Auburn University Engineering School Solves Performance Issues with Meru WLAN System; Meru Products Provide Seamless Wireless Coverage at the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Meru Networks, the enterprise WLAN performance leader, announced today that Auburn University, the first university in the country to offer a four-year wireless engineering degree, is deploying the Meru WLAN System to deliver wireless services at its Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. The college will deploy Meru access points, Meru controllers, and Meru's System Director Software to serve some 3,000 students and faculty in the college's interior and exterior areas.

"As a pioneer in wireless engineering education, Auburn University wants to provide its students, faculty, and staff with the highest performing WLAN infrastructure to support school-wide access to email, the university Intranet, and the Internet," says Steve Henderson, director of computing for the College of Engineering at Auburn University. "The Meru WLAN System was the only product we tested that allowed us to deliver ubiquitous wireless coverage both inside and outside our building infrastructure without causing user performance issues related to co-channel interference."

After more than three years of providing hotspot coverage in several key locations, the College of Engineering at Auburn University was ready to move to the next phase of its wireless strategy -- ubiquitous wireless coverage indoors and outdoors. However, the traditional WLAN technology in use at the time required placement of access points on non-overlapping channels. When Auburn's Office of Information Technology tried to extend wireless coverage to outdoor areas using high-gain antennas, the greater range resulted in inter-access point interference and ultimately, inconsistent network performance for users.

Leveraging Meru's Virtual AP technology, Auburn University's College of Engineering is able to easily deploy multiple Meru access points on a single channel to provide a contiguous zone of outdoor coverage without causing interference to the existing indoor deployment. The Meru system further eliminated the need for RF experts to conduct complex channel planning and re-deployment and provided a smooth migration path to an all-Meru network on the university's own budget and timeline.

"Our selection by the wireless-savvy users of Auburn University's College of Engineering is a testament to Meru's technology leadership," said Kamal Anand, vice president of marketing at Meru Networks. "As the only WLAN vendor to enable truly seamless coverage with guaranteed quality of service for data, voice, and video in large-scale environments, Meru is setting a new standard for wireless LAN performance."

About Meru Networks, Inc.

Meru Networks is the global leader in converged wireless LAN technologies, and makes the only enterprise WLAN infrastructure that delivers the reliability, scalability, and security for voice and data services over a single WLAN infrastructure. Meru's Wireless LAN System is deployed in major Fortune 500 accounts, universities, and healthcare organizations. Meru's unique Air Traffic Control technology provides predictable bandwidth and over-the-air, application-specific QoS to support a wide range of current and future wireless applications. Meru, founded in 2002, is based in Sunnyvale, California. For more information on Meru Networks and its products, visit www.merunetworks.com or call 408-215-5300.

About Auburn University

Auburn University is a comprehensive research institution with nearly 23,000 students and 6,500 faculty and staff. Ranked among the top 50 public universities nationally, Auburn is Alabama's largest educational institution, offering more than 230 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degree programs.