Cisco’s 802.11r/FT settings & Adaptive mode explained

I see questions come up more and more often around Cisco’s Fast Transition settings (aka FT or 802.11r). In particular mixing non-FT and FT clients on the same SSID, and the role of Adaptive mode. I myself totally misunderstood how their FT Adaptive mode worked until two weeks ago.

There is an awesome culture within Vocera of doing as much as we can to provide guidance to our customers, even when that means providing assistance on another vendors equipment. One such opportunity occurred two weeks ago when a customer wanted to use our voice clients with Fast Transition (the IEEE’s feature name for the 802.11r amendment), but had older Cisco phones on the same SSID that do not support FT. We spun up our lab to test it out and these are the findings.

Continue reading “Cisco’s 802.11r/FT settings & Adaptive mode explained”