Meraki MR34 Cloud Managed AP MR34-HW Leaflet

Deploying 802.11ac

Today, users’ demands for a greatly improved wireless experience 
are so strong that deployments are continuing at a considerable 
pace. As the new standard comes to the attention of IT departments, 
the question of whether to deploy 802.11n or 802.11ac will inevitably 
arise.

Support for co-existence with older 802.11a/b/g/n client devices is 
built into the 802.11ac standard, and thankfully the latest generation 
of 802.11n APs and clients already provide excellent performance 
in terms of throughput, support for voice and video apps, and high 
client density environments. For those administrators looking for 
even higher capcity, 802.11ac access points are here to meet those 
needs.

With no physical controller to upgrade, the Meraki cloud-based 
architecture makes migrating to 802.11ac a plug-and-play experience. 
Administrators can add 801.11ac APs to their existing network with 
no manual configuration or added complexity, as all the settings for 
the APs, including security settings, access control and — crucially — 
radio configurations are automatically retrieved from the cloud.

Those needing the additional capacity of the new standard can 
upgrade from 802.11n to ‘ac’, or can mix-and-match, for example 
deploying ‘n’ for standard capacity needs and ‘ac’ where 
performance and density requirements are the highest. The Meraki 
solution makes mixed or staggered approach to deployment 
straightforward, comfortably accommodating management of a 
mixture of 802.11ac and 802.11n APs within a single pane-of-glass, the 
Meraki dashboard.

Meraki AP management is out-of-band, meaning that wireless traffic 
never passes through a controller or the cloud, so it experiences 
no bottleneck along its journey. The advantage of the Meraki 
architecture becomes greater the faster the traffic is flowing, leaving 
legacy architectures based on hardware controller appliances 
behind.

When administrators are ready for a migration to Gigabit WiFi, the 
benefits of the highly adaptable Meraki cloud-based architecture 
will enable the new technology to be rolled-out and managed in the 
most efficient and least disruptive way possible.

802.11ac APs  

(1.3 Gbps)

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