University Of Miami Selects Meru Networks For Campus-Wide 802.11n Wireless LAN
The deployment, which began in January at the university's Coral Gables, Fla., campus and will be completed by April, will include 525 wireless access points and fully redundant controllers. Approximately 100 of the access points are already in operation.
The wireless network will provide Internet access in classrooms, residences and outdoors for the university's more than 15,000 graduate and undergraduate students, plus some 10,000 faculty and staff. Plans also call for adding voice (VoIP) capability to the network in the coming months.
Stewart Seruya, the University of Miami's assistant vice president of telecommunications and IT security, said the university had been looking to upgrade its wireless network and selected Meru to replace legacy WLAN equipment from several other vendors.
"We've had wireless networking in some form for the past seven years, and chose the new 11n standard because we wanted our next investment to take us at least that far into the future," Seruya said. "We learned about Meru from our colleagues at the (University of Miami) medical school, who were extremely satisfied with their network."
"Meru met our requirement for 100 percent backward-compatibility with the earlier 11a/b/g standards," said Diana Cortes, senior network engineer at the university. "And since we don't yet know which frequency will emerge as the most popular for 11n-equipped student laptops, we wanted our 11n products to operate in both the 2.4- and 5-GHz spectrum bands. Meru gave us absolute flexibility in all these areas and surpassed our expectations in terms of performance."
Cortes added that the key technology factor in the selection of Meru was the "virtual cell" architecture, which automatically selects a single channel for use campus-wide, layering additional channels only when more capacity is required. This contrasts with the "micro cell" approach used by most legacy WLANs, which assigns different channels to adjacent network cells, raising the potential for co-channel interference.
"Meru's single channel approach not only made the network much easier to deploy, but had better signal coverage and overall throughput, and could support more concurrent users than other vendors," she said. While the university expects a single access point to typically accommodate 20-30 users at a time, Meru equipment was recently shown to support as many as 150 students concurrently taking an online exam with just two access points.
Meru products being used in the University of Miami deployment include the AP300 family of single- and dual-radio access points, which provide simultaneous support for 802.11n, 802.11a and 802.11b/g clients, handling toll-quality wireless voice and high-capacity data on a single infrastructure; and MC5000 controllers, which provide centralized intelligence and control for up to 1,000 access points. Plans call for the deployment of two geographically separated MC5000 units – one in the university's data center, the other in the main campus – in a fully redundant configuration designed to withstand natural disasters and other potential causes of outages.
SOURCE: Meru Networks