Cisco Medical-Grade Network (MGN) 2.0— Wireless Architectures

George — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:36:27 +0000

Cisco released their MGN 2.0 - Wireless Architectures document this week. Nothing earth shattering here but it is a good refresh for healthcare organizations to take a pulse of what offerings there are in the healthcare wireless vertical.

This document does a brief overview of wireless design, location, security, network management and Jcaho.

I love how Cisco trashes DAS and puts them under the bus. DAS + 802.11 is a VERY BAD MIX. Just my 2 pennys. DAS is great for other wireless transport modes, just keep WiFi off of it... I remember when DAS hit the market. Cisco wasn't sure how to handle it. I'm glad they are stepping away from supporting DAS deployments. If you don't read the entire document. Read the DAS section.

"Cisco does not certify, endorse or provide support for Wi-Fi deployments over any distributed antenna
system. The DAS vendor or integrator is solely responsible for the support of the DAS products and for
any RF-related issues. This includes location accuracy, RF coverage, roaming issues related to RF,
multipath issues, and scalability. While Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) and Cisco field teams
do not provide support for RF issues that arise in a Cisco WLAN used over a DAS, they will, however,
provide support for non-RF related issues if they arise"

Cisco mentions in this document that WEP is not an acceptable security posture for healthcare. Nothing new, I know. But there are tons of hospitals still using WEP and this read will likely end up on the C levels desk and perhaps new direction may come down from the top to not use WEP.

"Wireless Networks which use Open Authentication, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) or Cisco's WEP
Extension using CKIP) are no longer considered Medical Grade due to their weak security."

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Verticals/Healthcare/MGN_wireless_adg.pdf