Meru Networks has announced that its 802.11ac Gigabit WiFi market share jumped more than six-fold from Q3 to Q4 2013, moving from 1,5%% to 9,4% of industry revenues for wireless access points, according to a report issued by from Dell’Oro Group on February 27, 2014.
The company launched its flagship AP832, the industry’s fastest access point, in July 2013, and has been very focused on gaining traction in the 802.11ac market. While industry analyst projections for 802.11ac share of enterprise access points in 2014 range from 1,5% to 18% of total shipments, Meru expects to more than double the high end of those projections for its shipments in 2014.
Largely driven by sales of the AP832, Meru achieved operating breakeven with record revenue of $30,2-million in Q4 2013.
“We are extremely pleased with the quick sales growth that we’ve seen with the AP832, and the momentum in the adoption of our 802.11ac solutions,” says Dr Bami Bastani, president and CEO of Meru. “The specific performance advantages that our technologies and architecture offer puts us in a technology leadership position in 802.11ac, and our customers continue to validate that.”
Education, Meru’s strongest vertical, was an early adopter of 802.11ac with deployments driven by the use of wireless as the primary network among students and staff at all levels – from K-12 schools through universities.
Adoption in hospitality venues has also been strong. Recently announced Meru 802.11ac customers include Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, St. John Fisher College, Cornwall Community Hospital, the Goffstown, N.H. School District, the University of Houston and Bellarmine College Preparatory.
In addition to the increased throughput enabled by the new standard, customers report up to 30% increased throughput when using 802.11n devices on Meru 802.11ac networks.
Meru’s 802.11ac solutions are gaining rapid market traction due to several distinct advantages over the competition:
* First, Meru is the only supplier that can deliver enterprise-wide Gigabit WiFi. The new 802.11ac standard delivers higher capacity by utilizing fewer, but wider, radio frequency channels. Meru’s MobileFLEX architecture takes full advantage of these features, while competitors are restricted to the same narrow channels currently deployed in the 802.11n standard. This allows Meru to support more than twice the capacity of its competitors.
* Second, the AP832 is the industry’s fastest .11ac access point. While other vendors’ access points use a combination of one 802.11n and one 802.11ac compliant radio, the Meru AP832 includes two 802.11ac compliant radios. This increases per-AP throughput and enables support for higher densities of client devices.
* Third, the AP832 eliminates the need for Ethernet switching infrastructure upgrades and greatly reduces total cost of ownership for Meru customers. It is the most power-efficient 802.11ac solution in the market, offering full dual-radio capacity on standard Power over Ethernet (POE).
“Meru bills the AP832 as the world’s fastest AP, and with good reason,” says Craig Mathias of the Farpoint Group in a recent review of the AP832. “Other APs incorporate dual radios, but only one radio is 802.11ac-compliant. The best approach is to maximize the availability of services at 5GHz — a nondisruptive overlay strategy.
“The AP832 does just that, providing two 1.3Gbps 802.11ac radios that can operate simultaneously in up to 80-megahertz channels. Higher education institutions everywhere are going to need to begin working with 802.11ac in the very near term, and Meru’s AP832 is a great way to do so.”
