Costello Technology College chooses Meru from Vissensa

Costello Technology College has chosen a Meru wireless network to enable its vision for the wireless delivery of education across their Basingstoke campus. The solution was supplied by educational ICT specialist Vissensa in conjunction with Siracom.

The network, based around Meru's 4000 series controller, and a mixture of 802.11n capable AP320s and 802.11g AP201s was chosen after Vissensa demonstrated that the Meru equipment overcame the performance issues that Costello had experienced with wireless networks, in particular reducing "whole class" login times from twenty minutes to just over a minute.

The Tests

An MC-3000 controller from Meru Networks was installed onto the core Costello network and an AP-320 deployed to a science classroom, to enable whole class log-in tests for laptops from a Costello laptop trolley.

The laptop trolley holds sixteen RM MobileONE 945 laptops. These are Core Duo 2000 machines with 512M RAM, running windows XP, and using Intel 3945 802.11 a/bg network interface cards. All 16 laptops were used. Tests were carried out using 802.11g.

Live Environment Testing

The system was left installed at the college for testing in the live environment. A class of students were asked to test times for simultaneous login.The average login time was 45.5 seconds. The maximum was 150 seconds.The test was repeated and achieved an average login time of 33 seconds with maximum login time of 91 seconds was achieved.

The results of these tests are difficult to fully interpret as the profile sizes were variable, and there is no control of background tasks occurring in parallel to the log-in. (background tasks include software upgrades). The live test however compared favourably with the existing wireless deployment which failed to deliver whole class log-in in twenty minutes.

Controlled Testing

For test purposes clean roaming profiles were created, and the laptops were upgraded to ensure that a standard log-in occurred without down load of updates. Simultaneous login of sixteen laptops was timed. The tests were repeated, with each “user” logging in at a different machine, to ensure that profile information was not cached.

Average results between the two tests were as follows:

Number of Laptops	Wireless Spec.	Profile Size	Average time to login all laptops
16	802.11g	1.5MB	46 Seconds
16	802.11g	10.1 MB	68 Seconds

John Yarham from Vissensa said "We have a long history of installing wireless networks but were relatively new to Meru. Siracom provided everything we needed to enable us to transition to Meru"