Danville Public Schools In Indiana Choose Meru Networks To Provide High-Performance 802.11n Wireless Network Access

Sunnyvale, CA - The Danville, Indiana, Community Schools have selected Meru Networks to provide a high-performance IEEE 802.11n wireless network for their students and staff. The new network, to be deployed beginning in early 2009, will enable students to participate in online class activities, conduct research, complete assignments and take assessments from anywhere in the building. Teachers will be able to use the network to create lesson plans, review electronic records and perform daily classroom management tasks such as taking attendance wirelessly using their laptop computers. School visitors will also have wireless guest access to the Internet.

The Meru wireless LAN will be installed first in the district's newly-built Danville Community Middle School in January. When funding permits, the district plans to extend the Meru wireless solution to the district's high school, elementary schools, alternative school and administrative buildings, serving nearly 3,000 students, teachers and staff in a total of nine buildings. The unified, centrally controlled wireless system will replace existing wireless access points that operate independently and provide isolated pockets of wireless coverage in several school district buildings.

"Historically, we were very cautious about using wireless for anything bandwidth-intensive or mission-critical," said Brad Fischer, director of technology for Danville Community School Corporation. "A minimal network disruption in the middle of a school assessment has the potential to affect the performance of hundreds of students. With Meru's technology and 11n's performance and reliability, I'm confident in using the wireless network not just as an adjunct to my wired network, but as the primary network for high-stakes activities such as student testing."

In preparing a technology plan for the district's new middle school, Fischer said he was initially leaning toward buying from a larger wireless LAN vendor when he heard about Meru from his peers in other school districts.

"My two greatest concerns were what would it take to get the network up and running in the first place, and then what would it take to keep it running and grow it," he said. "Several people suggested I take a look at Meru, and I did. As I dug, the more Meru's solution seemed to fit what I was looking for. The deeper I dug into other vendors' solutions, the more questions and concerns arose about them."

Meru's virtual cell wireless architecture minimizes WLAN interference and improves WLAN performance and reliability by using one wireless radio channel enterprise-wide. If more capacity is needed, additional enterprise-wide channels can be layered over the first channel. In contrast, conventional WLAN systems use a "micro cell" approach, which assigns different radio channels to many small adjacent AP cells to ensure that no two APs use the same channel in the same place. This requires precise and time-consuming channel planning and AP power adjustments to work well, making it difficult to load-balance in dense environments, and limiting future network expansion.

"We were able to design our Meru solution quickly, accurately and intuitively, without a lot of up-front planning and a detailed channel overlay," Fischer said. "Our coverage and capacity needs are subject to frequent change, and with the other vendors you'd do a lot of planning on the front end, only to have to throw out that plan and do it over if something changed later. With Meru's single-channel approach, you just drop in an additional access point wherever there's a coverage gap, without worrying about channel interference."

802.11n: Choosing the "Standard of Tomorrow" Fischer's choice of Meru's 802.11n technology for the district was based on having the flexibility to deploy "the standard of tomorrow" and giving users the highest possible performance, while retaining backward-compatibility with the old 802.11a/b/g standards.

"We wanted a wireless system that would give us more flexibility and provide the basis for a more fluid learning system," he said. "The network might need to support two laptops in a classroom on one day and five on another day, and occasional special events in the gym or cafeteria."

While wired networks will remain in most areas of the schools, Fischer added, the wireless LAN will significantly reduce the need for costly wiring, enabling a classroom to support just one or two wired connections rather than one for every desk.

SOURCE: Meru Networks