Meru dual-802.11ac-radio gives customers two 80 MHz channels at 5 Ghz

ENGLAND, UK: Meru Networks has announced the Meru AP832, the market's fastest 802.11ac access point. Meru's superior 802.11ac speed is attributable to the Virtual Cell, a single-channel option provided by the MobileFLEX architecture and its support for the use of 80 MHz channels as outlined in the IEEE 802.11ac draft specification.

Competitors' wireless architectures largely restrict support for 40 channels due to limited channel availability, reducing data rates to approximately half of the 1.3 Gbps-per-radio that the specification allows.

The Meru 802.11ac solution stands alone in its ability to enable the use of three spatial streams over two 802.11ac radios on standard 802.3af power. This eliminates the need for customers to upgrade their entire Ethernet switching infrastructure, as currently required by many Meru competitors when deploying their 802.11ac solutions.

"Ubiquitous and instantaneous access to information resources is essential to ensuring the best possible learning experience for our students and is essential to our future," said David W. Johnson, head of Technology Services and Support (TSS) at the University of Houston. "The adoption of Wi-Fi devices on the University of Houston campus has been explosive.

"Students are likely to carry two or three Wi-Fi enabled devices at any given time and all-encompassing Wi-Fi use in the classroom will soon be the norm. The promise of IEEE 802.11ac to serve up media rich content in highly dense environments makes it a top priority and is driving UH to get out ahead of the curve. We feel that we need to be working with 802.11ac today, learning what it can do and how to leverage it to increase access, improve service and security, and reduce our costs by enabling a shift from wired to wireless infrastructure."