Last week we were thrilled to announce the launch of several new switching and wireless products, including our latest wireless access point, the MR30H: a wall plate AP with integrated switch ports designed for in-room hospitality deployments, higher education dormitories, and other multi-dwelling use cases.

Also included in this launch is our newest 802.11ac Wave 2 access point for general-purpose wireless: the MR33.

The new Cisco Meraki MR33 wireless access point.

We’re excited for this newest addition to our entry-level portfolio because the MR33 takes advantage of Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) capabilities that have become available in the new, 11ac Wave 2 wireless standards. MU-MIMO improves the efficiency of an AP because it allows multiple client devices to be served simultaneously.  Before MU-MIMO, an access point could only respond to one client device at a time, albeit at such a rapid speed that it might seem as if multiple devices were being addressed at once. The MR33 sports a 2×2:2-stream MU-MIMO architecture, meaning it can serve 2 concurrent client devices.

Another reason we’re excited about the MR33 is it’s sleek size. It’s roughly half the volume of an MR32 (in fact, it easily fits inside an MR32 case — and also a back pocket).

The MR32 (top) as compared to the MR33 (bottom).

We like to say it’s burrito-sized.

Hot sauce is always a good idea.

Or that it’s small enough to fit into a fruit basket.

Still life: MR33 with orange. Not oil on canvas. Circa 2017.

Or that it’s a perfect holiday stocking stuffer.

The gnomenclature of image subtitles is a fine art.

In a nutshell: the MR33 is an ideal AP to deploy if you want to be discreet or don’t have a lot of ceiling or wall room for hanging gear.  The MR33 comes with all the features — like out-of-the-box Location Analytics, dedicated wireless intrusion prevention, and automated RF selection — that you’ve come to expect from Meraki wireless access points, so provides robust, basic wireless coverage at a great value.

To learn more about Meraki wireless products, please check out our wireless products page or register for one of our many live webinars — and receive a free access point for attending!

I’d like to open this post up with a quote I came across recently:

The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of the candle.

– Oren Harari

I find this quote mirrors what many technology companies including Meraki strive for – to improve not only the products offered, but to innovate beyond the “cold steel” and revolutionize the experience in using those products entirely.

Last week we announced several exciting updates to our wireless and switching portfolios. The brand new MS225 and MS250 access switches received a warm welcome as they introduce high bandwidth uplinks and physical stacking across the complete Meraki switching portfolio – something many have asked for. Beyond the speeds and feeds our team has continued to strive for perfection when designing these new products, taking in a lot of the feedback we’ve received over the years from customers and partners, and doing everything we can to make the entire experience easy and straightforward. No quirky brackets to install or initialize commands to remember – just true plug-and-play technology that becomes an intelligent part of your network infrastructure the moment you connect it.

The new Meraki MS250 switches.

Perhaps the most exciting part of this product announcement is that the new models are offered at the exact same price as the previous generation, and can integrate seamlessly with an existing network. Upgrading from existing Meraki switches is done with the click of a button via our cloud cloning feature, so you can add higher bandwidth and redundancy in minutes.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about this refreshing update to our MS lineup. If you’re interested in learning more about the all new Meraki switches or giving them a try, we invite you to check out our website, or if you haven’t yet, register for one of our upcoming webinars!

Last month we shared the exciting news about our new dashboard localization project to translate the Meraki management interface into French, German, Japanese and Spanish. At the time of that post, a language selection option was made available to customers who explicitly requested it by contacting our support team.

Following a rush of enthusiasm and feedback we were able to quickly bring the translations project closer to completion, and so we are now delighted to announce that dashboard localization is now an option for all Meraki customers.

To try it out, just click on ‘my profile’ on any dashboard page once logged-in.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page to find the language selector.

We’re excited to hear feedback about this pioneering option for our customers. Please help us spread the word to colleagues and customers who speak these languages and together we can bring simpler IT management to all four corners of the globe.

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Happy Holidays from everyone on the translation team at Meraki.

By Andrew Dupree

Cisco Meraki ships a lot of hardware. In 2016 alone, we’ve sold millions of units to over 100 countries, and those numbers are only going up as Meraki continues to expand. For all of us Merakians, our continued growth is exciting and motivating.

The only downside—shipping this many top-quality hardware products is really hard! Each unit must be carefully designed, manufactured, and tested. Getting this gargantuan task done is the job of the Meraki Hardware team, and to do it we spend a lot of time on the ground with our development partners in Taiwan. While regular business travel isn’t for everyone, the prospect of time on the road was one of the most exciting parts of my new role as Hardware Program Manager at Meraki. Today—shortly after returning from my first trip to Taiwan—I’d like to share a little bit about the experience.

