New Wi-Fi 6 APs, new software, added security

[davidvan]

Hi Community,

We will release a blog post about this later in the week, but wanted to give the community a heads up that our website was just updated, and reflects a brand new set of Wi-Fi 6 APs!

If you payed close attention to recent firmware upgrade notes, you may have already spotted them. The MR46E, MR76, and MR86 will provide the ability to deploy Wi-Fi 6 to indoor, outdoor, and focused wireless environments. They will be available starting May 19, 2020. 

Highlights:

• MR86 is an IP67 rated, rugged 4×4:4 Multigigabit access point, with a 3.5 Gbps max data rate for high-density outdoor environments 
• MR76 is an IP67 rated, rugged outdoor 2×2:2 access point with 1.7 Gbps max data rate
• The MR46E is a 4×4:4 Multigigabit access point, 3.5 Gbps max data rate, with automatically-detectable external antennas. MR46E can re-use the same external antennas as MR53E.
• New troubleshooting capabilities with deeper insights and analytics into wireless performance metrics
• New security capabilities with WPA3, Adaptive Policy enablement, Identity PSK w/o RADIUS
• Other included firmware updates include MQTT, Local Authorization, and NBAR support

In recent months, outdoor and focused Wi-Fi installations have become even more important. Schools have been trying to provide outdoor Wi-Fi in parking lots, pop-up healthcare facilities want to provide outdoor access, and retail locations are seeing an increase in outdoor installations as they start opening back up their stores.

Are others seeing the same impacts?

[AnythingHosted]

Excellent. 

Is there any more information on "Identity PSK w/o RADIUS"?

Looks like there has been a website refresh as well, looks great. 

[davidvan]

@AnythingHosted You'll be able to read more about that tomorrow! It will use Meraki cloud for authentication instead of requiring a RADIUS server.

[AnythingHosted]

That's excellent. We were just testing deployment of FreeRadius but not that easy to manage outside of our own business (eg for our clients). I'm glad we haven't spent too much time on this!

Do we need to contact Support to have anything enabled in our Dashboard, or will this become available automatically?

Thanks,

Chris

[LG]

I wonder if the "deeper insights and analytics" will be only for the wifi 6 APs or for older ones as well like MR33, 42, etc..

[davidvan]

@LG All Wi-Fi 5/802.11ac Wave 2 APs (MR33, MR42, etc.) and Wi-Fi 6 APs. You can read more details about Meraki Health here

[cmr]

@davidvan that link asks for permission to access a Google Doc, any chance of opening it up?

[davidvan]

Updated the link

[LG]

Perfect, thanks David!

Do you know when the Performance and History tab will be available?!

[davidvan]

@LG By end of day.

It'll certainly be there tomorrow morning when you wake up. Curious to hear your thoughts once you do the upgrade.

[LG]

Everything enabled here with 27.1. I have two MR33 at home, didn't do any stress test yet, but looks fine for now and liked very much the performance/connection statistics and information.
Kinda liked the ipsk without radius, but I was expecting something a bit different, like ipsk with meraki authentication...
Local authentication I think it is an interesting addition as well.. need to understand better the LDAP/AD integration in this case

[JohnD]

Working great on my MR45 and MR56. I love the new Performance tab -- across the whole AP it's not as useful in my opinion, but the per-client view is mind-blowingly useful. Finally if someone says "At 12PM my wifi was slow", you can dig into their client and see what AP/channel/SNR they had, correlate it with recent channel changes or DFS events, etc all from one page.

This is really where Meraki was already ahead of the competition and this is yet another leap forward. Right now I'm kind of jealous I don't work in an IT department 😄 

On another note, 802.11ax performance seems slightly improved on MR56 in 27.1. On an 80MHz channel with no neighboring APs, I was previously observing around 450 down 550 up, now getting closer to 550 down 670 up (670 up is the fastest uplink I've ever seen on 80MHz HE)

[davidvan]

Summarizing some of the new pages added/updated in Meraki documentation:

iPSK without RADIUS

NBAR Advanced Application Recognition

Meraki Local Authentiction

Access Point Firmware Upgrade Strategy

Meraki Health

[davidvan]

MR36, MR46, MR56, MR76, MR86, MR46E are all listed on Wi-Fi Alliance page for those interested

Link

[cmr]

@davidvan any idea why all of the certificates are certifying the MR46-HW?  Shouldn't the other model's certificates certify their hardware and not the MR46... 🤔

[davidvan]

@cmr Do you have a screenshot? I'm not sure I see what you're seeing

[cmr]

@davidvanthe MR86 is still broken though some seem fixed now:

[davidvan]

@cmr The MR46 in this case was used as the parent platform. Since there are shared hardware components across models, they can be certified this way. For example, MR46 and MR86 core components are the same, but have trivial differences from certification perspective with outdoor enclosure and antennas. You'll see the same across older models & platforms as well.

Hope that answers your question!

[cmr]

Thanks @davidvan for the explanation, that makes sense 😎