Delaying the refresh of campus network infrastructure incurs hidden costs including increased security risks, higher IT labor demands, degraded user experience, and operational limitations, ultimately making the cost of waiting equal or exceed the cost of upgrading within one to two years, especially in large distributed environments

Each year, Cisco Live brings together tens of thousands of networking professionals for a week of announcements, deep-dive sessions, and the kind of candid conversations that only happen in person. This year in Las Vegas, WWT sent a team of networking subject matter experts covering wireless, switching, SD-WAN, core routing, optical networking, and data center networking. What they brought back was a consistent signal: AI is no longer a strategy conversation, it is an infrastructure conversation, and the network is squarely at the center of it.

Today's networking and security trends are driving branches and campuses to rethink their network lifecycle management strategy.

In 2026, Global-Fi Architecture emerges as a crucial enterprise differentiator, transforming networks into seamless, invisible platforms. Emphasizing wireless-first design, SD-WAN integration, micro-segmentation and AIOps, it redefines business operations. Organizations investing in this architecture gain a competitive advantage, ensuring networks are reliable, secure and unobtrusive, aligning with evolving business needs.

Wi-Fi 7's most overlooked feature — Enhanced Broadcast Services (EBCS) — has the potential to fundamentally reshape how public spaces, emergency services and businesses communicate with people in real time. From stadium experiences and airport wayfinding to life-safety alerts in cellular dead zones, EBCS turns existing Wi-Fi 7 infrastructure into a powerful one-to-many broadcast platform with real benefits for end users and operators alike. This post breaks down how EBCS works, how it's secured and why it represents a genuinely new category of wireless communication: one that lets access points push authenticated, encrypted content to any compatible device in range without requiring a network connection.

Modern cloud-managed WLANs are reintroducing centralized data-plane aggregation to improve scalability, simplify operations, and enhance roaming. Cisco's Campus Gateway exemplifies this hybrid model by combining cloud control with centralized tunneling, enabling cleaner segmentation and more efficient campus and branch network architectures at both large and small scales.

This blog post is based on the Arista A Day In The Life PowerPoint slide deck. The Arista engineer receives multiple issues reported via the Help Desk ticketing system in the course of the day and they must use manage.mist.com to identify and potentially resolve the issues. This deck covers the common factors affecting wireless networks and explains why certain data is needed from end users in order to effectively troubleshoot a wireless network using the Arista dashboard.

K-12 and library network and wireless systems need enhanced segmentation through modern infrastructure today more than ever! In my post, I provide some clear reasons and guidance on enhancing these critical infrastructure components. I explain why it is important to implement new modern infrastructure underlay and overlay systems and what they can do to help enhance the security of staff, students and xIOT components on the supported network systems.