Wireless | Short Takes

Brief: Meraki WiFi APs Get Performance Boost, Price Drop

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 11/16/10

Meraki has released a two new access points in its 802.11n family, boosting performance and lowering cost. The new Meraki MR16 is a dual-concurrent 802.11n access point, designed for enterprise and campus deployments and priced at $649. The Meraki MR12 is a single-radio 802.11n access point, best suited for small branches, teleworkers, and home office deployments, priced at $399. Both support about 100 users and are about an inch thick in size.

Features introduced by the company in September 2010 are included in the new APs. Those include spectrum analysis for uncovering and mitigating non-WiFi interference and application-aware traffic shaping that lets the network administrator set up traffic policies. The devices also integrate a policy firewall for guest, user, and group-based access control.

Meraki's controller infrastructure is cloud-based, which means management of the WiFi network is done through a browser-based dashboard and updates to the firmware take place in the background during normal AP operations.

Further information can be found here.