So you thought that 802.11n was the ultimate protocol, allowing 300 Mbps, maybe up to 450 Mbps? If you are not working in wireless yet, now is the right time to think about switching career, and starting to get a few certifications in the 802.11 wireless field: new protocols are coming that will change the deal for a long time, and make 802.11 THE protocol you want to be expert on. So get some Cisco wireless training and prepare for the storm to come: Read the rest of this entry »
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End of Life for the Cisco Aironet AP 1250, the end of a beta product
Cisco announced yesterday the end of life / end of sale for the Cisco Aironet 1250 access point (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/wireless/ps5678/ps6973/end_of_life_notice_c51-681596.html?vs_f=RSS+Feed+for+End-of-Sale+and+End-of-Life+Products&vs_p=End-of-Sale+and+End-of-Life+Announcement+for+the+Cisco+Aironet+1250+Series+Access+Points&vs_k=1).
You can still order it for a few months, but it will be completely removed from support and upgrade by early 2014.
This EoL/EoS announcement was long expected. The 1250 was the first enterprise class AP certified to be compliant with 802.11n draft 2. It was launched in 2008 at a time when everyone wanted 802.11n data rates, but the second draft of the 802.11n amendment had gone through extensive changes since draft v1.0, and was receiving thousands of comments and requests for changes from many IEEE 802.11 participants.
At that time, Cisco built the 1250 to allow for 802.11n draft 2 compliance, and still the guaranty to be 802.11n compliant when the final amendment would be released. This was a risky bet, because their could have been major changes in the protocol between draft 2 and the final amendment. To provide this guaranty, Cisco built the 1250 in a modular fashion, with extractable modules for each radio module block. In worst case scenarios, if the final amendment proved very different from draft 2.0 and if the 1250 hardware could not support the final 802.11n specifications, you would just have to replace the modules (slide the old module out, slide the new module in, done. No need to move the AP).
This modularity came at a cost: the 1250 was big and heavy (the modules could not be integrated, as they had to be able to slide in or out), and the 1250 was consuming too much power… at least too much for a standard 802.3af switch. To power it, you needed a specific power brick, or a new, enhanced PoE switch supporting the (yet to come at that time) 802.3at.
When 802.11n was released in 2009, the 1250 hardware didn’t have to be replaced (the AP could in fact do more than the final amendment required), and you could upgrade from 802.11n draft 2.0 to 802.11n final amendment support with a simple code upgrade.
Then Cisco started shipping final 802.11n APs, with integrated radios (no need to be able to change these, as they were already fully 802.11n compliant), and lower power consumption (standard PoE 802.3af). Many models came out, from the 1140 (to replace the 1130), the 1040 (a simpler and cheaper 802.11n AP), to the 1260 (to replace the 1240) and the 3500 (to add CleanAir to the 1260).
In this new configuration, the 1250 had no more cards to play. It was heavier than the others, took more space, did not blend well in most indoor environments, and consumed more power.
Still, the 1250 continued to be a very highly demanded product for close to 2 years, surfing on the wave of its gigantic initial success… and it took close to 2 years for this success to cool down and demand to slow down to a point where Cisco accepted to EoL that AP.
I’ll keep the few I have in my lab as a souvenir of these pioneer times, and as a tribute to a beta product which sales outperformed many “final products” before and after…
CCIE Wireless: take it now or wait for v2.0?
The CCIE Wireless lab exam, currently v1.0, will change to CCIE Wireless lab v2.0 on November 18th this year (2011)…
The main changes between v1.0 and v2.0 are as follows:
- Controller code is updated from 4.2 to 7.0 MR1 (which is the current code), which brings new features (CleanAir, VideoStream, IPv6 bridging, Office Extend, band select, passive clients, VLAN pooling, mesh, to name only the main ones)
- Location Appliance is replaced with Cisco Mobility Service Engine (MSE), running code 7.0, allowing both Context Aware Services (CAS) and Wireless Intrusion Prevention System (WiPS)
- ADU/ CSSC client is replaced with AnyConnect v3.0
- Open Ended Questions are removed, and replaced with troubleshooting exercises. This is not a separate lab section, like for CCIE R&S, but is part of the lab itself: you will need to solve some issues to make the lab work. For those who have taken the initial lab v1.0, this is nothing new!
- ACS is migrated from 4.2 to 5.2, and brings along NAC
These changes represent about 30% of the lab content, which means that 70% of the core knowledge remains the same. So should you rush to take your lab now, or should you pace yourself and take the new version?
