Wellington Primary School chooses Meru from Netsymphony

Students at Hounslow’s Wellington Primary School can now experience high‐speed, uninterrupted WiFi access thanks to NETSymphony’s recent installation of Meru Networks' innovative Virtual Cell WLAN architecture.

Since the implementation of the new system at the West London school all pupils are now able to connect to the internet from anywhere in the school, and experience a rich, fully interactive experience without interference from their neighbours.

The school had previously used stand‐alone Wi‐Fi access points to provide coverage, but it became clear that conventional WiFi could not provide full network access throughout the school, nor could it support high levels of connectivity when thirty or more pupils attempted to get online simultaneously at the start of a lesson.

"The features of the Meru system enable high numbers of students to be connected simultaneously" said Adam Pearce, IT infrastructure technician at Wellington Primary School. "The results we have achieved are impressive, pupils can even move from classroom to classroom without losing their network connection, something that just can’t be done with conventional WiFi systems."

NETSymphony, working in closely with networking distribution specialist, Siracom, installed a Meru wireless network, comprising 13 AP150 access points and an MC1015 controller. The solution was installed by two engineers in just two days with minimal disruption to pupils in the school.

“Schools have specific requirements when it comes to wireless networking” said Richard Coukham, Projects Director at NETSymphony. “The high density of users and the need to support many pupils logging in simultaneously at certain times of the day means that it is a very different networking challenge to that found in a commercial or industrial environment. The Meru single‐channel virtual cell architecture is the perfect solution.”

Meru's virtual cell architecture has all access points on the same radio channel, in contrast to the multiple radio channels used in conventional WiFi environments. With conventional systems each access point has to broadcast on a different channel than its neighbours. This means a lot of time must be spent surveying and planning the installation and can also mean that certain access points have to be attenuated to prevent them from interfering with an access point close by running on the same or an overlapping frequency.

Meru virtual cell architecture eliminates the need for this level of planning and eliminates interference between access points, making network management and expansion simpler. More importantly, the network can be extended easily; additional capacity or coverage can be added at any time simply by plugging in a new access point.

Information about Netsymphony is available at www.netsymphony.co.uk.