Meru Heats Up The Wall Plate Access Point Space

Yeah- that’s right. There IS a wall plate AP space. And it’s pretty friggin’ cool.

We’ll get to Meru in a bit..

A little more than a year ago, I celebrated Ruckus’ ZoneFlex 7055 wall plate AP announcement right here on this blog. I really like this form factor, as it enables the leveraging of existing network wiring in really cool new ways. As I type this from my hotel at Interop, I have the following view to my immediate left:

 

Though this Teleadapt TA-6200 does have a certain style, it’s also a bit of a relic. I’m guessing it doesn’t see much action on that RJ-45, and if we follow it back to the wall, we can picture a wall plate AP in it’s place- serving up high-speed Wi-Fi while still affording the same seldom-used LAN capability. And, THEhotel wouldn’t have to run any more wire to get there. Sweet. 

I’m aware of wall plate APs from Ruckus, Aruba, Motorola, recently Cisco, and this little gem from out in left field. You have to read the fine print to find the differences, and there very much are differences in capabilities from radio performance to supported features.

Which brings us back to Meru Networks, and the AP122. This little guy is the industry’s first dual-band 11ac wall plate AP.

Meru rightfully positions this unit as a trade off- it’s no rocket ship at 2×2, but you get decent performance on standard PoE and a lot of bang for the sub-$600 buck.

Hopefully, other vendors will also up their wall plate AP game and continue with near-commodity pricing on a form factor that can really be transformative on existing cable plants.

The only bummer to the Meru AP122 story? Like everything else in WLAN-land, lack of interoperability means it’s only available to Meru customers.

WSJ Market Watch PR here.

 

What’s The Big Deal With Stadium Wi-Fi? Let Me Spell It Out For You

Here’s the Executive Summary: Dollars. Quid. Clams. Smackers. Greenbacks.

Sure, some WLAN vendors and their Integrator buddies stand to make big dough from putting Wi-Fi in stadiums. But if you think that’s the end of the story, you might want to give the matter another think. A BIG ol’ think. There’s a LOT of money going a LOT of places in this equation.

I have written about stadium wireless once or twice in my Network Computing blog, but it was the recent announcement about Extreme Networks scoring the NFL Wi-Fi Analytics gig  that got me thinking more on the topic. But my ponderings didn’t stop with the NFL. No sir, the powerful cranium that sits a mere inches above my handsomely chiseled jaw also went to town thinking about Major League Baseball, the NBA, the NHL, Japanese baseball, the NCAA, minor league baseball, and even strayed into the realms of soccer and rugby.

Being all about value, I partnered with Google’s finest search engine to come up with a bunch of numbers. And they are impressive.

Riddle me this: How many professional-level stadiums are out there in the world of sports? What about college? And the minors?

The answer of course is “a boatload”.

And let’s talk about how big that boat is. Here are the number of teams for each sport, at the identified level:

• NFL Football: 32 teams
• NCAA Football: 245 teams (with at least 100 stadiums)
• Major League Baseball: 30 teams
• Minor League Baseball: 240 teams (at different levels in 6 countries)
• NBA Basketball: 30 teams
• NCAA DIvision 1 Basketball: 345 teams
• NHL Hockey: 30 teams
• Nippon Professional Baseball (Japan): 12 teams
• International Professional Soccer: 200+ teams

And the list goes on with other sports venues, convention centers, etc- but you probably are starting to get the point. Now let’s play the “What If” game from the above data set.

Of the over 1,100 teams specified above, let’s say that 400 of them had a stadium or arena that has, or will get, decent Wi-Fi. We know that some venues like Cowboys Stadium (now called AT&T stadium) have far higher than 500 access points (Cisco in this case), while facilities like Packers’ Stadium (Lambeau Field) have a small quantity of APs (Aerohive for the Cheeseheads) that cover select administrative areas only. We also see that Ruckus soccer stadium deployments in Brazil feature a few hundred APs per. So for the sake of conversation, we’ll say each of our 400 example venues will get a conservative 250 access points each. That’s a total of 100,000 access points (anyone familiar with topical reality would probably agree that I’m being very conservative with this exercise).

