So faculty but not students might have access to Apple TVs in specific rooms, or to certain AirPrint printers.

Ciscos Webcast promotional page puts it this way: With the Cisco Bonjour Gateway, available in a future software update, the wireless controller will answer device service queries in proxy of the server. Once the client gets a response it can connect via layer 3. Now file servers, printers, video devices, or any Bonjour server device can be accessed across subnetsmaking it easy for users to access the services they need.

Spain says Cisco is currently testing the gateway to find out how and to what degree it can reduce Bonjour discovery traffic. In effect, with the intervening controller, every Bonjour request-response appears to the client device as a local, single-network transaction. Because the controller acts as a proxy for other Bonjour services on other subnets, it can minimize broadcasts, at least in theory.

We think the gateway will reduce the total amount of Bonjour traffic over the network, says Spain.

The Tuesday webcast will also demonstrate Ciscos application visibility and control (AVC) over wireless LANs. This software, which identifies specific applications based on deep packet inspection compared to a catalog of application signatures, has been around for years as part of Ciscos popular ISR routers and other products, especially to optimize relatively slower, shared resources like WAN links. This code is now being embedded on the Cisco WLAN controllers and given yet another Cisco acronym, NBAR, for Network Based Application Recognition.