The Magic 3 – ‘rescue’ Wi-Fi standards in a Mobile Enterprise.

Cisco and Apple provide the benefits of optimized Wi-Fi connectivity and the use of prioritized business applications for Cisco and iOS devices. It also provides integration of voice and video to reduce costs and complexity. In a world where mobility and connectivity depend on each other, they give their users more capabilities than ever before and meet the demands of modern businesses. 

Intelligent and efficient roaming are automatically configured for optimized Wi-Fi connectivity. Furthermore, business data gets priority with the use of prioritized business applications.

Not only will iOS devices work more seamlessly in a Cisco mobile enterprise environment, it is also the sheer speed and power that these mobile devices provide. This certainly stands out in this modern world of mobile enterprises.

Cisco and Apple are very compatible with each other by recognizing all devices in a network infrastructure environment, as well as by enabling special capabilities. Apple devices can easily connect to a Cisco access point, this gives the user optimized connectivity together with advanced networking features like Fast Secure Roaming and Quality of Service (QoS).

Business-critical applications always need more bandwidth. Since iOS 10’s latest features and Cisco’s new hardware and software, businesses can take full advantage of a great user experience in business-critical real-time apps: Wi-Fi calling with voice/video.

“Cruising” the fast lane for business-critical real-time applications only applies for Cisco-Apple deployments, so that you can prioritize applications per environment.

Since Cisco’s new hardware and software have been introduced, the magic 3 WiFi standards (802.11k, 802.11r and 802.11v) were configured specifically for iOS devices. This allowed users to move seamlessly between access points on the same network, transition between them without interruption and reduce the delay of roaming and management overhead. The magic three standards can be described as follows:

• 11k: useful to help roaming clients find candidate access points efficiently
• 11r: making the roaming process itself more efficient rather then helping clients find AP’s
• 11v: useful to help roaming clients find candidate access points efficiently

Proper configuration of QoS and the magic-3 (802.11k, 802.11r, 802.11v) will result in:

• roaming performances will improve in end user browsing and application experience
• probability of poor audio quality will be reduced
• network message load from the device beginning roaming will be reduced
• battery usage will be reduced.