50 K-12 School Districts Achieve Greater Productivity With Meru Networks' Next-Generation Wireless Solution.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Meru Networks, the global innovation leader in wireless infrastructure for the All-Wireless Enterprise, today announced that its next-generation Wireless LAN (WLAN) System has been successfully implemented and is currently providing advanced wireless connectivity in more than 50 K-12 school districts in North America. When fully deployed, this represents more than 1,000 schools.

Many factors are accelerating the adoption of the advanced WLAN in schools today. One key factor driving the growing reliance on mobile computing in the classroom is the need for interactive multi-media applications to support emerging learning techniques and environments. Meru's WLAN System excels at meeting this need, while also solving the specific challenges schools face in deploying and managing such systems.

Meru's patented Air Traffic Control technology is uniquely suited to support the high density of simultaneous mobile users and devices found in classrooms. Compared to other wireless LANs, Meru's standards-based system allows more users to be connected wirelessly and also dramatically reduces the time it takes for students to log onto to classroom applications simultaneously. This allows precious classroom time to be used more productively. In addition, with industry-leading wireless quality of service, Meru's system enables the schools to deliver advanced streaming media, voice and video applications to enhance the interactive learning experience. Meru's Wi-Fi certified system delivers these benefits to all the typical mobile clients found in schools like laptops from Apple, Dell and HP and enables the schools to use their wireless infrastructure to deliver advanced learning applications from Microsoft and others.

Meru's unmatched ability to support single-channel deployments eliminates the need for complex and costly site surveys and RF channel planning, allowing a school's IT staff to rapidly roll out and operate a pervasive wireless infrastructure. With this deployment approach, any changes in requirements of capacity, applications, configuration, or coverage can be implemented without any channel re-planning or costly changes to the network design.

One example of a successful campus deployment can be found at the St. Agnes Academy in Houston, Texas. "Meru Networks was the right solution for St. Agnes," said Jason Hyams, director of technology, St. Agnes Academy. "We have an extremely dense wireless network, with 950 notebook computers. Before upgrading to Meru we could only support 450 active wireless notebooks in one building. With the Meru WLAN solution, we can now have 700 active wireless notebook computers in the same building using the Internet, intranet portal and streaming media servers."

Other recent deployments, such as Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 in Park Ridge, Ill., illustrate a second need in K-12 installations; the need for an easy to deploy and manage network. "The Meru Networks solution has enabled us to provide a building-wide wireless solution for three of our nine school buildings," said Gerald Berkowitz, manager of technology for the Park Ridge-Niles School District 64. "With the Meru solution, we no longer have to worry about co-channel interference or spending a lot of time strategically placing access points; we no longer have dead areas. This has made a tremendous productivity difference, our students and staff have the computing resources they need always available and online and we're able to easily add or change the network when we need to."

Another school which benefits from Meru technology is the Faith Lutheran Junior/Senior High School in Las Vegas, Nev. "The simplicity of the Meru solution and the ease with which we can add access points and change the system made it the best choice for us," says Tom Chalfant, director of computer sciences for Faith Lutheran. "We can truly leverage this technology for the benefit of our teachers and students. Our students use laptops and we're using advanced applications such as video streaming across the wireless network to deliver lessons."

Other recent deployments include the Indian River School District in Vero Beach, Florida and Amherst School District in Amherst, New York.

"With the rapid adoption of laptops and new educational applications, pervasive wireless networks are becoming a critical element of the school's educational infrastructure," said Sarah Kim, director of Education Vertical Marketing. "As compared to other wireless LAN systems, the Meru solution not only allows these schools to cost-effectively deploy, manage and grow this critical network, but also enables the teachers and students to realize significant productivity benefits based on the unparalleled performance of the system."

About Meru Networks

Meru Networks is the global leader in wireless infrastructure solutions that enable the All-Wireless Enterprise. Its industry leading innovations deliver pervasive, wireless service fidelity for business-critical applications to major Fortune 500 enterprises, universities, healthcare organizations and local, state and federal government agencies. Meru's award-winning Air Traffic Control technology brings the benefits of the cellular world to the wireless LAN environment, and its WLAN System is the only solution on the market that delivers predictable bandwidth and over-the-air Quality of Service with the reliability, scalability, and security necessary to deliver converged voice and data services over a single WLAN infrastructure. Founded in 2002, Meru is based in Sunnyvale, California. For more information on Meru Networks and its products, visit www.merunetworks.com or call [phone].