Meru Networks Case Study: Brune Park Community School
Liam Stapleton: We're a launch school, 11 to 16. Over 1,700 students. The school's made an awful lot of progress in the last ten years where we got to a point where we need to make more progress more rapidly. In January last year, I was at the boat show and I saw the net books for the first time. It was then that I realized that there was a huge potential here for us to make a very big increase, a very big improvement in the standard of pupils' work, and also to raise achievement significantly. We made the decision to choose the Meru system in May. We presented it to the Board of Governors who approved the funding for this.
Aidan Bowen: We got introduced to Brune Park, I had a meeting with Liam Stapleton, the vice principal, and it became very clear that they needed a technology that was going to support their new year 10 and year 11 net book rollout. They're somewhere in the order of 700 users and they needed a technology that was going to support that large enough number. Consequently, Meru was really the only solution that we could see that was going to cope with that and we got involved talking to them about deploying that across the school.
Julie Dendy: We tried other systems, and none of them had the capability to be able to move from one area to another without losing signal. They were really high maintenance. We had lots of problems. Teachers didn't trust it, basically. When Meru came along, we looked at it and it was the sort of plug and play solution that is ideal for us at our school.
Mark Howell: Meru with its Virtual Cell and single channel technology, and also the air traffic control intelligence at the very edge in the access points does away with issues of channel interference, roaming, etc. The key point in a school environment where they're trying to roll out high-density usage or laptops or Wi-Fi devices, Meru can handle very high users of devices in a single space such that logon times are far greater reduced using Meru than with competing technologies.
Aidan Bowen: More and more schools and colleges are looking to deploy net books, laptops and handheld devices to really embrace modern teaching and learning techniques. This is a great idea, but of course it falls over very, very quickly if you haven't got a very robust and scattered wireless network. It's no good plugging these devices into the Ethernet network anymore, many of these devices don't have Ethernet interfaces. So a very strong, scalable, pervasive wireless network is absolutely fundamental and essential for deploying that kind of regime. That's where Meru fits in. Meru's the only technology that provides that level of scalability and performance and return on investment that all of these institutions are looking for today.
Year 11 Student: When I use the net book it's really reliable because getting onto any website is really quick and the connection's quite quick, even just logging on.
Randall Jull: Before we had the net books, we did have access to the ICT Suite and we did have a small amount of laptops available to the department, but they were on a booking system and it was very hard to get them. They've got much more of an access to thousands and thousands of resources that we wouldn't have before and would've been limited to small slots throughout the year, so it's more about the old cliché of doing is understanding. Because they've got a resource that they can now practice and manipulate, it then helps them understand it and recall it better further down the line.
Year 11 Student: Once I've done my work, I can send it to my teacher through email and electronically. Then instead of my handing it to her, I can just do it over the Internet and she can send it to me once they've marked it, so it's much more quick and I know what level I'm working at.
Aidan Bowen: Reliability and robustness is a core concern from the clients. From this point of view, we've been delighted with the response, obviously, with regard to Meru. Literally, we haven't had a single telephone call from them since the day we put it in. I don't know, that's obviously a solution that they're very, very happy with. Kids go into the classrooms, they open their net books, they log on, it works. It's a fire and forget element in that respect.
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Very High Density Wireless LAN Demonstration for BYOD - Part 1by merunetworks3,319 views
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