Cisco’s 802.11ax products

Cisco is in the 802.11ax market now, with two sets product products under each of its main brands.  These are:  Cisco Meraki MR45/55 and Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points.  You cannot find these kinds of products on Amazon, but some are listed on CDW for instance.

The Meraki products don’t have the full set of 802.11ax features, and the Catalyst 9100 APs are categorized as “certifiable” and “pre-standard” depending on what models you chose.  For our market share purposes, we’ll be calling all of these products as “802.11ax” (aka Wi-Fi 6) in our market share tables, so it looks like Cisco will have shipped some product in the C1Q19 quarter.  This is interesting because it is common for Cisco to introduce new enterprise products at its Cisco Live show, and that’s on Jun 9-13, 2019.  So, we were thinking we’d find out about the products in San Diego at Cisco Live.  It’s possible that Cisco felt some competitive pressure to get the products out there; many of its competitors have already been shipping products (HPE Aruba, Ruckus, H3C are some examples).

We’ll be reporting on C1Q19 shares in a couple months and will have more to say about how many Cisco 802.11ax products actually shipped, but we are fairly confident the 802.11ax enterprise-class product class is hitting the knee of the curve, so to speak, very soon.