Now that you've gotten yourself a new ride by trading in your clunker, it's time to do the same with your wireless router.
Meraki, the first networking vendor to bring the Wireless-N standard outdoors earlier this year, launched Wednesday its Cash for Wireless LAN Clunkers promotion campaign.
(Credit:
Meraki)
The program is for those who want to upgrade their legacy 802.11b/g network (which caps at 54Mbps) to the 802.11n (which caps at 300Mbps) network with a Meraki wireless access point. The promotion includes a $150 credit for each access point traded in for one made by Meraki.
Note that this is only for enterprise-class access points, so your old home wireless router is not qualified. Other conditions to get qualified include a new purchase of one Meraki 802.11n access point per each traded-in access point; also, the old access point must be from the following vendors: Cisco, Aruba, Meru, Motorola, HP/Procurve, Belden/Trapeze, 3Com, Xirrus, Aerohive, Alcatel-Lucent, Ruckus Wireless, Enterasys/Siemens, Extreme, Nortel, Proxim, Bluesocket, or Tropos.
This means, if you've got yourself an old 802.11g wireless access point from Meraki, you will be stuck with it unless you pay the full price for a new one.
Whether this is a good deal, Meraki's Cash for Wireless LAN Clunkers program will definitely not last as long as the government's Cash for Clunkers; it ends September 30. Until then, you can start trading in your old access point or learn more about this program on Meraki's Web site.
Known for offering one of the biggest wireless mesh networks for regular hot spot users and being the first that brought Wireless-N to the outdoors, Meraki on Monday showed that it can also mean serious business with its new enterprise class wireless local area network (WLAN) solutions.
WLAN is nothing new. Buy a wireless router to set up at home and you have one. However, it's a lot more complicated and expensive when it comes to the enterprise-class WLAN, where both large coverage and high performance are needed.
What Meraki introduced offers just that, plus lower price points. For less than $3,000, you can get a Meraki Enterprise Wireless LAN system that covers an office of approximately 20,000 square feet. The price, of course, increases with the area of coverage. For example, for an area of 500,000 square feet, the price would be up to $75,000. This makes the new solutions work for any business between 50 to 5,000 people.
Meraki's Enterprise Wireless LAN consists of two new Wireless-N access points, including the single radio MR11 and the dual-radio MR14. Both are high-end, high-speed wireless access points with the MR11 having the cap speed of 300 Mbps and the MR14 boasting 600 Mbps. These speeds are significant as most businesses still use the regular 100Mbps wired network.
Other than that, the new WLAN solution is also easy to use, thanks to Meraki's Enterprise Cloud Controller. According to Meraki, setting up an enterprise wireless network can be as simple as plugging in the access points and watching them self-configure over the Internet. Meraki's new solution also offers IT personnel the capability to manage multiple geographically distributed networks from a central location.
Meraki's new enterprise-class products will be available for purchase by June but the company will start taking the preorders as early as May 12.
Though Wireless-N (an 802.11n draft standard that offers throughput speeds up to 300Mbps or faster) has been used in home and small-office routers for a long time, routers for outdoor hot spots are still mostly based on the 802.11g standard that caps at 54Mbps. This is primarily because the 802.11n hasn't been ratified yet.
The MR58 outdoor Wireless-N router is made for rugged environs.
(Credit: Meraki)Nonetheless, Wireless-N standard's proven superiority over 802.11g both in throughput and range means hot-spot equipment makers and providers can't ignore it any longer.
Meraki, arguably the biggest provider of outdoor Wi-Fi mesh services, on Tuesday announced its very first 802.11n device, the MR58 outdoor wireless router.
Like most previous routers from Meraki and unlike all home Wireless-N routers, the new MR58 is a weatherproof wireless device that can be mounted outside to provide wireless signals to a large open space. According to Meraki, the MR58 can withstand temperatures ranging from from -4 degrees F to 122 degrees F and provide five times the speed of standard 802.11b/g wireless devices.
Being a router for a mesh network, it can deliver high bandwidth across multiple hops, support long-distance links, and is much better for high-bandwidth content such as voice and video.
The MR58 is designed specifically to provide wireless access for large outdoor networks located on campuses, apartment complexes, hotels and resorts, and other large public spaces. It can also be used in indoor indoor areas with high-bandwidth needs such as classrooms, convention centers, stadiums, student housing complexes, and manufacturing facilities.
The new router is house in rugged casing and includes the networking features of Meraki's cloud-based hosted services, such as centralized configuration, monitoring, and security.
The Meraki MR58 is sold in packages starting at $1,499. You can upgrade it with different high-gain antennae or to get multiple units working together to create a coverage area of up 12 miles in range.
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