Aruba, Meru or Ruckus

[slice]

Guys, We are extremely pleased with our new Meru network here. I appreciate the dilemma, i had conversations with most of the afore mentioned suppliers. We eventually took up the offer of borrowing some eval kit from Meru to see first hand how it worked with our own devices. Very impressed! The bandwidth limitations associated with our existing unmanaged wifi network have gone. We can now consistently logon suites of laptops/students with a 4Mb mandatory profile in a couple of minutes. The ability to create security profiles and SSIDs with a couple of mouse clicks is superb. The result is the ability to support not only our own devices, but an array of staff / students handheld devices. As a school our strategy is to embrace the use of personal handhelds and as such students are now accessing Moodle / Mahara / email etc with surprising regularity. In a recent 'very high' density test we simultaneously connected 200 devices to our Meru network, and then attempted simultaneous video streams, nearly 90 devices streamed the vid successfully at which point we saturated our Internet bandwith! Very pleased to observe that the Meru network didnt even break a sweat!

[garethEds]

We are looking at Aruba at the moment as our LEA has negotiated a discount with the supplier. I'm only looking to put in 4APs at the moment but will be getting the 16 port version of the control switch.

 

Gareth

[plexer]

I've been along to a demo of the Meru kit today thanks to Karen Nash at Ergo and the IT Guys at Reepham High School for hosting it and the guys from SiraCom for doing the demo.

 

As has been said previously the report is a few years old and so the statements in it about the Meru kit not being centrally managed are no longer accurate as they also now use a controller appliance.

 

Every wireless vendor will tell you there kit is the best and so you have 2 choices really test them all independently yourself running real world testing, probably not doable for most schools or pick a wireless vendor who's products have been used and tested in environments similar to yours and then work with that vendor so that the solution works for you.

 

Ben