MR52-MR56 compatible issue

[光热斗]

Hi all,

New to the Meraki Community. Not sure if anyone before me has raised this question. 

We upgraded the APs from MR32 and 52 to MR 56 last year, but missed one MR32. I would like to get a better understanding of cross-model deployment before spending money to buy another one. 

Since MR 56 supports Wifi  6(802.11ax), but MR 52 does not. Is it possible to have both MR52 and MR56 without dealing with a backward compatibility issue? Or will one MR52 bring the whole network down to 802.11ac? 

And what's your best practice for having two different models in your wireless network? 

Thanks in advance!  

[KarstenI]

My best practice is to avoid it where possible. But you won’t have any backward compatibility issues. But it can be the other way round because clients just do dumb things. Some devices will connect to the more “feature-rich” ax AP although having a better signal from the ac AP.

Just make sure that you don’t mix in any MR32 as these devices limit the network from running recent firmware versions.

[cmr · Accepted solution]

To expand on what @KarstenI said, you will not limit the network by having MR32s in it, the MR32s will just run an older version.  It does limit a few features that require a consistent version, like NBAR categorisation, but that is it.  We have sites with MR32, 33, 34, 42, 52 and CW9166 and the latter have their Wi-Fi 6 features enabled (but not Wi-Fi 6e).  We tested a lot of clients and found no major issues and the site has been like this for 2-3 months with ~2-3'000 clients per day visiting.