Three net gear vendors choose Meru for wireless LAN voice

Three of Japan's top network equipment makers have chosen Meru Networks’ wireless LAN products as the heart of their wireless VoIP offerings.

Oki Electric, Hitachi Technologies, and Fujitsu Interworks now are packaging their Session Initiation Protocol servers, IP PBXs, and wireless LAN VoIP handsets with Meru's WLAN controllers and thin access points.

Meru - as have other wireless LAN vendors such as Aruba, Cisco, and Trapeze - has been promoting its products for WLAN voice calls, convinced that voice applications will drive both the adoption and expansion of wireless LANs. Users want mobility and they want to reduce the costs of using expensive cell phone minutes for in-building calls, say Meru executives.

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Three of Japan's top network equipment makers have chosen Meru Networks’ wireless LAN products as the heart of their wireless VoIP offerings.

Oki Electric, Hitachi Technologies, and Fujitsu Interworks now are packaging their Session Initiation Protocol servers, IP PBXs, and wireless LAN VoIP handsets with Meru's WLAN controllers and thin access points.

Meru - as have other wireless LAN vendors such as Aruba, Cisco, and Trapeze - has been promoting its products for WLAN voice calls, convinced that voice applications will drive both the adoption and expansion of wireless LANs. Users want mobility and they want to reduce the costs of using expensive cell phone minutes for in-building calls, say Meru executives.

The Japanese companies tested an array of WLAN offerings. Meru offers two-way quality of service between an access point and the wireless handset. And its hardware cuts to 2 to 3 milliseconds the time needed to hand off a mobile call from one access point to another. Delays in these handoffs can cause calls to break up or drop altogether.

Meru has also automated or streamlined much of the configuration needed for access points, including radio channels, power levels and so on.

In January, the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine announced plans to blanket a 2.5 million-square-foot campus with a Meru wireless LAN to support data, voice and video. So far, about 350 of nearly 1,000 access points have been deployed. The school has begun testing voice capabilities and will introduce voice services later this year.