Extricom or Meru Wireless

[mattstevenson2005]

Hi Everyone

 

Looking at wireless system for a full campus wide solution narrowed it down to two Extricom or Meru, i am swaying more towards Meru as you dont have to wire each access point back to the switch directly. Anybody got any thoughts?

 

Thanks

 

Matt

[featured_spectre]

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/our-advertisers/49546-ruckus-quote-please-3.html#post457170

 

Review that before making a choice some people have found it to be quite helpful.

Edited March 18, 2013 by ZeroHour

[BooBoo]

Hi Mat,

 

I was at a presentation from Brune Park Community College in Gosport last week on how they are have deployed Netbooks to their yr10 & yr11. Nearly 650 pupils in total. This is in addition to the standard trolley suites and staff laptops.

 

The college is using MERU for the wireless and Lenevo Netbooks. The Parents are buying the Netbooks from the school at a heavily subsidised rate but the Netbook remains the property of the school until they leave.

 

Talk to their Assistant Principle Liam Stapleton about the how they have implemented and paid for it or Julie Denby their IT Team Leader on how it technicaly works. Tel :02392616000

Solutions Inc was the supplier.

 

I was impressed with the whole setup. They seems to have less drop-outs than us (We've been Cisco for about 5 years) and everyone connects at a faster rate than a normal micro-cell infrastructure.

 

Martin

[inhousetech]

Hi Matt

 

Have you had costs for each depoyment yet? If not that could make a BIG difference! just speaking from my experience.

The Extricom could be seen as being limited because all AP's have to be linked dirctly back to a switch, however dependant on your campus layout this may not bean issue. They also have range extenders allowing up to 200M from the controller. The Meru AP's doen't have to be directly linked to the controller, however that means they put 802.11 traffic (approx 3 times the size of 802.3) straight on to the network, meaing a lot more traffic on your network. Great if your running very high bandwith backbones!

Edited March 4, 2010 by inhousetech

[chilbs]

Get quotes from both and talk to people. Both companies should be able to give details of flagship projects in schools.

 

Having used and installed the Extricom system I would definately recommend it.

 

 

Have not used Meru so cannot comment on that.

 

Chilbs

[_Adam_]

Recently reviewed the big players and Meru ended up in the top 2 the same as you. However further research into them discovered the possibility of them breaking the 802.11 protocol to achieve their results, in a bad neighbour way.

 

This disqualified them from our short list. In our case we went the Cisco 5508.

[localzuk]

How come you've narrowed it down to Meru and Extricom, might I ask?

[Haptic]

Have you taken a look at the Ruckus Managed Wireless Solution as a comparison and if so what did you think

[mhowell]

Hi Matt,

The best way to review Meru is to talk to our now very large education customer base in the UK and ask them of their experiences using Meru's products. One of the responders earlier in the thread talked about Brune Park. There's a fair number of references in your area as well

here's a couple of useful video case studies.

Meru Networks | New Line Learning

Meru Networks | Brune Park

 

The notion of Meru being in some way being non standards based is a red herring. Meru's (like Extricoms) architecture is so differentiated that the market became "split" around 2005/2006 where microcell vendors with an architecture based on home based wireless (how many homes do you know where 30 children arrive and try to access the wireless simultaneously) have tried to protect their position. There's a good reason why Extricom and Meru's technology is called 4th generation wireless by the leading analyst Gartner. Meru came to market with their "Air Traffic Control" technology back in 2005 and it was so successful that others claimed it was non standard. This is clearly not the case and Meru was certified twice.

 

For a list of certified enterprise wireless products from the wifi alliance see here

Wi-Fi Alliance: Product Search

 

Meru's 11n products were certified as far back as 2007, we were the first to market for 11n and have the most field experience deploying 11n.

 

Hope this helps in some way and if you'd like to let me know exactly where you're located then I'd be happy to find you some local schools/colleges to talk to

 

Thanks

 

Mark