Meraki, a cloud-based wireless networking company, announced recently that its “wireless access points” product was picked by Stanford University.
The Palo Alto (News - Alert), Calif.-based school plans to install them in the Gates Computer Science Building in order to provide wireless coverage for the growing number of laptops and WiFi (News - Alert)-infused devices in the building.
The Gates Building is a 150,000 square foot facility that houses roughly 550 faculty, staff and students in Stanford’s Computer Science department. Under terms of this deal, 15 Meraki MR14s -- dual-radio 802.11n APs -- were installed. The entire installation took only four hours to deploy, clarified company officials.
Reportedly, Meraki’s new Enterprise features are used to manage the Meraki network in the Gates Building. These new features – Rogue AP Detection and Network Analytics -- are now generally available to all new and existing Enterprise customers at no additional cost, include
The Rogue AP Detection feature improves network security by detecting nearby APs that may be spoofing SSIDs, as well as APs that may be connected to the LAN without permission.
The Network Analytics feature generates analytics reports about the usage and reliability of a Meraki wireless network, bandwidth trends, device popularity, mobility and more.
Each Meraki AP is capable of broadcasting up to 16 SSIDs that are independently configurable.
Administrators can use these 16 SSIDs to create different wireless networks for different groups of users and devices. Apart from this, they can even have Event Logging: Real-time logs offer complete visibility into where, when, and how devices connect to a Meraki wireless network, reducing troubleshooting time and providing device tracking capabilities.
Miles Davis, director of computer services, said Meraki’s new Enterprise features to be instrumental in providing reliable coverage in the department’s challenging network environment, students, faculty, visitors and even experimental robotic devices.
“We’ve got robots on their own network drops, along with a campus network for people who come in and out of the building all day. We also have people who work in the building and have wireless devices that must work all the time,” said Davis. “Having a wireless network just work is kind of refreshing.”
Jai C.S. is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Jai's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Marisa Torrieri