Aruba's Got Gigabit Wifi For The Great Outdoors #WFD6

Aruba showed off their 802.11ac outdoor access point in an off-camera, 'don't talk about it til you can talk about it' session at the last WFD6.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, the 274 and 275 can be discussed freely. We were shown a prototype of the 275 model access point and the single piece of metal bracket especially designed for the AP 275.

Christian Gilby wrote a good post on the new access point and published it to the Airheads community. In the post he also covers recommended distances between outdoor mesh access points as well as links to antenna options for the new access point.
The list price for the AP 275 is $1995 for the dual radio 3x3:3 access point. The access point can be controller based or controller-less. The power requirements for the access point is 802.3at or standard AC power. Inside the access point housing is two horizontal and one vertically polarized antenna. This access point has been designed to have advanced cellular coexistence, meaning it is good at out of band filtering in order to avoid the LTE frequencies which have side lobes which affect the 2.4GHz spectrum.

The access point was surprisingly lightweight given the size of the AP 275. I liked the single piece of metal mounting bracket and that the access point weights less than six pounds (~2.5 kg). The single type of installation bracket and the minimal weight of the unit will allow outdoor installations to be streamlined and simplified. This single mounting bracket however does not allow strand mounting (a popular mounting style for Cisco and Ruckus outdoor access points). This may or may not be an issue for Aruba mesh customers.