Meru Networks: Bryant & Stratton Deploys a Wireless LAN
Ernest Lehmann: My name is Ernest Lehmann. I'm with Bryant and Stratton College. We're a career college based in Buffalo, New York and we have about 10,000 students in about 17 locations across the eastern seaboard. We came to Meru last fall. We were looking for what I always call something that wasn't grandma's wireless. We had a lot of access points from all kinds of different vendors. D-Link and Linksys of course on all our campuses, and some campuses had nothing at all.
As a career college, more and more of our students were coming to us and wondering why do we not have a wireless system that works, works everywhere and works well? Our administrators and our campus directors were also looking for wireless that would be available everywhere so that no matter what campus we were in and what class we wanted to offer, we could provide a wireless experience that worked and worked for an entire classroom. So we invested in Meru. We did that after a bakeoff where we actually put the two systems, Meru and a competitor, head to head against each other to see which one would actually work in a real-live lab classroom environment. We're happy to say that Meru was the clear winner, not just for performance but also for administration and for administering and controlling the various classrooms that we needed.
So we've been very happy, we've been rolling it out over the last few months and deploying it primarily in every single square footage area of each of our campuses. So it's a complete solution for all our locations and it's really cut down the cost of wireless at every location primarily because now we can provide wireless everywhere without having to worry about wiring. So when it comes down to having the wire versus having wireless everywhere, the cost-benefit has been that we've not had to wire all of our locations and all the wiring has been replaced with wireless. We're putting classrooms everywhere and it gives us the flexibility of moving classroom carts and putting a classroom anywhere we choose to.
And then of course for students, when they come in and they need to access the Internet, they can do so easily. They can get to it as a guest or as a student, and of course our faculty and administration have easy access to wireless. So that's primarily the solution we're using at Bryant and Stratton college. So at Bryant and Stratton, we have primarily an Angel learning environment, which is a learning management system that's used for our online students, and as we look to the future we're really looking to have Angel used by the rest of the campuses.
So we have an online division that has about 1,000 students in all kinds of locations. But at the campus locations, the students primarily have been doing the traditional educational experience and we're moving them into blended learning environments and environments where they need to use the learning management tool from a laptop or from a computer. Sometimes that's at home, but many times it's on the campus. So they need to be able to get to computers. And as a career college, many of our students may come to us without a computer at all so we need to provide them with access to computers and wireless devices.
They come with their iPhones, they come with their handhelds, they come with their Blackberries or sometimes just cell phones. Many of the times, these are increasingly coming with Wi-Fi capability. So being able to access our Angel system, which does have a web capability for mobile devices means they need to be able to get to the learning management system from a device. And then eBooks of course are coming on strong. Our bookstore's beginning to offer those so people can get to those eBooks or textbooks from any device, particularly a laptop.
For more info visit: http://www.merunetworks.com
Loading...
6:03
WLAN Case Study: Brune Park School - 1,700 Studentsby merunetworks624 views
Link to this comment:
All Comments (0)