Barnard College Picks Meru Networks 802.11n Wireless for Primary Networking in Student Residences

 

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Mar. 31, 2008 – Barnard College has selected Meru Networks to provide student residence halls on its New York City campus with high-speed IEEE 802.11n wireless network coverage.

This summer Barnard will deploy approximately 150 Meru 802.11n-enabled wireless access points in five campus dormitories, providing students with high-performance wireless coverage when they return for the fall term. When two additional dorms get Meru 802.11n equipment in the summer of 2009, a total of nearly 2,000 students in Barnard residences will have wireless coverage.

Plans also call for deployment of Meru 802.11n gear in The Nexus, a 70,000-square-foot state-of-the-art mixed-use building that will serve as the college's center of intellectual, cultural and social life and is scheduled to be completed in 2009.

Barnard selected Meru as its wireless network provider based on the results of a 2006 product test in which the college deployed access points in two initial residences: one dorm had Meru products; the other, products from Cisco Systems.

Thom Sobczak, Barnard's director of management information and network services, said the wireless project was initiated because "our wired infrastructure was old and prohibitively expensive to replace, and wireless had evolved to the point where it was a valid option for primary student networking. In our 'bake-off,' the Meru technology blew us away. There were no issues with coverage or capacity, no complaints from users."

A major factor in the selection of Meru was the company's virtual-cell wireless LAN (WLAN) technology, which automatically selects one channel span for enterprise- or campus-wide coverage, layering additional 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.

Emily Harris, Barnard's associate director of networks and systems, said, "With Meru's single-channel approach, the client never needs to know or care which access point it's associated with, and the IT staff doesn't have to do any of the time-consuming channel planning that every other wireless LAN vendor requires. And as a small college that has to budget carefully, we appreciated the fact that, with Meru, less hardware would support the same number of users and take less manpower to maintain."

The move to 802.11n, Harris added, in part reflects the increase in students bringing in more 11n-equipped laptop computers – notably Apple systems, which have supported 11n for the some time. "The majority of first-year students are coming in with the newest Mac laptops, wanting the fastest possible access," she said.

The new portions of the Barnard network will use Meru's AP311 dual-radio access point, which has one 802.11n radio and one 802.11a/b/g radio (software-upgradable to 11n). Existing wireless sites on campus use the AP208 access point, whose two radios can operate in either 802.11a or 802.11b/g mode. The expanded network will deploy four Meru MC3000 series controllers, each capable of supporting 150 access points, in a 3+1 high-availability configuration.

About Barnard College
The idea was bold for its time. Founded in 1889, Barnard was the only college in New York City, and one of the few in the nation, where women could receive the same rigorous and challenging education available to men. Today, Barnard is among the finest liberal arts colleges in the country, and the most sought-after women's college. For more information, visit www.barnard.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.