Cisco 2500 Series Wireless Controllers
End-of-Life — Migrate to Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series
Cisco 2500 Series Wireless Controller – End-of-Life Notice
The Cisco 2500 Series Wireless Controller has reached its End of Sale (EOS) and is no longer available for new purchase from Cisco.
Cisco will continue limited support for existing deployments until the official End of Support date. Organizations planning long-term wireless infrastructure should begin migrating to Cisco’s modern Catalyst wireless platform.
Recommended Replacement
Cisco recommends upgrading to the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers, the next-generation wireless architecture designed for modern enterprise networks.
- Built for Wi-Fi 6 / Wi-Fi 6E high-density environments
- Enterprise-grade security and policy control
- IOS-XE based architecture with automation and programmability
- Scalable deployment for campus, branch, and cloud environments
If you currently operate Cisco 2500 Series controllers, our team can help plan a smooth migration path to the Catalyst 9800 platform.
Overview:
The Cisco® 2500 Series Wireless Controller enables systemwide wireless functions in small to medium-sized enterprises and branch offices. Designed for 802.11n performance, Cisco 2500 Series Wireless Controllers are entry-level controllers that provide real-time communications between Cisco Aironet® access points to simplify the deployment and operation of wireless networks.
As a component of the Cisco Unified Wireless Network, this controller delivers centralized security policies, wireless intrusion prevention system (wIPS) capabilities, award-winning RF management, and quality of service (QoS) for voice and video. Delivering 802.11n performance and scalability, the Cisco 2500 Series provides low total cost of ownership and flexibility to scale as network requirements grow.
The Cisco 2504 Wireless Controller supports Cisco Application Visibility and Control (AVC), the technology that includes Cisco's Network-Based Application Recognition 2 (NBAR-2) engine. N-BAR-2 does deep packet inspection (DPI) to classify applications and tie into quality of service (QoS) to either drop or mark the traffic, thereby prioritizing business-critical applications in the network. Cisco AVC uses NetFlow Version 9 to export the flows to Cisco Prime™ Infrastructure or a third-party NetFlow Collector. The Cisco 2504 Wireless Controller also supports Bonjour Services Directory, which enables Bonjour (Apple) Services to be advertised and utilized in a separate Layer 3 network. Wireless Policy engine is a wireless profiler and policy featureon the Cisco 2500 Series Wireless Controllerthat enables profiling of wireless devices and enforcement of policies such as VLAN assignment, QoS, ACL, and time-of-day-based access.
Cisco 2500 Series Wireless Controller-based access point licensing offers flexibility with 5, 15, 25, or 50 access points. Additional access point support can be added in increments of 1, 5, or 25.