Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center Expands Meru Networks Wireless LAN Campus-wide

Medical Campus Adds First 802.11n Coverage; Several Areas to Have Wireless-only Connectivity

 

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 25, 2008 – Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center has begun installing its first high-performance IEEE 802.11n wireless access points from Meru Networks as part of a major network expansion designed to provide pervasive wireless access across its 16-building campus in Winston-Salem, N.C.

The medical center, a Meru customer since 2006, will add 255 new access points by the end of February to the 677 previously deployed, extending wireless coverage to faculty offices, outpatient clinics and the comprehensive cancer center. Fifteen of the new units incorporate the emerging 802.11n standard, which allows wireless access at speeds of up to 300 megabits per second – more than five times the speed of earlier 802.11a/b/g standards.

Bill Masten, senior network systems analyst at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said that wireless will be the exclusive means of connectivity at several of the newly-deployed sites.

"A lot of old wiring was removed when several of our lecture halls were renovated recently, so for the first time we will have some wireless-only sites," Masten said. "Where wireless used to be seen as inferior in terms of reliability and security, two years of experience with our Meru wireless LAN shows it to be just as dependable as our wired network. Meru's fourth-generation wireless architecture is superior to the others we looked at. And with the new 802.11n access points putting 200-plus megabits of data in the air, it becomes a cost argument. Why spend $300 per wire pull when you can put in a single access point to serve dozens of users?"

The move toward pervasive wireless coverage across the campus also reflects a recent paradigm shift, Masten said. "Physicians, residents and students – especially the younger ones – no longer want to plug into wired networks. They have an expectation of high-quality wireless connectivity."
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center is deploying its new 802.11n access points in high-density locations, such as lecture halls and conference rooms, where as many as 100 users could be wirelessly connected at a given time. They will also be used in areas requiring ultra-high-performance data transmission, such as outpatient clinics where ophthalmologists work with high-resolution eye images.

The center has been running voice traffic on its wireless network for more than a year. Masten said a major reason for selecting Meru was its high MOS (Mean Opinion Score, a measure of VoIP quality).

Meru products being used at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center include the AP311 dual-radio access point, which has one 802.11n radio and one 802.11a/b/g radio (software-upgradable to 11n); and the AP208 dual-radio access point, whose two radios can operate in either 802.11a or 802.11b/g mode. All access points provide high-capacity data and toll-quality voice on a single infrastructure and support Meru's "virtual cell" technology, which automatically selects a single channel span for use enterprise- or campus-wide, layering additional channel spans 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.

About Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
Wake Forest Baptist is an academic health system comprised of North Carolina Baptist Hospital, Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Brenner Children's Hospital. It is licensed to operate 1,298 acute care, rehabilitation, psychiatry and long-term care beds and is consistently ranked as one of "America's Best Hospitals" by U.S. News & World Report. For more information, visit www.wfubmc.edu.

About Meru Networks
Meru Networks is the global leader in wireless infrastructure solutions that enable the All-Wireless Enterprise. Its industry-leading innovations deliver pervasive, wireless service fidelity for business-critical applications to major Fortune 500 enterprises, universities, healthcare organizations and local, state and federal government agencies. Meru's award-winning Air Traffic Control technology brings the benefits of the cellular world to the wireless LAN environment, and its WLAN System is the only solution on the market that delivers predictable bandwidth and over-the-air Quality of Service with the reliability, scalability, and security necessary to deliver converged voice and data services over a single WLAN infrastructure. Founded in 2002, Meru is based in Sunnyvale, California. For more information on Meru Networks and its products, visit www.merunetworks.com or call (408) 215-5300.