If you are at the very beginning of your lab journey, there is probably no reason to rush. The lab is hard, and rushing without being ready is paying to fail. But if you have already travelled a while on your journey toward CCIE, you may want to push harder and get your number before the change, for several reasons:
- MSE 7.0 and NAC are different animals from the Location Appliance…. not to mention ACS 5.2. You can do more things, and setting traps on them is easier (and with 2 years of CCIEW v1.0, I am sure that the lab designers collected along the way, thanks to all those candidates, plenty of ideas about things that can go wrong).
- This is an expert level lab, and you will be tested on features that will probably new to you, and that will be poorly documented (how many times have you run IPV6 multicast on a controller over the last few months?)
- New labs means testing, which means that the lab may be difficult to pass on the first days. Regardless of how carefully the lab designers tested the new lab sets, unexpected surprises will probably arise on such complex scenarios, rendering some lab sets difficult or impossible to pass without fine tuning. This tuning may happen during the alpha and beta tests, but some live tuning may be necessary for the first candidates. The lab designers may also realise that some scenarios are more difficult (or longer) than they thought. As an exam writer, I know that we can be surprised to see candidate get stuck on items that we thought would be no brainer… so it may be a few weeks before the first candidate succeeds int he new version of the lab.
For those reasons, you probably want to take the lab now, while it runs on the good old (and more limited) 4.2. Invest in summer longer days to work a bit later, get the training you need on items that make you fail the lab or feel uncomfortable, and get your CCIE now, instead of waiting and having to postpone until early 2012…
I will be delivering 2 more CCIE Wireless Lab Boot Camps just in time for you to schedule for a v1.0 Exam. See our CCIE Wireless Lab schedule page for more info.
Good Luck, and Study Hard!
Jerome
Understanding medianet
Cisco keeps saying that Video is the next Voice. What is meant here is that voice evolved from “you call one place over an analog line, and hope that the person you try to reach will be there” to “you call a person, and the flexibility of voice and VoIP systems allows you to ring the person you try to reach, on the best phone/voice device (which can be a phone, a PC, a tablet, etc.) at a very cheap or no cost”. For Cisco, video is next on the list… our children will look at yoube as an interesting but yet quite archaic media. very soon, video will be an integrated part of your communication experience. You will have video conversations just like you have audio conversations and will post videos of your holidays just like you post pictures. Oh yes, I know, you have been hearing this story about video calls for 20 years, and nothing happened. Why? 2 reasons:
- static phones: I do not need to see your face when I am calling your home, this is boring and of little or no interest. But I am definitely interested if you call me from, say, the Valley of Fire in Nevada and want to share with me what you see. So video calls only make sense if there is something to see. With today portable voice devices, voice videos start to make sense. So why don’t we do it yet? That’s reason number 2.
- Bandwidth: I remember the days of CuCme, when the best we could have was a small (but live!) picture of you, refreshed every minute or so. Have we done much better since? I can imagine showing you the magnificent desert and red rocks of Valley of Fire, but if do it live from my phone, it is certainly not going to be very fun: poor definition, bad refresh rate, limited colours… boring. Yes, video consumes bandwidth. So how can we make it better?
This is where medianet comes into the play. The idea is to have the network play a role to improve video communication. This implies that the network devices (end points, interconnection devices such as routers, switches and others) become video aware. This awareness allows for several enhancements:
- The network becomes aware of the various video streams, and of the available bandwidth.
- This awareness allows the network to feed the endpoints (video cameras, video phones, etc.) with information allowing the endpoints to choose the best codec based on the curretn available bandwidth. This is done live and adjusted (live) to the changing network conditions. The result is a smooth video without glitch or interruption in the flow.
- When conditions change too fast, the network is able to re-encode the video on the fly while it forwards it from one point to the other.
- Because the endpoints (both the video emitter and the receiver) register to the network, the network can determine, live, the best path (that is the path offering the best bandwidth and routing time combination) for the video stream. This determination is live and can change if needed.
- The video is buffered at the best location, on the end device or close to the end device.
- If packets are lost, the network is able to compensate for this loss by using a forward error method.
- Different types of videos can get different types of prioritization, for example to send live teleconference traffic before recorded video.
- This network awareness makes that the endpoints become plug and play. You can just turn your device on, and look for videos (live or recorded) just by looking for their names or who sends them, without having to care about how you connect to the network and where the videos are.
Is all this SCI-FI? No, it is already starting to happen, and so fast that you will have to be part of it soon. If you buy new Cisco hardware, it may be a good idea to verify if it is “Media Ready”. Cisco offers a collection of design guides, white papers, documented use cases as well as a set of services to prepare, plan, design, implement, operate, and optimize a successful and step-wise migration to a medianet. Here is a good starting point:
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ciscoitatwork/unified_comm/Media_Ready_Network.html
