Wireless OTT Overview

Wireless OTT Overview

Wireless OTT is a traditional CAPWAP deployment on top of a fabric wired network.

In wireless OTT, SD-Access fabric is the transport for CAPWAP traffic. 

Wireless OTT Use Cases

Wireless OTT can be deployed as a migration step to full wired and wireless SD-Access and can be used in scenarios such as:

• The customer first migrates their wired network to the SDA fabric and wants to keep the existing wireless network unchanged until it is time to switch to fabric-enabled wireless.
• The customer has different teams managing wired and wireless networks.
• The customer has different buying cycles for wired and for wireless networks.
• The customer requires time to get familiar with the fabric.

Alternatively, wireless OTT can be a long-term solution in scenarios such as:

• The customer has a third-party wireless solution that is deployed and does not wish to migrate.
• The customer cannot migrate to fabric-enabled wireless for several reasons.
• The customer has older wireless software and hardware without support for fabric mode.
• The wireless infrastructure is too critical for the customer to make changes to it.

Wireless OTT Deployment

In wireless OTT, the WLCs connect external to the fabric, and the border configuration is as follows:

• The border advertises the WLC Management subnet into the fabric.

The border advertises the fabric prefix for AP to the WLC management network. 

APs are in the overlay space on the fabric edge switches, with the following deployment characteristics:

• All APs are in one management subnet across the entire fabric.

APs get registered in the host tracking database (control plane) as wired clients.