Last week at the virtual #MFD5 event, the first up was our friends at Mist – now a Juniper company
(That was announced about a year ago around the time of #MFD4)
First up, let’s look at their AP line-up – you can easily see the couple of new Access Points highlighted on this chart.
The current, top-of-the-line access point with Wi-Fi 6 and a full suite of IoT sensors is the AP43 – these are available in both internal and external antenna versions, and have been their flagship access point for the past year.
The new line of new access points starts with the dedicated outdoor AP – the AP63. This has been designed from the ground up as an outdoor AP with the features you’d expect from an enterprise-class outdoor AP.
https://www.mist.com/wp-content/uploads/Mist-AP63-Datasheet.pdf
If you feed it 802.3bt PoE in the multi-gig Ethernet port 0 – you can then do PoE passthrough at 802.3af rates out the second gig Ethernet port. Perfect for locations where you might already have PTZ security cameras – the installation can be amazingly fast while not losing your camera functions.
All of the Mist access points that support Wi-Fi 6 support all the features normal associated with 802.11ax, including:
- OFDMA
- 1024-QAM
- MU MIMO
- Target Wake Time (TWT)
- Spatial Frequency Reuse (BSS Coloring)
- As well as full backwards compatibility with 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
The other unique feature of some of the Mist access points it their custom-built BLE antenna array.
This is designed specifically to give angle of arrival information for Bluetooth. This feature allows for Mist access points to help ‘triangulate’ and learn better the local RF environment and quickly find locations of target devices not only using normal BLE functions, but to be able to augment with some increased level of accuracy based on how other like-equipped access points also view the same target device.
There are a couple of Mist access points without the BLE antenna array, and those use only the standard omni methods of location tracking.
Another fun announcement was for their new ‘Wallplate’ access point.
Sure, Mist isn’t even close to being the first in this arena – of multi-function wallplate sized access points. But it now allows them to compete in this crowded marketplace a bit better.
The AP12 is their smallest AP.
https://www.mist.com/wp-content/uploads/Mist-AP12-Datasheet.pdf
Unlike their other access points, this one is designed to be mounted on a wall rather than on a ceiling. And has an omni BLE antenna as well as both 2.4GHz and 5GHz omni antennas. It is designed for environments where you might need PoE passthrough, and a couple of extra local managed switch ports.
A final thing to mention on Mist access points is their ‘Third Radio’
– this is targeted with listening in on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz for dual-band WIDS/WIPS, spectrum analysis, synthetic client and location analytics radio
These extra features allow for some fairly sophisticated analytics and security tracking from each of the Mist AP’s.
There was a LOT more in the Mist presentations on their AI / Marvis / integration with their Juniper wired solutions.
Check out the rest of the Mist presentations at Mobility Field Day #5 sessions on their YouTube channel here:
