Cisco® Aironet® 1200 Series access points deliver the investment protection, versatility, and enterprise-class features demanded by wireless LAN customers. It is designed specifically for challenging environments like factories, warehouses, and large retail establishments that require the antenna versatility associated with connectorized antennas, as well as a rugged metal enclosure and a broad operating temperature range.

Supporting Cisco IOS® Software, the Cisco Aironet 1200 Series is a component of the Cisco Structured Wireless-Aware Network (SWAN) framework, a comprehensive framework that delivers an integrated, end-to-end wired and wireless network. Using the radio and network management features of the Cisco SWAN framework for simplified deployment, the Cisco Aironet 1200 Series extends the security, scalability, reliability, ease of deployment, and manageability available in wired networks to the WLAN.

The Cisco Aironet 1200 Series meets the needs of today's applications and protects future network infrastructure investments. The modular design of the 1200 Series provides a high-performance 802.11g configured access point that allows for either single- or dual-radio configuration. While the 802.11g-configured access point meets the needs of most customers and applications that may not have a current need for 802.11a, an easy 802.11a upgrade kit is available, to increase scalability and performance with complete backward compatibility for legacy clients.

The Cisco Aironet 1200 Series is part of the award-winning Cisco Wireless Security Suite, which supports 802.11i, Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2), WPA, and numerous Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) types. WPA and WPA2 are the Wi-Fi Alliance certifications for interoperable, standards-based wireless LAN security. These certifications support IEEE 802.1X for user-based authentication, Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) for WPA encryption, and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for WPA2 encryption. These certifications help to ensure interoperability between Wi-Fi-certified wireless LAN devices from different manufacturers.

The Cisco Aironet 1200 Series hardware-accelerated AES encryption supports enterprise-class, government-grade secure encryption over the wireless LAN without compromising performance. IEEE 802.1X authentication helps to ensure that only authorized users are allowed on the network. The series also provides backward compatibility and support for WPA client devices running TKIP, the RC4 encryption algorithm.