Industry's Fastest 802.11ac Access Point from Meru

A wireless access point supporting the next-generation 802.11ac (5G) wireless standard, was unveiled by Sunnyvale, California-based Meru Networks last week, and is the company's first access point.

The Meru AP832 access point is the most recent in a series of new wireless equipment brought in this year to support 802.11ac; Aruba Networks, Motorola Solutions and Cisco have also released next-generation access points and routers.

Organizations with Meru's AP832 are able to adequately make room for the increasing number of mobile devices and bandwidth-hungry applications, like video, which are being distributed on wireless networks. Network performance can be brought down by media-rich apps, smartphones and tablets, but the 802.11ac has been designed to change that. It provides data rates of up to 1.3 Gbps, as well as improvements to big bandwidth, when compared to former-generation wireless standard, 802.11n.

Meru has noted that the new AP832 is the fastest 802.11ac access point available on the market today, and has been made possible as a result of its use of single-channel, rather than multichannel, architecture. The director of channel marketing at Meru, Frederick Harris, stated that the access points that are sold by most vendors need at least three non-overlapping channels to avoid interference in environments where a number of access points are being used.

The U.S. today has only a small amount of 80MHz channels (specific channels needed to reach 1.3-Gbs speeds promised by 802.11ac), and vendors use multichannel architectures to dip into 40MHz channels to avoid interference instead. This, consequentially, leads to a fall in performance and stops that 1.3 Gbps milestone from being reached at all.

Harris said: "If you drop down to the 40MHz channel with 802.11ac, you are getting 600 Mbps versus what the standard mandates, or 1.3 Gbps."

Carolina Advanced Digital is a Cary, North Carolina-based solution provider, and its vice president of engineering, Jennifer Minella, noted that Meru's unique, single-channel architecture sets it apart from other wireless vendors.

Minella said: "Related to 802.11ac, this [architecture] is really juicy for them and a very key differentiator in how they can do an implementation."

The AP832 also includes use of two 802.11ac radios, support for Apple's Bonjour networking architecture, and built-in fingerprinting capabilities; this assists in determining and enforcing certain use policies based on a device's type or operating system. From Q3 this year, the AP832 will be deployed at a starting price of $1,295.

Minella also commented that there has been an increase in interest for the new 802.11ac standard among clients this year, especially in vertical markets like education, where the use of devices like iPads has risen.

Minella stated: "We are really excited about Meru's 802.11ac announcement because we service a lot of customers that have what we would call "unique" or "special" needs. That might mean density, but a lot of times it's bandwidth - whether it's a government facility or a hospital or even schools." She added that in the past, schools have been very interested in wireless technologies, but are now moving more towards tablets, online testing and streaming media. (CY)Link