Every Connection Counts
While reliable indoor Wi-Fi has become a given, it’s no longer enough. Today, users need and expect a consistent connection as they walk between buildings, to parking lots, across campuses, and anywhere in between. And in places like warehouses, loading docks, industrial sites, oil and gas facilities, ports, and terminals, consistently reliable wireless connectivity has become essential for users and devices. Especially businesses that are increasing automation by connecting ever more assets like IoT devices, sensors and temperature monitors, autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs), and robots.
Today, we’re excited to introduce the Juniper Mist AP64 outdoor access point, designed to ensure business continuity and operational efficiency in harsh environments. The ruggedized and weather-resistant AP64—which supports Wi-Fi 6E and is our smallest outdoor access point—is ideal for retail curbside, enterprise campus, public venue, outdoor station, and industrial environments.
6 GHz Outdoor Use Cases
Mobile applications and the rapid digitization of industrial operations require high-throughput, scalable and reliable wireless connectivity. Wi-Fi 6E doubles the available bandwidth by accessing the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and the 6 GHz bands, which were restricted to indoors until recently. It’s ideal for new industrial use cases intended to:
- Support bandwidth-intensive worker productivity applications
- Provide insights into the location of critical assets
- Continually compile data insights from all areas of the warehouse, loading dock, or plant
These new use cases deliver significant operational efficiencies and production uptime. The additional spectrum provided by Wi-Fi 6E offers a chance to provide dedicated spectrum for certain applications and also improves battery efficiency for client devices.
As organizations roll out digital transformation initiatives, they should plan for the best possible Wi-Fi performance and a modern cloud architecture to support automation, AI, and more advanced technologies that serve both business services and operations. There are also a host of regulatory considerations around outdoor 6GHz Wi-Fi.
Global Regulatory Considerations
Even though Wi-Fi operates in unlicensed bands, most countries strictly regulate its use. Local regulations define maximum power levels and operating frequencies of access points to avoid interference between users. This in turn determines range, coverage, penetration, and signal strength. In high-density deployments where hundreds of user devices may be operating, or where there may be sources of electronic interference, more access points may be needed.
Currently, for most of the world, outdoor Wi-Fi in 6 GHz is limited in some way or not yet allowed. For example, businesses in the U.S. and Canada are waiting for regulators to approve Standard Power (SP) and more specifically Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC). Europe allows outdoor 6 GHz Wi-Fi, but under “Very Low Power” (VLP) rules, limiting EIRP to 14 dBm (25 mW), which is restrictive and limits range.
Figure 1: A detailed breakdown of 6 GHz channel allocations.
The following table includes several regulatory domains from around the world and the rules currently governing outdoor Wi-Fi in the 6 GHz band as of January 2024.
Keep in mind that for the U.S. and Canada, the situation is fluid and that Mist AP64 outdoor access points can accommodate current and anticipated regulatory requirements (as explained in the next section).
The State of Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) Efforts
While outdoor 6 GHz is allowed under Very Low Power (VLP) rules in many countries, the U.S. and Canada are pursuing a system based on automated frequency coordination (AFC). To protect incumbents in the 6 GHz band (such as fixed microwave links or satellite service) extensive studies were performed during the formulative stages of opening the 6 GHz band to evaluate the impact of unlicensed use.
Figure 2: An FCC map of a 6 GHz licensed point-to-multipoint link.
For some deployment scenarios, such as outdoors with high transmit powers, it was determined that a frequency coordination service could be used to maximize unlicensed use efficiently and automatically while sufficiently protecting incumbent operation by providing a list of available channels and frequencies daily to unlicensed devices. This model, which is currently used by the CBRS spectrum access system (SAS), has been dubbed Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) in Wi-Fi.
Not all countries are adopting AFC, although several are considering it. So far, the U.S. and Canada are in the process of approving AFC operators. Since AFC is not yet approved, AP64 access points will ship with 6 GHz disabled in the U.S. and Canada. Juniper intends to enable 6 GHz by certifying the AP under Standard Power rules when allowed.
Figure 3: With AFC, AP64 access points must provide automatically derived geolocation, which is ideal for the Juniper Mist platform because the cloud will communicate with the AFC operators as a proxy for the access points.
