Juniper expands WiFi 6 access point family to support remote workers

Taking aim at helping enterprise customers support tons of remote workers, Juniper this week extended its family of Wi-Fi 6 wireless access points.

The access points feature integration with the Juniper Mist Wi-Fi Assurance cloud service to help customers with automated WLAN configuration, anomaly detection, performance and service-level metrics to ultimately make wireless networks more predictable and reliable.

An optional package includes Juniper’s Virtual Network Assistant, an AI-based engine called Marvis that features dynamic packet capture and machine learning to automatically identify, adapt to and fix network issues.

The four new Wi-FI 6 wireless access points :

• AP63 – Includes location services and is aimed at outdoor environments
• AP33 – Has an integrated vBLE antenna array and is designed for smaller enterprise offices, retail sites, K-12 schools and medical clinics
• AP32 – Includes integrated omni BLE antenna and is targeted at remote workers, smaller enterprise offices and K-12 schools that do not require advanced location services
• AP12 – A compact wall-plate unit that supports the connection of multiple devices and aimed at home offices, remote workers, school dorms and hotel rooms

The new access points join Juniper’s flagship Wi-Fi 6 device, the AP43, and offer customers a number of new deployment options.

WiFi 6 is designed for high-density public or private environments. But it also will be beneficial to IoT deployments and in offices that use bandwidth-hogging applications like videoconferencing. Products bolstering the Wi-Fi 6 rollout have been coming from players across the industry with HPE/Aruba, Cisco, Arista and Extreme making Wi-Fi 6 upgrades.