Cisco CW9800H1-MCG | CW9800H1 Campus Gateway, 5K APs, 100 Gbps, 4x 25G

Q: What is the difference between the CW9800H1-MCG Campus Gateway and the CW9800H1 Wireless Controller?
A: The CW9800H1-MCG Campus Gateway uses the same hardware as the CW9800H1 WLC, but operates in a cloud-managed Meraki architecture. The Campus Gateway is managed entirely via the Meraki dashboard and designed for centralized wireless deployments with CAPWAP tunnel termination, while the standard CW9800H1 is a traditional on-premises Catalyst wireless controller running IOS XE.

Q: How many access points and clients can the CW9800H1-MCG support?
A: The CW9800H1-MCG Campus Gateway supports up to 5,000 Meraki access points and 50,000 concurrent clients. In an active-active HA cluster configuration, the scale remains the same per cluster, but throughput can increase up to 200 Gbps with two appliances.

Q: Does the Campus Gateway require a separate device license?
A: No device license is required for the CW9800H1-MCG appliance itself. You only need active Meraki access point licenses (either Enterprise or Advanced) for the APs connecting to the Campus Gateway.

Q: Can the CW9800H1-MCG be deployed in high availability configurations?
A: Yes, the Campus Gateway supports active-active HA clustering with two appliances. Cluster members act as mobility peers, enabling seamless client roaming across APs connected to different gateways. Both 1 Gbps RJ45 and 10 Gbps SFP+ HA heartbeat ports are available for flexible data center deployments.

Q: What deployment scenarios is the Campus Gateway best suited for?
A: The CW9800H1-MCG is ideal for large campus environments such as universities, hospitals, and multi-building enterprises that require centralized traffic aggregation, seamless Layer 3 roaming, and unified cloud management without requiring client VLANs to span across all access switches.