802.11n starts its wireless stress test at Morrisville State

There are two things different about Morrisville State College this week. One is the campus-wide wireless LAN, with about 700 access points, including 10 brand new draft IEEE 802.11n access points from Meru Networks.

The second thing is there are now 3,000 students back on campus, all extremely unwired.

And while they can connect wirelessly to the campus net in classrooms and dorms and even outdoors, the place where they notice a real difference is in “Mustang Alley,” a combination food court, coffee house, and general student hangout. It’s here the first crop of 11n access points have been deployed, where they are guaranteed to get a workout. By later this fall, the campus will be all-11n, the first large-scale deployment of the high-throughput standard.

As reported in July, tests by the IT staff found the 11n access points were delivering “unbelievable results” compared to performance of 11g an 11a access points. The incoming students are noticing a difference between the Mustang Alley 11n 11n zone and the rest of the net.

Jean Boland, the schools’ VP of Information Services has been visiting Mustang Alley, chatting with students who are working, socializing or playing on their wireless notebooks. “The most interesting response I got was from one student who said the wireless network is 'wicked fast here' [at Mustang Alley],” she says.

That’s a telling comment. The campus is now blanketed with Meru’s 802.11abg access points, each one making available to a group of connecting students about 20-25Mbps throughput. Also part of the deployment is Meru’s companion high-end controller, the MC5000. But each of the two 11n radios in the Meru access points can deliver 150Mbps or more, and do so more consistently and reliably.

“Once we get 11n up and running everywhere [on campus], it will become the new norm, the new expectation [for WLAN performance],” says Boland.

That same shift in user expectation may start to occur in other enterprise deployments as more WLAN vendors introduce draft 11n access points later in 2007. Just last week, Cisco unveiled its own 11n product line, with network officials at beta tester Duke University reporting similar throughput as Morrisville.