I was taking a peek at some of the replies, all good stuff. If you're moving on from MR36 and MR42 and want to stay in the mid-range of the Wi-Fi 7 family, CW9174I could also be a great choice, and if you only have 30W PoE then the 9174 models are fully functional from a Wi-Fi perspective even on class 4 power, you won't lose any spatial streams, all client serving radios plus the IoT and Scanning radios are all on.
With only 30W on the CW9174I/E, what you lose is some power on the USB port (9W down to 2.5W and you likely don't care, unless you're simulating a retail environment in your home lab with ESL dongles) and the 5Gbps mGig port drops to 2.5Gbps, that's it. And if it's a 30W switch port and maybe also only 1G then you may also not care about 2.5 vs 5Gbps for the uplink.
All that said, if you've got 60W and/or mGig, go for it with a CW9176I or CW9178I. They are absolutely more capable and higher horsepower APs. The newer mid-range 9174 is not a "stripped down" 9176, it's more of a "souped up" 9172.
On your other question about ready to go for Meraki out of the box, yes. Regardless if you order -RTG (ready-to-go with default low profile mounting bracket) or the -CFG (configurable) to customize the brackets you want, all of the CW (Cisco Wireless) CW917x Wi-Fi 7 APs are "Global Use APs" and it's fully converged dual-boot hardware, with subscription-based unified licensing.
The AP will determine out of the box, with no priming or prepping, if it belongs in a Meraki Dashboard or on a WLC. And you can also convert it back and forth on Day2+, bidirectionally, without a support ticket, so that's nice if you also have a WLC in your lab and want to use both personas over time.
For any other readers coming across this thread in the future, I thought this is a good spot to describe the GUAP process, here's a Global Use AP slide below and a bunch of notes.
There are two key things about a "Global Use AP". First, we have decoupled the AP PID/SKU from the boot mode (all GUAP APs can be on-prem or cloud-managed), and 2nd we have decoupled the AP PID/SKU from the regulatory domain in which it will operate.
There are 4 sections on the slide for days 0/1/2/3, but in reality, days 1/2/3 could be any indefinite length of time (not literally 1 day). 😉
On day 0, the very first boot out of the box or after a factory reset, there is a GUAPO process (Global Use AP Onboarding) that determines the management mode automatically. Once it knows to either join a controller or join a dashboard, it will stay that way on day 1, regardless of any reboots, unless it’s later migrated on day 2, or factory reset on Day 3.
The first thing out of the box on Day 0, the AP first checks if it’s got connectivity to the cloud and if it has been claimed into a Dashboard Org and perhaps also assigned to a network. If so, great, it’s off and running. If there’s no connectivity to the cloud or it’s NOT claimed into a Meraki Org inventory, it begins the search for a WLC and continues with that onboarding process.
So if it’s a Meraki customer, basically nothing changes whatsoever, and it’s as transparent as possible to the customer: Claim the AP's serial number which is now called the Cloud ID (or claim an order # of many Cloud IDs) then it’s plug and play. The only caveat being if that customer has a hybrid deployment of both Meraki and controllers for different parts of their deployment, then there’s a little more to pay attention to.
If it’s a classic controller customer, you power up the AP, there’s no Meraki Org for it to live in and/or no Internet access, and it begins the search for a WLC (or Cat Center). If it finds a compatible controller, it reboots into WLC mode and joins the WLC like normal with CAPWAP discovery (which includes DHCPv4 Option 43, DNCPv6 Option 52, DNSv4, DNSv6, Broadcast IPv4, Multicast IPv6, or Static assignment), or we have plug and play with Cloud PnP or Pnpserver.<localdomain> for CatC.
One more cool thing, in the case of on-prem APs on WLAN controllers, in addition to the AP auto-determining its boot mode (cloud/dashboard vs on-prem/WLC) it will also determine its regulatory domain. So for on-prem, when ordering, there are no more county codes like -B or -E etc.
After joining a WLC, it then determines which country it should be operating in, in which case it’ll check 4 things, in the following order. The 1st is via GPS/GNSS, 2nd is by proximity via nearby APs within RF range on the same WLC. A 3rd way is via migration from Meraki Dashboard to WLC mode and it’ll retain the country code that was in Dashboard. This is the “Migrate to WLC” button on the AP flex table page (API works too) and the APs will retain the country code.
And the 4th and final (failsafe) way is with a regulatory activation file which can be downloaded from Dashboard and installed on a WLC. This last one will be rare, but it’s a last resort, cryptographically signed but human-readable file generated off the Meraki Dashboard, thrown onto a USB key and sneaker-netted to a WLC to authorize a list of S/Ns to operate in a given country. So if you happen to be in an underground bunker with no GPS, no Internet or Dashboard access, no other APs whatsoever, then we've got you covered there too. 😁
Hope that helps!
A bunch more info here: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/access_point/technical-reference/global-use-ap-dg.htm...
