If you are looking for an enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 7 solution which you can deploy for Indoor or Outdoor environments, CW9177 is your answer. One of the key features that CW9177 offers is, flexibility to use either copper or fiber as uplink. This gives customers more deployment flexibility—whether connecting over existing copper infrastructure or using fiber for longer outdoor runs beyond the standard 100-meter ethernet limit.
Flexible Uplink and Downlink
- CW9177 has two ports- 10G copper and 10G fiber which can interchangeably act as uplink port. You can refer to CW9177 Deployment guide for more details.
- With 10G copper acting as uplink, the AP can be powered using PoE or DC power while 10G fiber acting as uplink, the AP can be powered only using DC power.
Expected Behavior of Operation
Considering that both, copper and fiber can act as uplink it is important to understand how the links would operate in different scenarios while in Local/Flexconnect/Sniffer mode. Let us try to understand these scenarios-
| AP Mode | Scenario | Expected behavior |
| Local/Flexconnect/Sniffer | Only copper port is connected after CAPWAP reset | Copper port will act as uplink and AP will request for ip address and WLC connection over this link |
| Local/Flexconnect/Sniffer | Only fiber port is connected after CAPWAP reset | Fiber port will act as uplink and AP will request for ip address and WLC connection over this link |
| Local/Flexconnect/Sniffer | Both ports are connected after capwap reset and fiber is link to WLC (only Fiber is connected to establish uplink and then copper is connected) | AP will request for ip address and WLC connection over fiber link and it will act as uplink |
| Local/Flexconnect/Sniffer | Both ports are connected after capwap reset and copper is link to WLC (only copper is connected to establish uplink and then fiber is connected) | AP will request for ip address and WLC connection over copper link |
| Local/Flexconnect/Sniffer | Reboot AP after uplink is established | AP will save the uplink configuration and try to establish uplink over the same connection which was uplink prior to reboot |
| Local/Flexconnect/Sniffer | Unable to get DHCP ip address from uplink (link swap scenario) | AP will try to request for ip address over the existing uplink for 25 times before trying to switch the uplink to the other port. After 25 failures, AP will start requesting ip address over the other link trying to establish a new uplink. If successful uplink configuration will be updated. |
| Local/Flexconnect/Sniffer | Unable to get CAPWAP response from the WLC (link swap scenario) | AP will try to reset CAPWAP tunnel establishment process over the existing uplink for 25 times before trying to switch the uplink to the other port. After 25 failures AP will try to establish CAPWAP tunnel over the other link trying to establish a new uplink. If successful uplink will be updated. |
You can refer to the datasheet for more details regarding this AP.
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