The Flight

When it’s time to travel, we usually catch a direct flight from San Francisco to Taipei. This flight is a solid 13 hours! Once you add in a few extra hours for travel to and from the airport, security, customs, etc., and you’re looking at roughly 18 hours on the road between our homes in the Bay Area and our hotel in Taipei. It’s a long day!

SFO to TPE is 6500 miles (or about 13 hours) in the air.

Everyone has a different method of passing the flight time. We sleep, watch movies, play games, and read. It’s everything you do on a domestic flight—just a lot more of it. When several of us are on the same flight, we’ll banter over Google Hangouts using the onboard WiFi. And there’s talk of trying to get multiplayer video games working…

We usually leave SF in the morning or early afternoon and arrive in Taipei in the evening of the next day. That’s because—in addition to the flight time—Taiwan is 13 hours ahead of SF. Talk about jet lag!

The Work

When we’re on the ground in Taiwan, it’s time to get to work. That work may be any number of things, depending on the current stage of the product development process.

Early in the process, we’ll sit down with our manufacturers and communicate the vision for the new product. This helps our partners allocate their resources effectively, so they will be ready to manufacture when we want them to. We also clearly communicate our requirements for mechanical and electrical components, which helps us collaborate to define and set up our testing and measurement parameters early.

In the middle of the process, we will oversee small prototype manufacturing runs and check to make sure everything works as we expect. We’ll also help define the exact procedures for assembling and testing each unit to ensure maximum quality.

Ruby, Nick, and Nathan inspect an assembly line.

Further along in the process, we’ll check the progress of our large manufacturing runs, or troubleshoot any errors that have arisen.

One example of this occurred while inspecting plastic parts for one of our newest products. We realized that a thin strip of plastic was being bent somewhere in the manufacturing process, resulting in a poor appearance when the product was fully assembled. We inspected the parts coming out of the machine and the steps of the assembly process. Eventually, we realized that the assembly line operators were holding the parts too firmly when they were newly-made and still malleable. We changed the assembly process to allow the plastic components to cool fully before the rest of the product assembly process began, and the problem was solved.

When we’re not working directly with our manufacturing partners on our hardware products, we’re probably bouncing around the country building relationships with various other vendors and partners, like the people that manufacture our electrical, plastic, and metal components. Some of the technology we get to see is truly amazing! Metal stamping machinery so forceful that the building housing it needs a reinforced foundation, PCB assembly lines fully automated by high-speed robotics, hot plastic parts fresh out of the injection-molding machine; the tools that build modern electronics are truly impressive.

The Fun

It’s a lot of work to get to Taiwan, and there’s even more work to do once we get into the country. But it’s not all heads-down time. The Hardware team has a lot of fun in our spare moments abroad. We get to eat local Taiwanese delicacies, like beef noodle soup and the infamous stinky tofu. Additionally, we often spend some time visiting cultural landmarks—like an evening at one of Taiwan’s famous Night Markets.

The Night Market is a great place to buy souvenirs and sample Taiwanese street food.

Taiwan and its culture are vibrant and fascinating, and I feel privileged to get to experience a piece of it.

In Conclusion

There’s a common saying in the hardware world—“hardware is hard.” And it’s true—it takes a lot of time and energy to design, develop, and manufacture a great hardware product at scale. For the hardware team at Meraki, that means a lot of time on the ground in Asia. And while it can be tiring, it’s also fun and incredibly rewarding to see the world and play a big part in developing great new technologies.

If you love travel and creating great hardware, keep an eye on the Meraki jobs page for high-flying opportunities! 

The hospitality sector is growing, and there is every indication that it will continue to do so throughout 2017 — driving hotels to find new, innovative ways to differentiate themselves and their services. To offer more unique, personalized guest experiences at scale, a robust technology platform is needed.

Enter Cisco Meraki. Our recently announced wall plate access point (AP), the MR30H, offers the latest wireless technology for in-room deployments. The MR30H’s built-in 4-port gigabit switch can be used to easily service nearby IP-enabled devices (like IPTVs). We’ve designed the MR30H to be sleek and discreet; for example, the LED has been engineered to shine through the front body plate, emitting a significantly softer glow that is less disturbing to guests’ sleep.

Like every piece of Meraki gear, the MR30H is viewable and manageable via our web-based dashboard — an intuitive, graphical interface that enables global control over devices and that displays digestible metrics about clients, applications, access points, and client behavior.

An example dashboard view of the MR30H.

