Aerohive and Apple

Delivering a High Quality Wi-Fi Connected Apple Device Experience

With the explosion of iOS and OS X devices such as iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone and the MacBook and iMac, improved Wi-Fi connectivity is becoming a critical part of delivering a high-quality Apple device experience. If Wi-Fi connectivity is poor or broken, Apple user could associate this with the devices they are holding in their hands instead of the real culprit: the Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Two Common Causes of a Poor Wi-Fi Experience Are

  • Consumer-grade Wi-Fi infrastructure is usually purchased in a retail store and installed by the customer. Consumer-grade Wi-Fi often works at an acceptable level for a few undemanding devices in a single Acces Point (AP) deployment, but poorly in a more typical environment where there are many demanding devices and more than one AP needed.
  • Complex Enterprise-grade Controller-based Wi-Fi infrastructure is intended to support a large number of demanding devices. This type of Wi-Fi infrastructure can deliver a poor connectivity experience as it is complex to deploy, difficult to configure and manage, and often not set up exactly as intended even with professional installation. It is significantly more expensive, and when it is time to expand the Wi-Fi for more coverage or to handle more Apple devices the expense and complexity continues.

Features & Benefits

Aerohive delivers an enterprise Wi-Fi infrastructure solution that enhances the Apple mobile device connectivity experience, and takes only minutes to deploy. Aerohive products “just work” and are typically 50% less expensive than more complex, less-capable alternatives.

Feature Benefit(s)
Aerohive APs, called “HiveAPs” were designed from the ground-up to support a high-density mobile device environment with superior range and throughput.
  • Aerohive has designed our platform around the unique properties and requirements of iOS and OS X-based client devices: long battery life, low transmit power, compact antennas, and single-stream transceivers.
  • Our Access Points have better receive sensitivity, better uplink Error Vector Magnitude (EVM), and higher output power through the use of high-quality discreet components such as high-end power amplifiers, uplink Low-Noise Amplifiers (LNAs), customized radio modules, and high-quality/single-band antennas.
Aerohive’s cloud-based network management system, called “HiveManager” has a policy-based management is flexible, sophisticated, and easy enough for any market and situation, making it map well across all Apple markets.
  • Aerohive delivers a best-of-breed, enterprise-class feature set that is configured via a simple Graphical User Interface (GUI). The GUI is intuitive enough for Academic environments, yet sophisticated and full-featured enough for the most advanced enterprise deployments.
Like Apple products, Aerohive’s Wi-Fi infrastructure was designed to “just work” through a simple, elegant and breakthrough architecture.
  • Five minute cloud provisioning of enterprise-class devices, anywhere in the world
  • Industry-leading visibility and diagnostics across local and distributed enterprises
Aerohive’s unique, decentralized Cooperative Control architecture enables feature-rich, secure, enterprise-class Wi-Fi infrastructure without the deployment complexity, high costs, and scalability and reliability limitations of today’s de facto standard controller-based model, because with Aerohive, you don't need a controller.
  • Simplifies the networks by centralizing management but distributing control eliminating the need for any type of controller (primary, secondary, N+1, cluster, branch, etc.).
  • Improves the reliability through inherent redundancy within the network infrastructure using an inter-AP protocol suite.
  • Integrated mesh and best-path/least-cost L2/L3 routing.
  • Improves data throughput, as scalability is linear and unlimited. Throughput is only limited to the Ethernet network to which the APs are attached.
Aerohive’s feature set is customized uniquely to enhance the Apple device experience
  • Can fingerprint Apple devices and apply specific security and QoS/SLA policy and auto-reformat Captive Web Portal pages based on the Apple device type.
  • Enable Apple consumer-grade devices to be used securely in the enterprise.
  • Integrate with a variety of MDM solutions to make auto-enrollment and application updating seamless.