wifispray

30 devices per room isnt high density in my opinion, also if internet is your only application im sure that will work no problem. The fact is you could have half the APs and it would likey work the same. Your right alot of people who talk on her are non-meru people, ive used in the past with very mixed results..... Glad your network is working well for you, hopefully in the future with IoT it will scale.....

Ok dead is strong, maybe dying is more the word to use. SINGLE channel doesnt scale in high density! Multi-Cell, Multi-Single channel, Channel Blankets, Channel duvet whatever its called now does..... With the world moving to IoT, single channel isnt the answer, maybe for schools its ok. Meru helped the industry to bring ideas such as airtime fairness, fact is they have fallen behind over the years.

Hopefully with the acquisition by Fortinet we will see Fortinet/Meru drop single channel, which is a dead technology! The truth is Meru had some great ideas with this that have been since fixed by the standards. Problem with Meru is they have been very niche for many years and due to the market not adopting single channel almost caused there demise. Although it doesn't break standards it takes a view on specific parts of the standard which doesn't play nice with neighboring Wi-Fi, they adjust certain parameters which allows there APs to transmit quicker (adjusting inter-frame spacing etc).... Its great to see them being purchased although for a very small price for a WiFi company, look at Aruba/HP and Cisco/Meraki you will see its a steal. If they had not been im sure they would have slowly disappeared. This does bring uncertainty for anyone who is currently a customer, or people looking at this until the acquisition is fully complete. Mark works for Meru and will always be biased to his technology.

Looks like this is Microcell..... Shouldn't all the APs be on the same channel in Meru?

The best overall solution on the market for BYOD and Wi-Fi is Aerohive. With Aerohive you can create unto 10k private pre shared keys (Private PSK) per AP which makes guest/BYOD management very easy. You can then assign a user profile to each of the different user types (i.e. BYOD/Guest etc). As each AP has a layer 3-7 firewall built in it means that you can have a mixture of clients on the same SSID and segregate nicely. You then get a good view of all the applications running on the network as the firewall is able to see the different applications. As recommend LAN3 are a good supplier in the UK that have come highly recommend before.

So native cell? i.e. Multicell

Meru have a product called IDM, Cloudpath is another option and iBoss is also worth considering

Ill take your word it worked great with 70 clients on an AP320..... That would be a lot of overhead with Virtual Cell enabled on 1 radio.

Did you have 4 SSIDs?

MCA networks offer much more scalability than SCA networks for a fraction of the cost. Per a high-end Meru VAR, building ubiquitous single-channel layers across a campus adds about a 50% cost penalty (at minimum) to have 3 layers for 2.4GHz and only 2 layers for 5GHz. That's pretty steep considering that MCA networks can scale far beyond that level for 50% less cost. Heavy saturation comes from 2 things: high client density and heavy utilization by those clients. A single channel can only withstand a given amount of utilization until it saturates, wherein lies Meru's scalability problem. By use many times as much free bandwidth, MCA systems can far out-scale SCA. When interference happens in a particular area, MCA systems can have ONLY the AP covering that particular area change its channel to recover that available bandwidth, whereas SCA systems cannot. Meru's system doesn't support high client density at all. Their system is limited to (64 - #SSID per radio), which means if there are 4 SSIDs on a radio, they are limited to 60 client connections on that radio. That would mean 120 clients per AP. Worry less about the ethernet ports and more about the air contention!

In general controllers/aggregating traffic back to a central location doesn't cause to much overhead currently (depending on the network design). But with the adoption of 802.11ac in your case this is going to become and issue. A lot of wireless vendors now (Like Aerohive/Airtight and now Aruba) are creating controller-less products to tackle this problem. This basically means that everything is handled at the AP from a data/control perspective allowing the wireless to not have to traverse the network. It also makes things like QoS/policy enforcement/firewalling etc easier. It also allows you to control what hits the network and what doesnt. In the case of Meru this shouldnt be a massive issue, as Meru only uses a single channel and doesn't have the ability to hit the same speeds as multi channel solutions.

I would say if your looking at a cloud based solution the best choice (currently/at time of writing this) in the market is Aerohive. They are the leaders in this space.

As with everything, over marketed on the actual performance gains, but at PHY Ruckus are currently marginally better than all...... Every vendor has a benefit and short coming.... Its finding which ticks more boxes than another based on your requirements.

HAHAHAHA..... This made me laugh. Wonder if someone in marketing got fired?

Very true. However, The thing with Ruckus' solution is client support and moving to more than just downlink. I think standards will win out...... they always do. But Ruckus stand a great chance at leading the pack.