Recently, I received a Wi-Fi 7 AP from Juniper Networks for being a member of the MistFits group. Right after I received the package, the closure of the acquisition of Juniper by HPE was finalized. So, I am writing this for Juniper Networks, an HPE Company. I will give more of my opinion and view about the acquisition at a later date when HPE publicly provides more information.
As a Juniper MistFit, after AI Native Now in San Diego a month ago, I was lucky to be sent a Juniper Mist AP47 Wi-Fi 7 AP for testing and to create some content with the AP.This is a sponsored blog post for that reason, but they did not ask me to talk about this feature and the views are my own. Long time readers of my blog, may notice I have an affinity to Juniper products. I got into the Mist world before the Juniper acquisition, so I’ve been through this before. I’m hoping to see a somewhat similar transition.
The Datasheet for the Juniper AP47 can be found here.
Want to try an AP-32 for free? Check out Juniper’s Free Trial Program.
Wi-Fi and Networks in Schools
For my day job, I’ve been asked by so many schools if they should purchase their refresh Erate APs from, look at, or switch to Juniper Mist even after the announced acquisition. I’ve been hesitant and a little worried knowing how these things typically go. With that said, several schools have moved ahead, and I’m currently working on build outs of AP47 and new switches at several school districts that I support.
For those who don’t know how education in the United States functions, Erate Grants from the Federal Government are awarded roughly every 5 years. The Grant money comes from some of the fees and taxes we all pay on our cellphones and internet connections. The funding is highly regulated and awards require a lot of work on the school side with quotes and justification. So schools have to plan ahead what the next 5+ years will look like. Luckily, the Erate program is here to stay for the moment after some legal challenges of recent.
Schools function like large enterprises on the budget of a school district. Erate grants help provide the connectivity to schools to help provide equity between rich areas of the country and rural lower income areas.
Erate is a percentage grant where the local school district has to put up the money for initial purchase then get reimbursed a percentage (like 60-70%) of that cost back from the federal government. That percentage ranges from a number of things. These funds are so needed by schools to be able to provide the connectivity required of the modern school.
AP47 and POE++
In discussions with my schools, the biggest worry that has come up isn’t about whether they should buy the Wi-Fi 6e AP45 vs the Wi-Fi 7 AP47, although that has been a part of the long term discussions. I’ll keep my personal opinion to myself on that topic.
The bigger discussion in my schools is about power. Networking sales teams have been warning that there is a high power requirement and new switches need to be budgeted for and purchased when you start thinking about these new APs.
From my own understanding, I’ve been telling the schools that they need to buy new switches that support POE++ to provide enough power for the APs. Some of my schools are telling me that they didn’t budget for upgraded switches for this round of Erate.
I was worrying how we were going to handle this, until I received this Juniper Mist AP47 for testing. It allowed me to do some testing and figure out something that could help with this.
While the recommendation still is to use a new switch that has POE++ and MultiGig ports. For a transitional phase, that isn’t required in two ways that I’ll discuss shortly.
Unboxing and Mounting the AP47
Before we dig into all those details, let’s dig into what’s in the box. Over on my Towers Edge Youtube Channel, I posted an Unboxing of the Juniper AP47 I received. I then mounted it to a WiFi Stand and it barely fit because of how many radios are stuffed into the casing of these APs. I briefly mentioned the fact the AP has two ethernet jacks that support powering the AP for backup and MultiGig Ethernet support. I didn’t mention something I discovered later that we will dig into next.
AP47 with POE+
When you plug the AP47 into a switch that only provides POE+, 802.3at, power, the AP will still power up. The AP is functional and works sub-optimally. The installations in schools that I’ve been doing are using this currently until they can replace the switches.
The AP47 will negotiate as much power as it can. It will then start to disable features, such as radio chains. If you go into the Mist portal you will get a warning message for the AP47 that isn’t shown on the AP45 or older models powered with POE+ as you can see from my lab environment above.
If you hover over the little Orange warning triangle, it will tell you the reduced functionality. In my case, my 6GHz and 5GHz radios are dropped from 4×4 radio chains to just 2×2 chains. I have 2.4GHz disabled on the radio, so that may differ if you need 2.4GHz.
If you look into the AP settings, by clicking on the AP name, you can see it is using POE+ 802.3at and the operating mode is that reduced functionality of 2X2 chains on the 6GHz and 5GHz bands.
You’ll notice that I have the AP47 plugged into a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port so it does have the higher throughput, but is limited by the POE+ power. You will not get the full real world speeds exceeding 1 Gigabit when using the 2X2 chains. So using 2.5GHz port on an underpowered AP47 is not needed.
The Wi-Fi radio will work, but this is not the desired status you want especially when purchasing an expensive AP and supporting 30+ students and devices in classrooms.
AP47 with 2 POE+ Cables
One thing I don’t mention in the video, is that the AP47 can be powered by POE+ when using those two ethernet ports to both supply POE+ power. This does require you to have two ethernet runs and two switch ports per AP.
In the video I plugged in a second ethernet jack into the second port. If I go into the Mist portal after connecting that second ethernet port, I get normal functionality. Notice the warning is gone and the little orange warning triangle is gone as well.
Be warned, if one of the two redundant switch ports or ethernet cables fails, then you will drop to the reduced warnings as above.
This AP47 is being powered and has redundancy of using two ethernet ports and POE+ ensuring the device stays online. If I go into the AP settings and look at the same area as above, I see that the AP47 is connected via “Power Source MULTI-PD” and is operating with “Full Power”.
You again notice that the port is “TwoPointFiveGigabitEthernet” or 2.5Gbps Ethernet. In my scenario, both ethernet jacks are running 2.5Gbps ethernet, but you can easily do to this on two 1Gbps Ethernet jacks supplying POE+.
I also didn’t have to setup a LAG port or anything on the specific switch I’m connected to (a Ubiquiti switch) but that may differ depending on your switch vendor. You may need Spanning Tree enabled on your switching ports. In my testing on Ubiquiti switches, one of the two ports is disabled although it continues to provide POE+ power to the AP47.
Redundant Switches
I also wanted to see if you could place the ports on two different switches and have true redundancy from a switch failure. So I connected the AP47’s Eth0 port to a different switch while the original Eth1 was still connected to the original switch.
Since the first ethernet interface was moved, it changed the detected switch in the LLDP Neighbors to the new one. I also didn’t have another switch with another 2.5Gbps interface, so it defaulted to just 1Gbps. It still shows the Multi-PD under Power Source and Full Power under Operating Power.
In some ways because of this redundancy feature, this is better than having to upgrade all your switches to POE++ and MultiGig. Combining two ethernet jacks across two different switches both running 1Gbps will give you the redundancy, the higher throughput for those rare peak moments that you need more than 1Gbps on Wi-Fi, granted it is using a LAG.
This has a HUGE CAVEAT that you need two ethernet runs to every AP. That may be more expensive than replacing the switch powering the AP. I know a lot of schools have been running multiple ethernet jacks to APs or the area, and it might be a cost saving endeavor. If you are installing new cabling, some schools are running cameras to every classroom, maybe this might be cheaper for the time being.
I know I will be making usage of this feature for at least the moment in some of my schools; while we transition to upgraded switching. We already have two cables ran to most APs. This postpones the need to replace our current switches with POE++ capable switches.