50 Districts Adopt Meru WLAN System
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2/12/2007—Wireless solutions provider Meru Networks has reported that more than 50 K-12 school districts in North America have adopted its wireless LAN (WLAN) technologies, representing some 1,000 individual schools. The company also said that it sees adoption of WLAN technologies accelerating in schools, driven in part by a "growing reliance on mobile computing in the classroom is the need for interactive multi-media applications to support emerging learning techniques and environments."
Meru is the developer of Air Traffic Control (ATC), a standards-based WLAN technology that's designed for high-density use in classrooms. The company said its ATC "allows more users to be connected wirelessly and also dramatically reduces the time it takes for students to log onto to classroom applications simultaneously."
One of the recent implementations of Meru's technologies includes St. Agnes Academy in Houston, TX, which includes 950 notebook computers. The system it deployed supports 700 active wireless notebook computers in the same building. Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 in Park Ridge, IL also deployed the system recently, providing building-wide wireless access in three of its nine school buildings.
"The Meru Networks solution has enabled us to provide a building-wide wireless solution for three of our nine school buildings," said Gerald Berkowitz, manager of technology for the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64, in a prepared statement. "With the Meru solution, we no longer have to worry about co-channel interference or spending a lot of time strategically placing access points; we no longer have dead areas. This has made a tremendous productivity difference, our students and staff have the computing resources they need always available and online and we're able to easily add or change the network when we need to."
Other recent implementations include:
- Faith Lutheran Junior/Senior High School in Las Vegas;
- Indian River School District in Vero Beach, FL; and
- Amherst School District in Amherst, NY.
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About the author: Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters. He can be reached at [email protected].
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