Meru Networks WLAN Case Study: Miller School of Medicine

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The campus is comprised of approximately 60 buildings. Here all on one campus is a big, metropolitan-area network. There's about 10,000 folks connected to the network on a daily basis. We have doctors asking for Tablet PCs so they can walk around seeing patients, taking notes. Two doctors in the trauma room with handheld cameras that they want on wireless so that 50 or 60 of them are looking at patients -- trauma patients -- and being able to give diagnosis and not have 60 folks in a patient room.

Technology has to work, and it has to be fast. And we cannot afford co-channel interference, which is a big problem with traditional wireless. You have to design your wireless based on that criteria -- channel 1, 6 and 11 -- and then the channels repeat and they cannot see each other. If they see each other, there'll be a disconnect and the user goes offline for seconds, minutes, whatever the reactivation time is.

Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of folks and it's a huge problem. You need an army of staff to maintain that environment, and it's exponential. The more APs or the more wireless you have, the worse the problem gets. We looked at Cisco Wireless as a solution for the medical system, and we started deploying and got up to about 150 access points from Cisco and just realized we cannot manage that environment. It was out of control for us. The Cisco product just didn't scale. Cisco said they can mirror Meru, they can act like Meru, they can work like Meru. Their idea for that was an auto-tuning feature on the controller that would tune the radios of all the APs and kind of theoretically manage that environment, and that doesn't work. We had to survey three buildings at a cost of about $150,000.

In the Meru environment, none of that's needed. You just put the AP wherever you'd like to place it, same channel as the rest of your deployment, and we just bought it. We bought a pilot which was 25 access points and a controller. We tried to break it for three months, and all the basic apps you can think of were not really a problem. Our second order was 100, then it went up to 500. It's just the actual engineers that maintain the product, it's very small. They're maintaining 25 controllers and over 3,000 access points for Meru.

There's really no competition for the way Meru does wireless. In the Meru environment, there's no co-channel interference which means I don't need to design a 1-6-11 deployment. I can pick one channel and deploy the entire network on the same channel. Just put the AP up and a MAC address, go to the controller and activate it. It's very simple. The mobile device always sees the same MAC address so it never thinks or feels that it's being handed off from one access point to another, it's completely seamless to the device. The doctor can roam anywhere on campus, anywhere across 2.5 million square feet of campus space. We even have wireless deployed in the external areas using directional antennas that are facing outwards from the buildings, and they're covering the external areas of the buildings so as a doctor's walking from one building to another, hallways, tunnels, cafeteria, restaurants, they're actually still in communication with the university practice.

In a seamless fashion, as they're walking from one building to the other, their call is completely crystal clear and uninterrupted because of Meru's Virtual Cell technology. The Meru product in the five years we've had the product at the medical center has been completely reliable. We haven't had any problems with the technology, or the equipment, or the access points. Everything's worked perfectly. As we said before, there is no product in the same space as Meru using the same technology. They truly are unique in the way they use technology.
Meru's wireless LAN provides high-performance mobility services to Miller School of Medicine's clinical staff, research staff, educational staff, medical students, visitors and its network of clinical facilities across more than 60 buildings.

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