Cisco Meraki Campus Gateway - The Future of Wireless Aggregation

Today, 20th May 2025, Cisco are launching their new product - the Meraki Campus Gateway (MCG).

The MCG has been created to solve a scaling issues for Meraki deployments using the VPN Concentrator mode, while pathing a way forward for customers that want to migrate to a fully cloud managed solution without needing to redesign their entire WLAN from scratch.

Firstly, lets cover the scaling issue in legacy environments. In Meraki SSID Tunnelling with VPN concentrator mode, the MR access point tunnels traffic from an SSID to the local MX appliance for centralised breakout to the internet or back into the LAN. For many customers this works absolutely fine with no issues.

However, these tunnels have a high encryption overhead and are brought up 1 tunnel per SSID per AP. So two SSIDs in VPN mode and 1000 APs would see 2000 VPN tunnels back to the MX... which in turn has a tunnel limitation of 1500 - Doh!

The MCG solves this by providing similar roaming scale to on-prem 9800 appliances and uses VXLAN encapsulation instead.

So who is the MCG for? Well, if you're a customer who has a large campus network and is looking to migrate to the cloud, but don't want to redesign your environment, the MCG is designed for you and grants you the following benefits:

• Keep wireless AAA and Client Traffic centralised

• high availble infrastructure

• seamless and fast roaming for thousands of clients

• capacity to tunnel 1000's of APs

• Campus gateway also act as radius proxy - Simplifying NAC/ISE configurations and deployment times

Most importantly for purchasing - There is no device license required for the MCG appliance. The only licensing required is for the Access Point in Meraki (Either Enterprise or Advanced) MCG SKU: CW9800H1-MCG (recommended 2 appliances)

Cisco is leveraging the power of the Meraki dashboard more and more, and the announcement of the MCG should be seen as the latest step on this path. The "tin" (switch, WLC, AP, etc) is starting to take a backseat. Even in this instance the MCG hardware is based on the 9800-H1 appliance, badged up as a Meraki product.

There has always been a perception (rightly or wrongly) that the Meraki devices are inferior to the more enterprise catalyst products, and as Cisco continues to mesh these product lines together I can only find positive things to say about their products and the impact they have on customers.