The School District of Philadelphia, the eighth largest school district in the U.S., is now providing wireless Internet access at every school in the district in one of the world’s largest installations of wireless local area networks (WLAN) in production today, says Meru Networks
Avaya and Meru Networks are teaming to supply wireless access to converged data, voice and video application services in nearly 268 schools for more than 166,000 students and 10,000 teachers.
They deployed more than 7,000 Meru Networks Radio Switches – the equivalent of 14,000 wireless access points and more than 28,000 radios - says the company. Avaya was the system integrator for the project, along with H. J. Heinz Company.
Meru’s RS4000 Radio Switch, based on Meru’s Air Traffic Control Technology, is said to provide full Quality of Service (QoS), toll-quality voice and data and multiple channel spans for high capacity. Using Meru’s patent-pending wideband omni-directional antenna technology, the RS4000 is said to be able to serve 802.11a/g bands and increase the total WLAN capacity by up to 400 percent in any given area.
In Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, which hosts a number of research projects in wireless communications, plans to deploy Xirrus Linux-based “WiFi Arrays” throughout residence halls and other locations. CMU plans to deploy the arrays along with Aruba WLAN equipment to create a campus-wide Gigabit WiFi network. Xirrus and CMU also plan to research pattern analysis of usage and roaming activity and co-develop services for WiFi-array device- and network management, says Xirrus.
Xirrus’s 802.11n WiFi Arrays are based on PowerPC-based control-plane processors, along with FPGAs programmed to handle performance-critical tasks in hardware. Each array integrates dual load-balanced Gigabit Ethernet uplinks, a console port, and PCI-X expansion slots. The company is beta-testing a software update that, along with new radio modules, that adds support for 802.11n.
In other news, researchers at Ball State University’s Office of Wireless Research and Mapping took advantage of a temporary six-month 3.5 GHz license that was granted to the university by the FCC, and tested connectivity, throughput, capacity, signal strength and penetration from inside homes, while accounting for variables such as weather, trees, elevation and distance.
“As one of the only research entities testing WiMAX in the United States, we’ve been able to examine the performance of the WiMAX platform during a typical Midwest deployment,” said Bizhan Nasseh, assistant vice president for information technology and director of OWRM. “The data collected will not just impact the ‘wireless world,’ but have a significant economic impact as well.”
Field tests were performed using indoor self-installable customer premise equipment (CPE) and outdoor CPE as well as signal testing to determine the ability of the equipment and obtain a quality usable signal.
Researchers found that the WiMAX equipment was much better at obtaining a consistent and usable signal from obstructed and non-line-of-sight locations than more traditional point-to-multipoint technology.
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