Let’s keep going… behind those 100,000 access points we have:

• Spare APs
• Controllers
• Countless server types
• Licensing
• Maintenance agreements
• Specialized antennas
• Cabling
• Pathway
• Switches
• UPS
• Routers
• New MTRs and ITRs
• ISP connections
• NOC operations
• App developers
• Security appliances
• Analytics services
• Upgrades
• Jobs- both short term and long
• New cultures
• Marketing
• Infinite “one thing enables another” opportunities

I don’t know about you, but I smell money. Let’s get even more bold, and say that each one of those 400 stadiums with 250 access points had a simple installation cost breakdown like this:

250 APs x $5,000 each (that includes cabling, pathway, controllers, switches- everything) = $1.25 Million per facility.

Multiply that by 400 stadiums, and we’re looking at a theoretical $50 Million cost, just to equip the 400 example venues with theoretical Wi-Fi. (And again- my numbers are BS, very conservative versus likely real costs and actual aggregate AP counts.) Then there are the costs of running the network, monitizing it (it takes money to make money), and evolving it based on the findings of lots and lots of analytics that are being counted on to return quick ROI on the technology investment. Along the way, a number of decent jobs have been created (or will be when people who have no clue what they are doing with big WLAN’s hire help). This is a big story with a lot of chapters.

I’m greatly oversimplifying something that is huge here- and I want it to be perfectly clear that my analysis is simple conversation fodder to make the point. And that point is- there’s a lot of money involved with in stadium Wi-Fi. So much so, that many WLAN vendors have special programs just for stadium WLAN. For example (this is in no way a complete list):

Cisco Connected Stadium

Aruba Networks Large Public Venues

Xirrus Stadium Wireless

Meru Sports and Entertainment Solutions

Extreme Networks Sports and Entertainment

Ruckus High Density Solutions

Even Ubiquiti Is In On It

(I’ll be talking with Extreme, Xirrus, and Aruba at Wireless Field Day 6)

Aerohive Throws Hat Into The 802.11ac Ring

Ah, this crazy wireless world we live in. It’s easy to forget that 802.11ac is still not “really” a standard, although we’re getting very close.  It’s also easy to get sparkly-eyed by the 11ac products available now, despite the fact that with the new standard’s promised weird and protracted “wave” planned evolution, 11ac in a couple of years will likely feature many a new AP. But.. let’s talk about the here and now, because we’re here- and it’s now.

Since Ubiquiti announced their 11ac offering in April of this year, many of us have watched as different WLAN vendors have pitched their new 11ac products (and accompanying back stories). There was Motorola, Meraki, Meru,  Cisco, and Aruba. And then there are the not-yet-to announce, like Ruckus,  Juniper, and until today, Aerohive.

Aerohive brings two new APs to the 11ac market, and No Jitter does a nice introduction of the AP-370 (internal antennas) and AP-390 (external antennas) along with Aerohive’s take on how the new units fit into a smooth, take-your-time-and-don’t-fret-it migration plan to full 11ac deployment. Aerohive’s entry into the 11ac market does two things: it both pushes the message of early 11ac adoption but in a less aggressive way than some competitors are going about it, and further delivers the truth that cloud-based networking is both viable and capable of evolving with new WLAN standards. This second point gets some added umph when you consider that Aerohive announced their 11ac APs on the same day that Aruba Networks announced it’s own maiden voyage into cloudy WLAN. (It certainly smells like the WLAN industry is marching towards both faster WLAN and a welcome de-emphasis of controllers, says I.)

It’s a bit curious that Aerohive took so long to let their 11ac cat out of the bag (though I confess to getting a sneak look at the AP-370 under NDA at Wireless Field Day 5) given that Matthew Gast is is both Aerohive’s Director of Product Management and the author of the current Bible du Jur on 11ac. Many of us have come to personally  associate 11ac with Matthew because of his book, his excellent presentations on 11ac, and his willingness to talk with anybody who reaches out to him via social media. (If you think about it, this really isn’t fair to Matthew, the IEEE, Aerohive, or even ourselves!)

For what it’s worth, Matthew’s fellow cloud/11ac evangelists Devin Akin and Andrew Von Nagy recently left Aerohive, and both went to AirTight Networks (yet another cloud WLAN company)- who have yet to announce their own 11ac product.