Security/SSID Considerations
Given the Wi-Fi 6E mandate for Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) encryption or Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE), Wi-Fi 6E provides robust protection measures. For organizations that have yet to adopt WPA3, the transition isn’t as daunting as it may seem. Enforcing which users and devices can join your network and what they can access is critical to safeguarding your IT assets. Juniper Mist Access Assurance provides Zero Trust, identity-based network access control, and full-stack policy and segmentation assignments in a flexible yet simple authorization framework to safely onboard your guest, IoT, BYOD, and corporate devices.
The Importance of the Right Architecture
As users, devices, and apps proliferate, networks must scale so that business can scale. Computing is increasingly shifting to the edge, where users require even greater connectivity and bandwidth. Networks must be more agile, connecting end users and devices to each other and to cloud environments that are also multiplying in both scale and variety. While wired and wireless networks are business critical, without the right architecture they can be harder to operate given the sheer number of mobile and IoT devices—not to mention the extensive variety of hardware, operating systems, and applications currently in use. Traditional architectures—highly manual and network-centric—lack the scale, flexibility, and end-to-end visibility required to support modern mobility requirements, adding to the burdens of the IT departments that manage them.
Juniper brings true innovation to wireless networking with the industry’s first AI-Native Networking Platform, which includes wireless LAN (WLAN). The Juniper Access Points, driven by Mist AI, rely on an open and programmable microservices cloud architecture to make Wi-Fi predictable, reliable, and measurable, offering unprecedented visibility into the user experience and service-level expectation (SLE) metrics. Proactive, AI-native automation and a self-healing network replace time-consuming manual tasks, lowering Wi-Fi operational costs and saving substantial time and money.
Built-in integrations between Mist wireless and Juniper wired access solutions simplify operations by giving network administrators visibility into both networks from a single dashboard. A single network operations platform gives IT teams the information they need to pinpoint and more quickly address issues across the network. Juniper delivers exceptional operator and end-user experiences with the most comprehensive AIOps across the entire network.
AI-Native Efficiency for IT and Operations
The AP64 outdoor access points are designed to work seamlessly with our industry-first AI-Native Networking Platform. Juniper relies on a closed-loop AI-Native Network that builds on experience-first questions to assure that every connection—for every device, user, and application across the cloud-first ecosystem—is reliable, measurable, and secure. It all starts with asking the right questions and capturing the right data to assess networking down to the level of each user and session. To ensure the right real-time responses, we train our models based on context of anomaly detection, service levels, and event correlation for continuous improvement. And we enable it all through the right secure infrastructure, which relies on a true cloud-native, API-connected architecture that is built to process massive amounts of data to enable Zero Trust and ensure the right responses in real time.
The experience-first approach ensures end-users have consistent and reliable connections during critical moments, resulting in flawless and personalized experiences. Additionally, IT and operations teams can transition from reactive responses to proactive issue resolution by accessing real-time insights at the application, device, and network levels.
For example, our AI-Native Networking Platform can provide proactive insights and automatic root cause determination, reducing the mean time to respond (MTTR) to issues across the wired and wireless networks. Juniper Mist Wired Assurance provides AI-powered automation and service levels for switches as well as Mist access points. By continuously measuring service-level expectations, it can proactively notify administrators of any deviations in switch performance—before users even notice. Wired Assurance can also quickly identify the root cause of wired and wireless problems and rely on self-driving remediation capabilities to take automated actions, such as adding missing VLAN configurations or correcting switch port misconfigurations. By helping prevent outages that can impact everything from worker safety to the bottom line, our AI-Native approach takes networking to the next level.
AP64: Supporting Business Critical Outdoor Connections
For businesses that rely on outdoor Wi-Fi to maintain mission-critical connections for devices and people, the introduction of Wi-Fi 6E brings a much-needed increase in bandwidth. The AP64 outdoor access point is specifically designed for rugged use cases and is supported by the industry’s first AI-Native Networking Platform. This empowers businesses to effortlessly ensure reliable and secure connections and enhance the user experience while also benefiting IT operations. Additionally, the AP64 can be easily configured to comply with local regulations.
To learn more about the technical features and benefits of AP64, check out the datasheet.
For more info on how end-to-end visibility drives better experiences, check out this recent infographic.
To learn more about how Juniper Networks’ Mist AI can help your organization change its network management, discovery, and resolution processes once and for all, catch our weekly Mist AI demo here.
For a closer look at the transformative potential of Juniper’s AI-native offerings, including AP64, watch our AI-Native NOW virtual event replay.