 
In addition, our completely refreshed MS225 line of access switches are the perfect complement — providing reliable connectivity and Power-over-Ethernet (PoE+) for up to 48 rooms per switch. This, along with the MS switches’ built-in network topology feature, port isolation and security, power scheduling, and expansive troubleshooting capabilities make for a complete IT solution that is unrivalled in capabilities and usability.
 

Going beyond guest wireless

 
When you combine guest wireless with location analytics, Bluetooth beacons, and mobile applications, you get powerful options for creating memorable guest experiences. All Meraki MR access points provide out-of-the-box location analytics at no additional charge — and the MR30H sports an integrated Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio that provides both beaconing and scanning functionality, enabling seamless integration with location-aware mobile applications.

This means, for example, that you can upload floor plans of your hotel into the Meraki dashboard and easily visualize trends in guest foot traffic over time to make better staffing decisions in hotspot areas like lobbies, front desks, pools, and gyms. You can even use it to determine where you might want to place your next access point, given client density!

See trends in guest density over time with integrated heat maps and floor plan views.

 
You can also use our built-in location analytics to see how many guests use your spa facilities, or how many in-house diners spent longer than one hour in your restaurant, or whether certain guests come back to the same property frequently. And best of all, you can compare all of this data across networks, properties, or even down to the individual access point level (using AP tagging).

Comparing foot traffic between our San Francisco and London sites over the past month.

When you combine these out-of-the-box features with the power of Bluetooth BLE, the possibilities for personalized guest experiences grow even more. If you have a mobile app to help promote guest loyalty that responds to BLE beacons, you can generate context- and location-aware events using guests’ mobile phones: for example, offering special promotions on your house wine if they are near the lobby bar, or a VIP pass to a fitness center yoga class if they have visited your gym facilities at least twice in the past week. We partner with a wide array of vendors to help make these use cases easy to realize and frictionless to deploy.

You can even drive adoption of your mobile app directly from your Meraki guest wireless deployment by taking advantage of our hosted splash page functionality, or even promote your organization’s Facebook page by allowing guests to sign-on with their Facebook credentials and check into your property.

These are only a few of the use cases that Meraki APs, combined with Meraki switches, make possible. To learn more, please check out our solutions for hospitality page and join us for one of our upcoming product launch webinars (where we will dive into these new products in greater detail): Dec. 13th at 8am PST, Dec. 13th at 11am PST, or Dec. 13th at 5PM PST.

‘Tis the season, so they say. We can think of no better way to end this amazing year and ring in 2017 than by introducing some exciting new Cisco Meraki products. Today we’re thrilled to announce a significant refresh of our access switching portfolio and two sleek, new access points.

We will be posting additional information here on our blog throughout this week detailing each of these new products — so stay tuned! — but the full lineup in this latest launch includes:

• MR30H: a new wall plate access point with integrated switch ports designed specifically for hospitality and certain multi-dwelling use cases, like university dorms

• MR33: an 802.11ac Wave 2 access point that is half the size of an MR32

• MS225 & MS250: A new generation of Meraki stackable access switches with 10G SFP+ uplinks and field-replaceable power options

Wireless

MR30H

 
Why a wall plate access point? We’re glad you asked. The MR30H’s form factor —  which sports four integrated gigabit switch ports — has been a heavily-requested wish, particularly from the hospitality industry. Wall plates are perfect for use cases where aesthetics matter and extra ports are needed to service IP-enabled devices like VoIP phones or IPTVs in the immediate vicinity of the AP.

The new Cisco Meraki MR30H wall plate access point.

The MR30H is built on a 2×2:2 802.11ac Wave 2 architecture, so can take advantage of Multi-User MIMO to simultaneously service two client devices. This makes the AP more efficient than an Wave 1 AP with equivalent specs.

MR33

 
The MR33 is an 802.11ac Wave 2 update for those who want robust wireless but don’t need support for high density scenarios. Like the MR30H, the MR33 is a 2×2:2 802.11ac Wave 2 access point, and it is one of the smallest we manufacture (the MR30H is smaller).

The new Cisco Meraki MR33 wireless access point.

Switching

We are also announcing a major update to our access switching portfolio, with the addition of stacking and 10G SFP+ uplinks on all new models – at the same price point.

The new Meraki MS250 switches.

The MS225 and MS250 are both designed for branch & campus deployments while the MS250 offers field replaceable power supplies and Layer 3 features.

Stay tuned

As we mentioned earlier, we’ll be posting more details about these products throughout the week. We also encourage you to join us next week for one of our customer product launch webinars (here, here, or here)!  While you wait to attend these awesome webinars, please check out our hospitality page, or our  MR30H, MR33, or MS225 product pages.