Wi-Fi Meltdown: Managing the Explosive Growth of Mobile Devices

Today is the dawn of a massive new flood of Wi-Fi devices, and they're heading straight for your wireless network. Gone are the days of sporadic, casual wireless use, when a few hundred users at a conference or exhibition had a few dozen laptops between them. Nowadays, each individual could have anything up to seven devices.

Andreas L'Estrade, Reception Manager, Nobis Hotel, Stockholm

Nowadays, I would guess, they have maybe up to seven devices. They have iPads, they have laptops, and their iPhones.

Simon Scholey, network manager, Suffolk One, College

Wireless laptops, desktops, thin clients, Apple Macs.

Aidan Bowen, Technical Director and Joint MD, Solutions Inc.

Netbooks, laptops, and handheld devices.

Jonas Herner, VP Sales, Clavister, Sweden

We get 20,000 to 40,000 people coming to the event during these two weeks, and it's really vital that they do feel secure when they're going out on the Internet.

Aidan Bowen, Technical Director and Joint MD, Solutions Inc.

But of course it falls over very, very quickly if you haven't got a very robust and scalable wireless network.

Abdul Chohan, Director, Essa Academy

So this means that actually the wireless network has to be robust. It has to allow access. It has to be seamless.

Steve McCorquodale, Education Consultant, European Electronique

It also had to demonstrate performance capability so that we could have mass numbers of students logging on, at any given spot on the college property, and there would be no issues.

Phil Page, Psychology Teacher, Suffolk One, College

At other schools that I've worked at, the wireless was a bit dowdy. You would get to move from one building to the next building, and you'd have to close your laptop and it wasn't too sure that it was working. Then you'd get there and you would spend time working out where the signal was coming from. Julie Dendy, Assistant IT, Learning Resource Support, Brune Park, School

We tried other systems, and none of them had the capability to be able to move from one area to another without loosing signal. They were really high maintenance with lots of problems. Teachers didn't trust it basically.

Traditional Wi-Fi network vendors simply can't prepare you to effectively manage the dynamic nature of radio frequency. By letting devices choose how and where to connect or should a flood of hungry Wi-Fi devices and applications hit, their flaws would be too big to ignore.

It's time for a new way forward.

Julie Dendy, Assistant IT, Learning Resource Support, Brune Park, School

When Meru came along, we looked at it, and it was the sort of plug and play solution that is ideal for a secondary school.

Steve Goodridge, Director of Learning, Suffolk One, College

The Meru network can really handle the high density traffic and has proved to us right across the college, as we built to capacity, that we've got a tool that we know is good for the future as well as being very reliable. The kids go into the classrooms. They open their netbooks, they log on. It works. It's a fire and forget type technology in that respect.

Simon Thomas, Practice Director, 9ine Consulting

We had a lot of confidence in the Meru network that delivered for us because we've gone through a lot due diligence and evaluation. It is safe to say that nothing was on the market that could touch Meru. But until we had what we called the next day dawn of the iPad, when all them looners came in all excited and connected those devices to our network for the first time, that was point when it really stood up and showed us what it could deliver.

Male

You don't even know it's there. It's like turning on a tap. You know that water is going to come out of that tap. The Meru wireless network is exactly the same. You just come in with your laptop, you switch the laptop on, and it will connect to the wireless network.

Claire Jones, ICT Co-ordinator, Southwark Primary School

The wireless that we've got here is really fantastic. It does enable us to use these laptops anywhere onsite. We can go to the end of our playing field right up the school office. We can walk around watching a video if need be. The children can really make use of the outdoors space we've got because of the wireless.

Traditional Wi-Fi networks operate like a three-lane motorway. By not recognizing the different devices, they give equal priority to each and all transmissions, resulting in the slower vehicles congesting the lanes and preventing fair access for the faster ones.