Case Study: Mesquite Independent School District Deploys a Wireless Infrastructure

Meru Networks WLAN Technology Deployed at Mesquite Independent School District

Jake Smith: My name is Jake Smith. I'm the president of Cactus Computer. I've been in the technology business for a long, long time and had the privilege to work with the Mesquite Independent School District for about the last 20 years. So, over that period of time we've seen a great evolution in technologies and wireless and the last ten years has been certainly a strong innovative avenue for the school district to move into.

About four years ago, to move from that first generation of wireless to a second or a third or maybe a fourth generation, but we went out to the industry and found as many different kinds of wireless equipment as we could test and we put them on various classrooms and various applications, and found after a number of weeks and those turned into months of trying to find a real, honest-to-goodness fourth generation wireless infrastructure, we weren't finding it. We were finding a lot of centralized management systems, but they were all micro cells.

So we happened to be on a conference call with another vendor, and the engineer who was just as polite as he could be mentioned how they were better than Meru. We had never heard of Meru so we decided to hang up and call Meru to see who they were and what they were doing. We had the sales people come out from Meru. We were doubtful that they were going to offer anything new, but in fact in the middle of the sales conference we were having I was interested in getting to the heart of it so I asked a couple of pretty pressing questions, and low and behold they had the absolute right answers. At least, they certainly had them in their presentation. So we got some real equipment, we put it on test. It was extremely exciting to see an honest-to-goodness fourth generation product in a way that no other vendor had even approached at that time.

That was three or four years ago, so we went into a test trial of a few access points, then we did a school, then we did a few schools. There are about 35,000 students. There's about 3,500 faculty and staff. We have a gigabit connectivity, fiber gigabit connectivity among all the sites. There's 60 building sites, of which the vast majority of them are school district buildings. 53 school district buildings. So we have all 53 on gigabit fiber networks, and we have wireless connectivity in each of the buildings.

At this point, we're in 53 schools -- sites -- in the district. We have about 900 access points. We have probably 30 controllers, distributed controllers. It's just been marvelous. So we're thrilled, we're excited about Meru's growth, we're excited about their new products. We just look forward to continuing working with Meru.

For more info visit: http://www.merunetworks.com

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• MeruNetworks
• Meru
• WLAN_Access_Points
• Wireless LAN
• Wireless_Lan_Controllers
• Wireless Software
• Mobile Computing
• 802.11n
• Wi-Fi_Networks
• Growth_of_Mobile
• Networked_Devices
• Channel_Layering
• BYOD
• Bring-Your-Own-Device
• Wireless_IT- Infrastructure
• Wireless_Networks
• Wireless_Technology
• Wi-Fi_Technology
• Enterprise_WiFi _Security
• 802.1n_Security_Management
• Wlan_AP
• WLAN
• Virtualized_WLAN
• Virtual_Cell
• Virtual_Port