University of Miami slots in campus-wide 802.11n WLAN

By Enterprise Innovation Staff | Dec 18, 2008

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University of Miami, one of the nation's premier research universities, has chosen Meru Networks to supply a campus-wide wireless network based on the new-generation high-performance IEEE 802.11n draft 2.0 standard, which allows wireless access at speeds up to 300 megabits per second - more than five times the speed of earlier technologies.

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."