Cisco Wireless CTO Talks Tech Around Wi-Fi 6, Apple iPhone 11, More

Cisco CTO for wireless, Matt MacPherson, celebrated two important milestones last week. The launch of the Wi-Fi 6 Certification program coupled with Apple’s rollout of the new iPhone 11 mark the latest achievements for MacPherson’s engineering team.

The new iPhones are Apple’s first that support Wi-Fi 6, joining the Samsung Galaxy 10 and Samsung Galaxy Note 10 phones, along with an increasing number of laptops that now support the new wireless LAN standard, which is notably faster and more reliable than the existing 802.11ac standard, aka Wi-Fi 5.

Demand for Wi-Fi 6 spells a significant opportunity for partners, who will play a key role in helping commercial and enterprises upgrade their wireless capabilities. While Apple has downplayed the Wi-Fi 6 support in the new crop of iPhones that became available Friday, behind the scenes Cisco worked closely with Apple as part of a partnership announced four years ago to ensure that the latest devices performed optimally on Cisco Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs).

Cisco’s Matt MacPherson

MacPherson talked to Channel Futures about the technical capabilities Wi-Fi 6 offers, how Cisco works with Apple and the importance of the new certification program put in place by the Wi-Fi Alliance (WFA).

Channel Futures: Explain some of the key areas your team has worked on with Apple regarding Wi-Fi 6 that will stand out?

Matt MacPherson: We’ve been working a long time with Apple on building features and capabilities with the idea that we not only want to make Wi-Fi better for the end user, but make it better for IT departments. One example of that is fast roaming. It means if you’re walking around the office environment or any environment where you have multiple APs, and you hand off your connection from AP to AP, you want that handoff to happen very fast, which is important if you’re doing voice over IP such as WebEx or Jabber, or any voice application, or for that matter any collaboration application or using AR or VR, which is just beginning with this next generation of cloud. These real-time type applications are very dependent on your connection remaining consistent and strong. When you’re moving around, every time you change to a new access point, you would have to do an authentication back into the network. And so we’ve been working on technologies around various standards – for example r/k/v, [802.11 r, k and v] – which allow that handoff to happen very fast.

CF: How does r/k/v accelerate that handoff?

MP: A real authentication sequence can actually take multiple seconds, which is not very good for real-time things like a call or a video call or FaceTime, or something like that. And so you want this to hand off in milliseconds, not seconds. What we’ve been doing is what we call “fast roam,” which allows you to go from AP to AP very quickly, passing the security context. What’s key here is that don’t have to go through a full reauthentication sequence, and we do some very, what I would call, smart things that include machine learning. For example, as you move further from the AP, the device …