What needs improvement with Catalyst 9100 Access Points?

Overall, my experience with Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points platform has been positive. However, there are a few areas where I think the deployment and operational experience could be improved. First, migration from all Cisco access points could be smoother; in our deployment, we encountered an older ARGAP 1602IC K9 that was not supported by the new controller. A more streamlined compatibility and migration workflow would make it easier to identify and support legacy hardware before the migration begins. Second, for larger deployments, simplifying some of the RF troubleshooting and optimization workflow would be helpful; we have approximately sixty-eight access points. Although Catalyst 9800 WLC provides good visibility, having even more recommendations for identifying RF issues, capacity problems, and roaming-related issues could reduce the amount of manual analysis required by the wireless team. I would also like to see continued improvement in automation and operational simplicity for large-scale deployments. The ability to quickly identify an issue, understand its causes, and receive actionable recommendations could be particularly valuable when managing many access points across multiple floors. These are not major limitations for us. Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points provides us with the functionality we need for enterprise wireless, but making migration, RF troubleshooting, and day-to-day optimization even more intuitive would make an already capable solution easier to operate.

Price is always a consideration with Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points, as Cisco commands a premium price. Sometimes customers cannot afford this product because of that pricing concern. Cisco is consistently one of the premium products on the market. Beyond the AP itself, the way Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points is managed presents challenges. Either you have to have a 9800 controller setup or use Meraki. I found this a bit challenging or tricky when using the 9800. There is always a learning curve for the person deploying it, who has to learn how to use the 9800. On the other hand, Mist offers a plug and play experience with cloud native capabilities, so the person deploying it does not need any knowledge of how to set this up. Most of the enterprise customers still using Cisco 9800 controller, which sometimes adds a burden to the deployment process.

What I dislike about Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points primarily revolves around unified management. I would suggest generally improving how the solutions are managed in conjunction with the rest of the networking ecosystem. Regarding pricing, I think that Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points are probably at a premium versus some of the rest of the market, but it does not really put off our target markets, I would say. Regarding the AI-driven insights from Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points, I think it is nascent in that these features are still fairly new and not hugely adopted, and there is still trust being built on how to use them. I think there is great potential there, but I think it is still early and a bit of the wild west. I think we just need to see more of it and they need to be more deeply integrated and have support for more external tooling as well.

Compared with other vendors such as Aruba and Huawei, one area where Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points could be improved is pricing. Cisco solutions are typically 20-30% more expensive than competing products. While Cisco offers excellent performance, advanced security, and a rich feature set, the higher cost can be a challenge for customers, especially when deploying large-scale wireless networks. Another area for improvement is power consumption. With the introduction of Wi-Fi 7 access points, Cisco now requires higher PoE power budgets to unlock the full capabilities of the access points. In many cases, customers must upgrade to multi-gigabit switches that support Cisco UPOE or IEEE 802.3bt PoE, which significantly increases the overall infrastructure cost. It would be beneficial if future Cisco Wireless Access Points could deliver the same high performance while reducing power requirements, allowing customers to reuse their existing switching infrastructure wherever possible. In future releases, I would also like to see Cisco continue enhancing AI-driven wireless optimization and automation within Cisco Catalyst Center, making RF optimization, troubleshooting, and client experience even more autonomous. This would further reduce operational overhead while maintaining the high reliability and performance expected from Cisco enterprise wireless solutions.

From a user perspective, I find Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points very good. The handoff is good, and I do not see anything needing improvement. The shape of the access points is also very good, and they look professional with no comments from users about any issues. To make it a ten out of ten, the addition of more AI capabilities could be an improvement.

I want to diagnose and troubleshoot these issues with Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points, but in the end, I restart the AP and access point, and then the session timeout expires. The new user then connects. I have observed much channel noise with Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points, which is disturbing their signals and leading to connectivity issues for users. I believe there should be improvements in channel frequency or channel bandwidth by OS level or kernel levels to improve network performance and reliability. Proper training and regional heads must cope with these gaps to satisfy the users, which I think need to be addressed by Cisco personnel. I want improvements in Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points, particularly because there are competitive market alternatives. Yet, we still focus on using WLC Cisco for reliability in our current organization. I would like to improve the connectivity issues; if addressed properly, the problem would be largely resolved. The only thing I would like to improve is the connectivity.

The navigation tools of the GUI could be more user-intuitive in certain areas. When trying to find a specific setting or option, it may not be in the most obvious place. This happened to me when we changed the VLANs on one of our switches and then had to change it in Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points. I found it in one location but missed it in another and had to go through different pages until I found the area I needed to change.

Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points could provide more automation instead of requiring manual work. I already have DNAC available to facilitate this, so more configuration needs to be done through automation. The reliability and end-user experience sometimes face issues as end users experience Wi-Fi connectivity problems. When this occurs, I log in and ask the user to share their screen to identify the issues they are facing, and I am often able to resolve them. If I cannot resolve the issue, I raise a case with Cisco for joint troubleshooting. Regarding AI insights, they help improve my troubleshooting capabilities, but they still need improvement from an AI perspective.

What I dislike about Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points is that controlling multiple APs is not centralized. We have multiple wireless controllers, and we cannot have a single pane where we can manage all the wireless controllers. In Aruba, we can manage all the wireless controllers through AirWave. In our environment with multiple Cisco wireless controllers, we cannot manage them centrally at one point.

I do not see support for advanced wireless technologies like Wi-Fi 6 and IoT applications. There is nothing to add on this technology.

From Cisco DNA, we are not able to identify deep troubleshooting for the wireless network; we are doing the troubleshooting from the wireless controller itself. We are not able to utilize the AI-driven analytics in Cisco Wireless 9100 Access Points because of our company's policy; we are not able to integrate Cisco cloud AI. Sometimes there are disconnections that happen with user laptops. When we want to troubleshoot, the more advanced features that are cloud-generated by the AI would be helpful if we could use them at a minimalist level at the on-premise device. We are following up on the DNA suggestions of the OS upgradation. Apart from that, the security measures of Cisco have not provided us with great help in reducing network vulnerabilities. There are no missing features that I would like to see included in it in the future or enhanced in it.

I have not yet deployed Wi-Fi 6E regarding its impact and support for IoT, though some customer endpoints already support Wi-Fi 6. I have only deployed some other devices, not almost all for IoT. There is not much information available for DNS deployment. Additionally, I recently deployed an access point type 166 that has three radios, but in my country there are some limitations to enabling slot six radio, so I have difficulties in enabling all channels in radio slot one.

Frankly, ease of use is one of the things that needs improvement, as the management interfaces have always been complex and not very intuitive. I believe Cisco needs to enhance its visibility solutions, just like FortiAnalyzer from Fortinet, which has put considerable effort into monitoring. Cisco is currently working on this but tends to have complexity when it comes to graphical interfaces, so I think they need improvement in ease of use. Particularly in the AI area, knowing that Juniper offers comprehensive AI features for problem detection and detailed visibility, I think Cisco needs better AI tools, similar to what Juniper provides with Mist. Cisco claims they are embedding AI, but they still lag behind. It is not that complex, but I believe there is a bit of difficulty when compared with other solutions.

Catalyst 9100 Access Points is a very useful product, but it's quite an old one. Some quality of service features could be added as a high-end technical feature. The traffic analyzer is something which is quite useful. We do some sort of rate limiting, per user, per AP. It needs to be more flexible when it comes to bandwidth allocation. I suggest that Cisco can add functionality where the user should be able to allocate specific bandwidth at a user level. For example, if there are 10 users with limited internet bandwidth, that bandwidth should be able to be allocated equally to all users.