Santa Fe School District Adopts Wi-Fi To Handle Streaming Video Lessons

The public school system in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has begun deploying wireless local-area networks (WLANs) from Meru Networks that will provide wireless coverage for 35 buildings and some 14,500 students, faculty and staff over the next two years.Santa Fe Public Schools will invest $500,000-750,000 over the term of the project to extend wireless coverage district-wide to its three high schools, four middle schools, 19 elementary schools and various administration buildings. Meru WLANs are already in use at three schools.

The Meru deployment is part of an ongoing infrastructure upgrade needed partly to ensure that the district can take advantage of an array of "streaming video"-based learning materials -- from firms such as Education 2020, CompassLearning Odyssey and Discovery Education -- that are increasingly being incorporated into school curricula. Streaming video, which sends live or prerecorded images to users' computers in a continuous stream, depends on high-quality, uninterrupted network connections.

John Phaklides, director of technology for Santa Fe Public Schools, said that the highly mobile nature of school populations, along with the inherent limitations of wired networks, are driving the move to district-wide wireless.

"The schools are typically older buildings that have only one or two drops [wired connections] per room," Phaklides said. "Not only do dozens of students need to be online in a computer lab at any given time, but there's a community of teachers with laptop computers who should be able to get onto the network no matter where they are in the district. In addition, schools have a habit of moving things around every year as their population is reconfigured. It's much easier and cheaper to move the lab down the hall if we don't have wires and cables to worry about. We expect our initial investment in wireless to be more than offset by what we save in making these frequent moves and changes."

After Installing Meru, "All the problems went away"
Before deciding on Meru, Phaklides's technology team had evaluated numerous wireless LAN products and deployed pilot networks from some of the industry's biggest names without success.

"They were having tremendous interference issues in trying to use their web-based learning software with more than a few students at a time," recalled Jack Vigil, CEO of Albuquerque-based Harmonix Technologies, a Meru reseller partner. "One or two computers in the room might be able to connect, but the rest were losing their connections and dropping off the network in the middle of course sessions. They told us if we could get one school to work properly, we could deploy Meru in others."

After the first Meru network was installed in November 2006, Phaklides said, "all the problems went away just like that. At our largest school, Santa Fe High School, up to 45 people are online in the lab at the same time, supported by only two wireless access points. Meru has provided us with the consistent classroom experience we've been looking for."

He attributes the success to Meru's unique "virtual cell" wireless technology, which automatically selects a single channel for campus- or enterprise-wide use, eliminating interference and the costly, tedious channel planning that plague legacy networks. In contrast, the "micro cell" approach used by most legacy WLANs assigns different channels to adjacent cells of the network, raising the potential for co-channel interference.

"With our earlier wireless networks, balancing the user traffic load was a manual process," Phaklides said. "Now we put two access points in a room and the load balances itself, which makes the deployment process much easier. And the Meru controller units can be managed easily through the Extreme Networks switches we've recently installed."

The initial WLAN deployment uses Meru products based on the IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless standards, supporting client data rates of 54 megabits per second. Phaklides said the school district soon plans to begin adding Meru units that incorporate the new IEEE 802.11n standard, which boosts performance as high as 300 Mbps. Meru's 802.11n products, the AP300 Access Point family and MC5000 Controller, are fully backward-compatible with the company's 802.11a/b/g products.