Meru WLAN brings non-stop Internet freedom to Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland

Details: Category: Consumer Ecosystems; 18 March 2009; 9311 views

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland is now giving students non-stop Internet freedom with a new Meru WLAN. Meru saw off competition from five companies, notably in eliminating breaks in service and coverage being encountered on campus...

Nicolaus Copernicus University, in Torun, Poland, has adopted a wireless network from Meru Networks to provide secure Internet access without dropped connections for a rapidly growing number of the university's students and faculty. The University, known in Polish as Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika (UMK), is replacing stand-alone wireless access points on its campus with a centrally-controlled wireless network from Meru in order to keep up with surging demand from students for wireless Internet access.

"The university's network has around 400 users a day and more than 2,000 regular users a month," said Tomasz Wolniewicz, Director of ICT at the University. "We needed a network that would give access to that number of students without breaks in service."

Since 2005, the University has deployed around 90 stand-alone wireless access points from 3Com to cover open access areas such as libraries, halls and cafeterias. At first these supported a small number of students with wireless notebooks but laptop use has grown rapidly, and wireless access has doubled in the last year. New arrivals are placing heavy demands on the network. "We can get up to 40 new users every day," said Tomasz Wolniewicz.

And with the influx of new users and growing demand, the old network was not able to cope. "Users were noticing a break in service when their laptop switched between one access point and another," continued Mr Wolniewicz. "This break was up to several seconds long, and was becoming a problem for users."

Additionally, the legacy network would not support new applications the University was considering, e.g., VoIP, so last year the University decided to upgrade its wireless LAN infrastructure. It tested equipment from Meru, Cisco, Aruba, Trapeze, 3Com and Siemens, and found that Meru Networks Virtual Cell architecture eliminated the breaks in service and coverage that students were experiencing as they roamed the campus. Virtual Cell architecture is claimed to be unique to Meru, and not to be found in other wireless LAN systems.

"The particular thing we had been measuring was handover - the break in transmission when a client moves from one access point to another - because we wanted to reduce the problems it caused," said Mr Wolniewicz. "In our tests, the Meru system eliminated this break." These positive results are being shared with other universities through the Polish academic network consortium Pionier.

In summer 2008, the University's computer science faculty installed a Meru network consisting of an MC1000 controller and fifteen AP201 access points, which support the IEEE 802.11a/b/g standard for wireless communication.

Following this success, the University installed another Meru network for other faculties and shared buildings across the campus. It replaced standalone access points building-by-building and now has Meru APs installed in three faculty buildings, the library and the main administration building. Now complete, the University has 65 Meru AP 200 access points supporting 802.11a/b/g and an MC3000 controller which provides the centralised intelligence to easily deploy and manage large-scale wireless WLANs. Looking to the future, UMK will not be buying any new standalone access points.

As well as UMK students and staff, the Meru network is available to visitors from other universities, because it connects to the international secure Eduroam system, which provides user authentication for wireless LANs in educational establishments across Europe. UMK's WLAN was the first network in Poland to connect to eduroam.

* Nicolaus Copernicus University (Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika w Toruniu, UMK), in Torun, Poland, was founded in 1945. It was named after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who was born in Torun in 1473, and launched the Scientific Revolution by placing the Sun at the centre of the Solar System. The University is the largest in North-West Poland, and has 40,000 students, and 4000 staff. The majority of its 15 faculties are located in a campus on the outskirts of Torun, while some are in the historic centre of Torun.

** eduroam (EDUcation ROAMing) allows users (researchers, teachers, students and staff) from participating institutions to securely access the Internet from any eduroam-enabled institution. The eduroam principle is based on the fact that the user's authentication is done by the user's home institution, whereas the authorisation decision allowing access to the network resources is carried out by the visited network.

*** Konsorcjum FEN commenced operations in 1998 and is a Value-Added Distributor. The company represents a number of leading manufacturers of network equipment and computer peripherals. It provides technical support for the brands it distributes with the next-business-day warranty and offers to its business partners technical and certification training courses. Each of the brands distributed by FEN is covered with comprehensive promotional-marketing support.

**** Founded in 2002, Meru Networks develops and markets wireless LAN infrastructure solutions that use virtualisation to deliver pervasive, high-fidelity wireless service for business-critical voice, video and data applications. The company first introduced its award-winning virtual cell wireless architecture in 2003, and Meru products embody a complete departure from typical hub-based WLAN approaches, offering a wireless solution with "levels of performance, reliability, security and cost-effectiveness previously found only in wired networking environments."Meru's solutions have been adopted in all major industry vertical markets, including Fortune 500 enterprises, healthcare, education, retail, manufacturing, hospitality and government. Meru is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in London, Paris and Stockholm, and operations in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.