Why Meru?

Why Do Customers Love Meru? Why Do Competitors Hate Meru?

Reliability and Performance

The Rhetoric

802.11n makes Meru irrelevant. Its Air Traffic Control technology is mainly useful for squeezing more capacity out of limited spectrum, but 802.11n gives everyone more capacity anyway.

Our Response

Other vendors can't deliver the full capacity of 802.11n in the 2.4 GHz band, and so recommend not depending on that band for 802.11n at all. The problem lies with their microcell architecture, which requires at least three non-overlapping channels to deliver one channel of usable bandwidth. As the 2.4 GHz band is only wide enough to accommodate three non-overlapping 20 MHz. channels, microcells leave nothing spare for redundancy or to increase channel size.

For 802.11n to reach its full 300 Mbps, it must use channel bonding: tying two non-overlapping 20 MHz. channels together to double the bandwidth. The only way that vendors using legacy microcell technology can support this is to put adjacent APs on overlapping channels, which degrades performance due to interference. In contrast, Meru efficiently utilizes each channel, enabling its access points to offer both a full-speed 802.11n network and a legacy 802.11b/g network on separate channels in the same band.

But the Meru technology does a lot more than just increase network capacity. It improves reliability, simplifies handoffs, eliminates channel planning and lowers the number of APs needed. Combined, all these advantages make a Meru network's total cost of ownership less than half that of a microcell network. [Network Strategy Partners]

Reliability is even more important with 802.11n than with previous standards. When a channel is blocked by interference, a 300 Mbps link can drop all the way down to 6 Mbps. And interference is twice as likely to affect 802.11n networks thanks to the doubled channel size. With Meru's channel layering, the wireless network can, for the first time, provide RF robustness by adding multiple channels of availability in the same band.  Microcell architectures cannot do this.  On a Meru network, interference is less of a problem because those additional channels are available throughout.

This is important, because 802.11n allows for a larger number of channels than before, by being able to use more of the 5GHz band.  Microcell architectures continue to waste those added channels trying to avoid adjacent access point interference.  Meru does not waste those channels, allowing them to be used for added robustness and capacity.  Therefore, Meru's solution is optimal for both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands.

The Reality

"Unlike other vendors we evaluated, Meru puts all of its access points on the same channel, so that roaming between access points does not interrupt the application.   This ensures that our doctors will have seamless mobility without the disruption of lost connections."
– IT manager, Women's Healthcare Associates.

"With Meru's virtual-cell technology, we've had zero outages so far – a first in my experience,"
– systems and network manager, Wyoming District Court.