Aruba AP-303 end of life: the 303P ends nine months before the 303

Aruba AP-300 series end of support dates

We track 4 variants in this family. 1 ends within the next twelve months. The earliest and latest dates are 2.5 years apart, which is why a single family-wide date is worth nothing.

Sorted by end of support, soonest first. The date shown is End of Support, the last day the vendor will fix, patch or replace the unit. It is not End of Sale, which is simply the last day you could buy one.

Source: HPE Networking Support Portal, Product End of Life notifications, End of Support Date. A variant we have no published date for is left out of this table rather than given a guessed one.

What the letters mean

Aruba uses a single trailing letter to mark a physical variant, and each variant gets its own lifecycle. The plain AP-303 is the standard ceiling-mount unit. The AP-303H is the hospitality model, a wall-plate access point with a wired passthrough port designed for hotel rooms and student housing. The AP-303P adds PoE-out, so it can power a camera or a phone from the AP itself.

The 303H and the 303 share a date. The 303P does not, and it is the one most likely to be forgotten, because it tends to be deployed in small numbers for a specific purpose and then never looked at again. A dozen PoE-out units in a warehouse are exactly the kind of thing that goes unsupported without anyone noticing.

Reading the model from the controller

On ArubaOS, show ap database lists every joined access point with its model string, which is the exact form to match against the table above: AP-303H rather than "303 series". On Aruba Central the same field appears in the device inventory export.

Watch for the IAP- prefix. The same hardware sold as an Instant AP is written IAP-303 in some vendor documents and AP-303 in others. The lifecycle date is the same, but a lookup keyed on the exact string will miss one of the two spellings unless it normalises first.

What replaces an AP-303

The AP-303 is a Wi-Fi 5 wave 2 access point. HPE positions the AP-500 series and AP-600 series as the Wi-Fi 6 successors, and the AP-700 series for Wi-Fi 6E. For a 303H specifically, the AP-503H is the direct hospitality equivalent.

For the broader picture see the HPE Aruba Networking EOL guide, the full Aruba end of life list, or the Aruba 2530 page if the switches underneath these APs are also on your list. HPE publishes access point and switch dates in the same notifications, and they rarely line up.

What the rest of the Aruba access point range has left

Access points are usually replaced in whole-site batches rather than one at a time, so the useful question is which of your other AP models fall in the same window. These are the Aruba APs still inside support, soonest first.

Still-supported models only, soonest deadline first. Channel and revision suffixes are folded into their base model here and dated by the earliest of the group, so this table understates rather than overstates. The full per-variant list is on the HPE Aruba Networking EOL list.

Questions people ask