Cisco and Apple updated their Fastlane integrated offering to now include support for the WiFi 6 standard to better manage the user experience for enterprises that rely on Apple iOS-based products like the iPhone and iPad.
The newly dubbed Fastlane+ platform adds more advanced scheduling intelligence so that it can better interpret application requirements, like a video call needing more bandwidth, and dynamically schedule network resources for a better user experience.
Matt McPherson, Cisco’s Wireless CTO, explained in a blog post that this allows those devices to send an advanced scheduling request trigger in highly congested environments to the Cisco Catalyst Access Points.
“This notifies the network that a user is initiating a Webex, FaceTime, or other mission-critical, latency-sensitive application,” McPherson wrote. “Because voice and video traffic typically have predictable bit rates, traffic patterns, bandwidth, and latency requirements, Fastlane+ allows the network to estimate the client’s demand and preemptively schedule airtime on the access point. This provides mutual optimization for both the device and network and enables the network to intelligently make decisions on how it produces the best experience for the end user.”
The Fastlane+ capabilities are also automatically turned on through the enterprise device management platform so that the end user does not need to deal with provisioning. It’s currently available on the Cisco Catalyst 9130 AP and Apple’s IOS XE 17.4.1 iteration.
The company’s first merged onto the Fastlane initiative in 2015. That effort was initially focused on optimizing the iOS ecosystem with Cisco’s collaboration tools like Spark, Telepresence, and WebEx.
WiFi 6 Need for Speed
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a year ago unanimously approved opening up 1,200 megahertz of spectrum in the 6 GHz band available to WiFi for unlicensed use. It was the largest swath of spectrum allocated for WiFi since 1989, and it came as WiFi 6, the next version of WiFi technology, began to proliferate in routers and silicon.
WiFi 6 is designed to provide speeds roughly 250% faster than the previous standard through a myriad of technology advances in addition to the spectrum boost. Those technologies include orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO), channel utilization capability up to 160 megahertz, beamforming, and 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM).
Vendors and device makers have since been quickly rolling out the technology into their enterprise-focused products.
