co/9009NQzw1
And follow that up with the Installation guide: http://cs.co/9005NQzoD 

[RWelch]

5K APs and 50K clients - NICE! 

[cmr]

1 year warranty and 2 weeks for an RMA, surely that can't be right?  Also where are the release notes for MR31.2.X...?

[Mloraditch]

Well the list price on that thing is 106K... I'm guessing they would prefer you get the RMA uplift. If your budget can afford it, you can probably afford the uplift is the thinking.

[meraki-chris]

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@cmr wrote:

Also where are the release notes for MR31.2.X...?

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Currently, you need to have a CG in-network for r31-2 to be visible.

[cmr]

I did see that, but access to the release notes would be nice 🙏

[tschlafke]

That's a good catch!  Error on the installation guide, it should have been 1 year warranty and next day RMA as standard.  It's been updated now!

[RaphaelL]

This is going to sound harsh but it looks great but a bit little too late to the party. 

I don't understand the target audience for this product. Most large enterprise probably already own C9800 WLCs and putting such an expensive pair of MCG in every location / campus doesn't sound cost effective. 

[siarena]

We do have lots of customers are thinking to move to a cloud managed solution for whatever reason. Before Campus Gateway, we didn't have a solution that would scale to the requirements of a large campus deployment. Now we do. Campus Gateway fils in a product gap offering a centrlized, overlay solution for lage campus.

[gregpalmer2]

The cloud monitoring for the 9800 WLCs seems to be quite a success. Very easy to implement and no additional imvestment costs. The MCG appears to be the next evolution of cloud monitoring. 

[siarena]

Agree. The Cloud Monitoring of C9800 is a first step to Cloud Management adoption. It's Monitoring, not Management, so the customer is still in charge for the full management (for example software upgrades and most importantly troubleshooting).

The next step in Cloud adoption is to go Campus Gateway which is a cloud native solution, completely managed from Cloud.

[EugeneChee]

I had a customer (up for Tech Refresh) whom has a large vlan, like 2000 APs, and i was trying to propose Meraki. 
Not the best design, but it is what it is.

After speaking with internal Principal Technical Marketing Engineer in 2024, , in full transparency, TME mentioned that the Meraki scaling to that size, it was not battle tested. 

With this MCG gateway,  it at the very least, resolved the concern for my customer. 

Looking forward!
to get onto cloud, and to manage the large vlan that they have.

[redsector]

I was happy to get rid of any Wireless-Controllers when going from Cisco Classic accesspoints with WLAN-Controller to Meraki accesspoints without controller, and now I will will never change back to a WLAN-controller. Never.

[siarena]

And you don't have to adopt it if you don't need to 😀. We want to give customers choices independently of their IT operation model, on-prem or cloud managed.  Campus Gateway allow you to scale across a large roaming domain like the one you would have in a University campus, in a Hospital or Manufacturing plant, across thousands of APs. And Campus Gateway is not a WLC, it does not manage the APs, it only centralize some functions (traffic aggregation, Radius proxy, mobility database) when required. Both APs and Campus Gateway are managed directly via Dashboard.

[AlbertoXYZ]

That’s a helpful clarification, especially the part about Campus Gateway not being a WLC. I can see how having that flexibility for large environments like hospitals or campuses makes a big difference depending on the deployment model.

[gregpalmer2]

For customers who have already purchased the CW9800H1, will there be an option to upgrade/ convert the device to a CW9800H1-MCG? I.E. connect the CW9800H1 to Dashboard in Hybrid Operating Mode, then convert to cloud managed MCG. The MCG supports features that the WLC does not, like Cloud RRM and Adaptive Policy.

[siarena]

The CW9800 hardware is capable of operating in cloud and on-prem mode. However, the ability to migrate between modes is not available at this time.

[gregpalmer2]

Thank you @siarena. I also noticed the CW9800 is not listed in the documentation for hybrid operating mode. Is this a typo? 
The older C9800 goes end of sale in Dec 2025. Customers who have hybrid mode enabled on their existing C9800 devices would have no incentive to upgrade to the newer platform if hybrid mode isn’t available.

[siarena]

Hi @gregpalmer2 

It's coming together with the support of C9800-CL and WiFi 7 APs. I think it should be in the summer release or soon after. Regards