Live demonstrations of Meraki Wi-Fi gear with Pablo Estrada

Pablo Estrada, Solution Architect at Meraki, demonstrated their cloud controller technology during Wireless Field Day 2, showcasing how Meraki is working with TelMex to implement HotSpot 2.0 and offload cellular data to wireless networks. The presentation focused on live demonstrations of Meraki’s Wi-Fi gear and its sophisticated cloud-managed dashboard, designed to give IT administrators an intuitive and powerful view of their network. Estrada began by navigating the Meraki dashboard, showing real-time analytics like access point status, client connections, and signal strength, and emphasized tools available for troubleshooting, including ping tests and traffic usage histories for both infrastructure components and end-user devices.

Throughout the presentation, Estrada highlighted the depth of telemetry data available through Meraki’s dashboard, such as detailed client device tracking, bandwidth consumption, application usage, and signal metrics. He demonstrated how administrators could troubleshoot individual devices by tracking their data consumption in real time, triangulating their location based on multiple access points, and even analyzing rogue SSIDs. The dashboard’s functionality extended to advanced mobile device management (MDM), which supports monitoring and controlling company-owned devices such as iPads through app installations, usage restrictions, and policy enforcement based on device type or user role. Estrada also covered capabilities around bring-your-own-device (BYOD), showing how automatic policy application ensures network security and bandwidth control without requiring manual intervention.

In the latter parts of the demo, Estrada explored Meraki’s network-wide and site-to-site VPN features, switches, and firewalls, demonstrating how their unified cloud platform manages wired and wireless devices together. He revealed the simplicity of configuring IPsec VPN connections, as well as the ease of distributing firmware updates and network policies. The dashboard’s application-layer traffic analysis tools allowed for bandwidth prioritization of critical applications like VoIP and blocking or throttling of peer-to-peer traffic. The session concluded with examples of Meraki’s use in enterprise and healthcare networks, showing how their scalable infrastructure meets robust management and compliance needs, including support for HotSpot 2.0 and emerging features like IPv6.