Jonn: You make some very salient points. The shortcomings that Cisco has in their WLSE product extends past the academic environment. For all their engineering talent and past experience, they weren't able to come up with an interface that just makes sense and can easily manage all points of their wireless infrastructure. Cisco has never been known to write a strong GUI, and perhaps this is just another confirmation of that trend. From what I'm told, Airespace's ACS is one of the reasons that Cisco bought them.
During a recent visit to a major conference Netstumbler was able to hear at least a eight 802.11b/g AP's simultaneously. There were 3 strong AP's on channel 1. That just can't be great for performance. If usage levels are moderate, OK, but what about when they increase? Frank -----Original Message----- From: 802.11 wireless issues listserv [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonn Martell Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2005 12:43 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] MERU networks questions Unfortunately, WLSE hasn't been able to keep up with the competitors. Some of us have been trying quite a bit but the development team is either understaffed or not understanding campus deployments. It could also be that campus environments are not that important for them (a small market share). The lack of completion for WLSE is likely the main reason they purchased Airespace. The future roadmap should be interesting; I hope they share it. It would be great to be able to turn the intelligent APs (1200, 1100s) into thin radios with hybrid capabilities. They could release a cheaper DSP based 1000 series which could support MIMO capabilities being discussed in 802.11n? We previously stayed away from the whole "special switch" concept because of our love affair with ethernet but there needs to be good 2D and 3D multi-building RF management tools to tune very large campus wireless networks in order to support next generation applications such as VOIP. Meru's offering is interesting but I don't understand the advantage of a single channel use in 2.4GHz. I would understand the ability to have three channel is campus-wide; that would seem like a far more capable network (up to eight in 5 GHz). I look forward in seeing Cisco's roadmap in relation to these competitors. ... Jonn Martell, UBC Wireless Eric T. Barnett wrote: >I just saw some promising information on the web about Meru Networks' >wireless solution. Anyone out there using Meru? What do you think? >We're running a Cisco WLSE with about 120 AP's and 5 1200's working as >WDS. Just wondering how Meru really stacks up to Cisco specifically in >ease of use, returns, support, and lifespan of equipment. All of their >press makes them sound too good to be true. Many thanks. > > > >Eric Barnett, CCNA > >Wireless Administrator > >Information and Technology Services > >Arkansas State University > >870 972 3033 > > > > >********** >Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. > > > ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
