Meru Networks reportedly announced it has successfully completed two years since its first deployed the 802.11n Enterprise Wireless Local Area Network, and said it was the first organization to debut such a technology.

A few years ago, Meru officials said that Morrisville State College, part of the the State University of New York, had selected it in partnership with International Business Machines Global Services for a campus-wide roll out of an 802.11n network to become the first institute to do so.

“Being an early adopter is never easy, but with Meru’s superior products, there is no risk since the architecture is so well suited for 802.11n,” said Jean Boland, chief information officer of Morrisville State College, in a statement. “In order to realize our vision of increasing productivity, speed, coverage, and bandwidth service for every user, everywhere on the network, we needed the latest in wireless networking. We now have more than 50 percent of devices that support 802.11n, and we are very proud of what we have been able to achieve with the latest innovation from Meru Networks (News - Alert). Constant and continuous access has helped our students and faculty foster a superior learning environment.”

Recently, a Dell’Oro Group market research report revealed that 802.11n access points have tripled over the last year to log in at 18 percent, and the WLAN market is expected to grow to $1.9 billion by the end of 2010, with 802.11n accounting for the majority of total access point shipments.

Meru Networks earlier this year installed its new Meru 802.11n WLAN solution at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, and the current 5 Giga Hertz revamped network is fast and conforms to IEEE (News - Alert) 802.11n draft 2.0. The standard permits data to be transferred at the rate of 300 Megabits per second on the physical layer. This speed translates to an average throughput of 100 Mbit/s for the user.

The new system has Multiple-Input Multiple-Output built in. It permits multiple types of transmitters and receiver antennas. Such a diverse environment accepts multipath signals. In the old system multipath signals were a nuisance because these caused signal interference and degraded the quality of service.

With the new technology, Wireless Access Points can be introduced anywhere anytime. Wireless signal transmission and reception through some of the old thicker walls is no longer a problem.

It is a well-documented fact that more and more people are demanding wired and wireless broadband to such an extent that that broadband usage catapulted up by 84 percent in 2008, compared to 2007.

Meru said its 802.11n solutions leverage WLAN virtualization techniques to allow organizations to deliver information, applications and business processes in a personalized way to individuals, while enabling network managers to roll out large-scale and secure WLANs at a fraction of the cost of Cisco (News - Alert) and Cisco-like other “micro-cell” based solutions.

Officials claim their solutions are backward compatible and interoperable with most 802.11a/b/g devices, and its Air Traffic Control applications help it to streamline and prioritize dual direction data transfer in such a way that the wireless network’s performance, bandwidth and delivery is maximized even for highly dense network clusters.

“Meru’s strategy to deliver a high-performance networking solution using superior wireless LAN architecture, at a lower total cost of ownership is resonating across the Americas, EMEA and APAC, and enabling us to gain market share over the incumbent networking vendor, Cisco, whose legacy architecture is being replaced with WLAN virtualization architecture that only Meru offers," said Ihab Abu Hakima, president and CEO of Meru Networks, in a statement. “With the pending 802.11n standard ratification expected in mid-September, more companies will adopt our enterprise wireless solutions and further realize the performance and cost benefits that our existing customers have enjoyed for years.”

The company said that its WLAN Virtualization uses a common operating system for access points and controllers and integrates wireless switching, security, voice and video network services to deliver high performing enterprise grade reliability and uncluttered operational simplicity.

Officials said Novarum Group, a WLAN product testing analyst firm, discovered that Meru’s WLAN solutions were performing better than all other equivalent and competitive technologies, and said more results can be found in Novarum Group’s study called, ‘Independent Study: Enterprise 802.11n Wireless Access Point (News - Alert) Performance Benchmark.’

“Meru 802.11n APs outperformed equipment from both Cisco and other like micro cell based products, consistently exceeding 170 Mbps throughput – and maintained high performance under heavy data and voice traffic loads that made other vendors' APs suffer performance collapse," said Ken Biba, chief technical officer of Novarum Group, in a statement.