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Colleges and Universities Choose Meraki for Affordable, Reliable Wireless Networks

Posted on: Monday, 6 July 2009, 11:00 CDT

SAN FRANCISCO, July 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Meraki, an award-winning wireless networking company, has been selected by 10 higher education institutions throughout North America to provide reliable wireless broadband access to students and faculty members. The institutions chose Meraki because its networks are cost effective, easy to manage and offer reliable performance and coverage. They join a growing number of schools around the country that are using Meraki to launch ubiquitous indoor and outdoor networks and to upgrade existing wireless networks at typically 50% the cost of traditional wireless solutions.

The 10 institutions, which service more than 43,000 students and cover nearly 600 acres, are Alliant International University's six campuses (California), Mount Olive College (North Carolina), Warner Pacific College (Oregon), Oklahoma Panhandle State University (Oklahoma), Nash Community College (North Carolina), Edgecombe Community College (North Carolina), James Sprunt Community College (North Carolina), Wilson Community College (North Carolina), College of the Redwoods (California) and Lake Tahoe Community College (California).

"On any college campus today you find students registering for classes on their laptops and iPhones, downloading and watching videos from YouTube and sharing photos with friends. Teachers are using online portals to post assignments, podcasts and videos to accompany their classroom curriculum. High performance and reliable wireless Internet is an expectation on these campuses, not just a nice-to-have," said Meraki CEO and co-founder Sanjit Biswas. "With Meraki these campuses can create extremely reliable networks that can handle the high bandwidth demands of these schools without breaking the bank."

Meraki offers universities and colleges reliable, premium-featured networks that can be deployed for less than half the cost and in less than half the time of traditional solutions. Meraki's Cloud Controller offers incredibly easy to use and powerful management tools that allow an entire network across multiple sites to be managed remotely with minimal IT staff and resource time. Meraki's high performance 802.11n access points and mesh configuration provide incredibly strong indoor and outdoor coverage across entire campuses in classrooms, auditoriums, stadiums, student housing and the campus grounds.

Meraki also offers educational institutions the latest enterprise grade wireless LAN features, such as automatic radio frequency (RF) planning, quality-of-service (QoS) for voice and video, security with 802.1x authentication, and the ability to create multiple virtual-LANs on a single physical network - one for students, another for staff, others for security cameras or voice over wireless, for example.

Meraki Deployed at North Carolina Community Colleges

North Carolina based Epproach Communications handled the installation of the five Meraki networks in North Carolina, including Edgecombe Community College. Edgecombe's two campuses -Tarboro and Rocky Mount - needed to provide wireless Internet access to a rapidly growing student body of more than 11,000. Edgecombe struggled to find a solution that would cover both its campuses while staying within the school budget.

"Epproach came to the rescue with the perfect package, the Meraki Solution or as I call it the Miracle Solution. The network consisted of 30 Meraki access points covering both campuses. It was half the cost of what was projected for just one campus by Cisco and both campuses were up and running in less than a week," said Neil Baker, Director of Computer Services at Edgecombe Community College. "Not only do we have all our campus buildings connected, now we have the parking lots and outside areas connected as well. Epproach and Meraki helped us to easily connect the entire campus and did so at a price that really shocked me."

The majority of schools Epproach works with have found the biggest benefit of Meraki's solution to be its reliability, performance, ease of management and ability to segregate traffic across different networks. In addition, the ground breaking economics of a Meraki system allow college and university IT departments create a powerful network while having funds to support other IT priorities.

Marty Hollingsworth, President of Epproach Communications added, "Meraki's solution allows these schools to create wireless networks that meet their specific needs at a price point that is significantly lower than any of the competition. The centralized dashboard and plug and play approach is just what these colleges with limited IT staff are looking for. And you can't beat Meraki's implementation time."

About Meraki

Meraki offers enterprise-class wireless networks at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional networking vendors. This is made possible by its unique cloud-based technology. The company's customers range from small and medium-sized businesses to global hotel chains to world-class educational institutions. Meraki wireless networks serve millions of users on over 10,000 networks in more than 130 countries. Meraki is located in San Francisco, California, and is funded in part by Sequoia Capital and Google. For more information, go to www.meraki.com. For information on becoming a Meraki certified reseller, go to www.meraki.com/partners.

About Epproach

Epproach Communications is a leading provider of customized wireless broadband solutions and services. The Company owns and operates the City Port WiFi network in Wilmington, NC and provides high speed wireless solutions for condos, resorts, municipalities, schools, business and other organizations. Contact Epproach by calling 877-364-5907 or by email at info@epproach.net. For higher education institutions looking for a wireless solution, visit http://collegewifi.com for more information.

SOURCE Meraki

Source: PR Newswire

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