[1st-mile-nm] Santa Fe Schools' Wireless Network

[Richard Lowenberg]

The following article appeared online today.
I understood that John Phaklides is no longer in his District IT position.
If anyone on this list has any additional info. about this news, please
post to the list.   Clear facts, only.
Richard
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The Santa Fe public school system is deploying wireless networks over the
next two years to serve some 14,500 students, faculty and staff in 35
buildings.
The project, expected to cost $500,000 to $750,000, uses wireless
equipment from Meru Networks to support streaming video educational
applications.

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From: Broadband Wireless Exchange Magazine
March 4th
www.bbwexchange.com/pubs/2008/03/04/page1423-1594215.asp

Sante Fe Builds Broadband Wireless Network to Provide High-Speed Internet
Access to 14,500 Students and Faculty across 19 Campuses

3/4/08 - 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.

Keywords: broadband wireless, high-speed Internet access, compasslearning
odyssey, local area networks, santa fe new mexico, wireless local area
networks, discovery education, school populations, school curricula, meru
networks, frequent moves, administration buildings, wireless coverage,
continuous stream

By Robert Hoskins

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Richard Lowenberg
P.O.Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504
505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell

1st-Mile Institute
New Mexico Broadband Initiative
www.1st-mile.com
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