mhowell Posted January 19, 2014 Posted January 19, 2014 The Meru UK & Ireland team is pleased to announce that it is shipping (and has already installed in a number of UK education environments) its new 802.11ac based access point - the AP832. With the massive increases in reliance on WiFi as the network edge, industry analysts are predicting a rapid uptake of the new wireless standard to help deliver the requirements of your network both today and in the coming years. 802.11ac delivers great density and performance and density benefits, at a cost that makes it incredibly attractive today! For a look at what the analysts and Meru are saying around 802.11ac, please take a look at the following white papers: IDC White paper IDC Tech Brief: The Promise of 802.11ac | Meru Networks Meru White Paper - http://www.merunetworks.com/collateral/white-papers/wp-ieee-802-11ac-understanding-enterprise-wlan-challenges.pdf The Meru AP832, is a dual radio access point, providing full a/b/g/n/ac capability on either radio. The out-of-box configuration sees the AP832 supporting 802.11bgn clients within the 2.4GHz band on one radio, and 802.11a/n/ac clients within the 5GHz band on the other. Although 802.11ac client are required to take full advantage of the new standard, industry testing has shown that due to newer silicon and higher performing radios and CPU's, legacy 802.11n clients are seeing a clear performance jump of typically anywhere between 20 and 40% when connected to and 802.11ac access point such as the AP832. Due to the increased performance of 802.11ac, a number of wireless vendors have found that they need to utilise the newer 802.3at PoE+ standard to get the most from their hardware, adding significant cost to any upgrade. Meru has however been able to engineer its AP832 to leverage full 3x3MIMO, 80Mhz wide 802.11ac performance of up to 1.3Gbps on both radios within the bounds of 802.3af PoE. The 802.11ac standard has been written with the future in mind, with the standard supporting datarates of up to 7Gbps. The first generation of 802.11ac products are supporting 3x3 MIMO and 80MHz wide channels, enabling up to 1.3Gbps datarates. This is not unlike 802.11n where initial enterprise offerings provided 300Mbps, with a wave of 450Mbps AP's coming a number of years later. In order to achieve the higher data rates of the 802.11ac standard, it is a requirement to use wider channel widths. The standard mandates the support of 80MHz wide channels in both AP and client hardware. The use of 80MHz wide channels does however leave a challenge for traditional microcell vendors due to the lack of available channels. Within ETSI regulations, there are 5 80MHz wide channels available. Of these, only one resides outside of DFS regulated spectrum. Of the other 4, two sit within a section of bandwidth reserved for weather radar - these two channels are available for use but there are very strict conditions, mandating a 10 minute channel availability check - in turn complicating their use. With these limitations in mind, a number of WiFi vendors are recommending 802.11ac be deployed utilising 40MHz wide channels. This reduces the benefit of 11ac, providing a 33% uplift in datarate over 3x3MIMO 11n, whereas the use of 80MHz channels provides almost 200%. Meru's single channel architecture allows for ubiquitous 80MHz 802.11ac coverage across your campus, whilst allowing WiFi virtualisation (Virtual Cell) to eliminate the slow down and poor end user experience delivered when clients are in control! For those customers already invested in Meru’s 11n solutions, we have some very aggressive trade up options to allow you to migrate your older controller infrastructure (Mc1000, MC3000, MC4100) to the newer MC1550, MC3200, MC4200 versions (physical or VMware based) which will support the newer 802.11ac standard and System Director 6 software which now has included in it our Service Control functionality (http://www.merunetworks.com/collateral/white-papers/wp-apple-bonjour-support-architecture-overview.pdf) to allow you to take control of the Apple Bonjour and zero config multicast services you may have running on your network, that can often cause network contention issues. There is a very aggressive trade up option for customers to trade in their existing Ap300 series (we will consider other models as well for this trade up, just contact us), and migrate to Ap832’s at significantly discounted prices. I can’t share these as this is the realm of our partners, but we are happy for you to contact us directly so we can point you in the right direction for pricing and support. 802.11ac will form the focus of our BETT stand this year, Stand E340, and we will be presenting each day on the following topics: 11:00 Discover the Meru Difference Learn why 3000+ Schools UK wide have chosen Meru for their wireless net¬work solution 12:00 Meru 802.11ac Learn about Meru’s virtualized wireless network architecture , optimisinng usage of 802.11ac for higher throughput and capacity 14:00 Managing Bonjour Services Learn how to overcome the challenges of managing Apple Bonjour services on your network with Meru's Service Control 15:00 Identity Manager – BYOD solution Learn how to simplify guest access and BYOD provisioning You can register for these sessions here https://merunetworks.wufoo.com/forms/bett-2014-seminar-session-with-meru-networks/ We look forward to seeing you at BETT and as ever feel free to contact me directly for any questions / support , Mark Howell [email protected] , and one of the team will be able to help you The comments and opinions here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer!
ticker Posted January 20, 2014 Posted January 20, 2014 Mark can you register for these sessions on the day at BETT?
mhowell Posted January 20, 2014 Author Posted January 20, 2014 Sure, just turn up on the stand and we'll accommodate. Look forward to seeing you
LukeC Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 @mhowell Do you know when 802.11ac will be ratified and not in draft version unless it has now changed. I am looking at installing a new wireless system and looking at Meru with the ac standards but want to check i'm not jumping onto the ship to soon. If the ac standard hasn't been ratified yet would there be firmware upgrades for the meru ap purchased now once ac has been ratified? Hope this makes sense.
Mustang Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 I believe 802.11ac got ratified on the 8th of January
mhowell Posted January 27, 2014 Author Posted January 27, 2014 correct, 11ac is now ratified and our hardware conforms Get in touch if you need any other advice on how to best migrate to ac The comments and opinions here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer!
kennysarmy Posted January 29, 2014 Posted January 29, 2014 Hi Mark, Jeff here, how long do you think realistically before those of us without AC will be forced to upgrade?
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now