Extreme Customer Sends Packets Flying Through 6 GHz Space

The 6 GHz space race has officially ended! Extreme Networks is excited to be the first to publicly announce customer shipment of a Wi-Fi 6E enterprise-grade access point. Congratulations to the Extreme team for shipping a 6E AP to a customer and sending wireless packets at high speed through the 6 GHz space! We are Openbooks (Extreme terminology), which means you can get the order in now. For those who come up with excuses on why not to adopt 6E now, the grapes are sour! Hats off to the rock-stars that made it happen – Alan Cuellar Amrod, Dionis Hristov, Hitendrasinh Gohil, Kevin Lin, Andrew Garcia, Rosalie Bibona, Paulo Francisco, Robert Greenway, David Zhang, Roie Lev, Gabriel Strasser, Koon Hung Lee, Vlado Tasev and many more engineers. Thank you to our strategic partner Broadcom, we couldn’t have done it without you! Press Releases in the works and will be forthcoming soon…

The best proof-point is the following picture from a customer that has deployed the access point.

Every Sci-Fi movie agrees on one scenario, the future has flying cars which provide the ability to commute at high speeds without traffic congestion. Now let us transition into the wireless networking world. Customers were held back from achieving their business outcomes due to networks being delayed by slow legacy clients sharing the same limited wireless spectrum. Wi-Fi 6E, effectively triples the available unlicensed spectrum available for use. All the legacy clients continue to operate on the 2.4 and 5 GHz spectrum, which leaves the 6 GHz spectrum wide open for 6 GHz clients.

Wi-Fi 6E carries forward all the High-Efficiency Wireless benefits from Wi-Fi 6. Additionally, 6E adds a few more capabilities such as the new 6 GHz spectrum, Wi-Fi Enhanced Open, and WPA3 security. This additional clean spectrum of 6 GHz opens up incredible new opportunities in various customer environments. Every customer in the Infinite Enterprise can now achieve their business outcomes using high-performance, reliable wireless networks. Whether it is an industry-specific application such as Telemedicine in Healthcare or a much more universally applicable collaboration application such as Zoom, you will experience increased reliability when operating in 6 GHz. This will allow students in schools to use AR/VR to for new experiences to learn, exercise real-time gaming. In a nutshell, you get all the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 and then some.

Ok, enough theory, what does the new Extreme Access Point look like and what are the key highlights?

Introducing our beautiful new Universal Wireless AP4000!

Key Highlights:

1. The first enterprise-grade 6E Access Point. The pleasant small form factor easily fits into Extreme mounting brackets if replacing a previous generation Access Point.
2. A single Universal SKU with a single license that operates worldwide and can be deployed with your Extreme Campus Controllers or with Extreme Cloud IQ
3. Operates simultaneously in all the three bands 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz
4. 2x2 MIMO with 2 spatial streams. In our test labs, we have seen multi-gigabit traffic through the APs by using the 6 GHz clients vastly outperforming previous generation 4x4/8x8 APs
5. Built with the innovative Broadcom FBAR Tri-band filter
6. A tri-frequency sensor coupled with AirDefense that continuously monitors your spectrum for enhanced security
7. The ability to be managed with ExtremeCloud IQ hosted in multiple cloud providers
8. The ability to exercise cloud deployment flexibility
9. The peace-of-mind that management by an ISO 27001, 27017, 27701 certified cloud provides
10. Utilizing unlimited data that feeds into Explainable ML/AI innovations such as CoPilot

What does the ‘E’ within Wi-Fi 6E stand for anyway? Per WFA, it is meant to be ‘Extended’. Here, we believe it stands for Extreme!

This blog was originally authored by Jeevan Patil, Senior Director, Product Management