SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 3, 2014) - Meru Networks® (NASDAQ: MERU), a leader in intelligent Wi-Fi networking, today announced that Loudon County School District, Tenn., Ponca City Public Schools, Okla. and Ridgewood Public Schools, N.J. have chosen Meru Education-grade (MEG) 802.11ac Wi-Fi networks to provide high-density wireless connectivity for students and staff. Meru's intelligent Wi-Fi enables uninterrupted learning, giving students access to the tools needed to develop the collaboration, communication and critical thinking skills that they need to succeed.

Loudon County School District recently deployed a MEG 802.11ac Wi-Fi network to support its schools and its technology center. Upgrading its wireless connectivity has been the Loudon district's primary technical focus, largely because of state requirements for online student assessment and Common Core standards testing. The MEG intelligent Wi-Fi delivers the capacity and reliability that the district needs to support digital learning in its highly dense mobile environment.

"Last year we spent $270,000 on mobility oriented solutions, including more than 600 laptops and many more iPads®," said Jennifer Malone, Loudon district's technology supervisor. "The number of devices that we support has doubled in the past two years and most of those devices are wireless. The Wi-Fi network from Meru helps us ensure that we have the capacity we need to ensure an excellent experience for our students, no matter how many devices we add."

Ridgewood High School upgraded from an 802.11n network, deploying Meru AP832 access points, which are designed to meet the highest performance wireless requirements with Gigabit speeds. Meru MC4200 wireless controllers were also deployed for their simplicity, versatility, and reliability. Ridgewood's 1:1 program is providing Google Chromebooks® for 1,800 high school students.

"When you do a 1:1 initiative, your infrastructure has to be up-to-date. We are using the Meru Education-grade solution because we don't want to think about our wireless network," said Ryan Kenny, manager of information technology at Ridgewood Public Schools. "We just want it to work -- with full coverage -- so that people will trust the network. That will allow our teachers to become more centered on students and less just a person in the front of the classroom. The Meru Wi-Fi network does this with ease, and gives us the consistently high performance we need."

The MEG intelligent Wi-Fi also delivers uninterrupted learning, even in the challenging RF environment presented by Ponca City High School, a part of which was built to act as a bomb shelter and has concrete walls four feet thick. Ponca City deployed MEG Wi-Fi to gain the performance and capacity needed to support their 1:1 computing programs, which provide laptops for 2,200 students in the eighth to 12th grades.

"When you're supporting as many kids as we are, you don't have time for problems with the Wi-Fi," says Jason Ridenour, technology director at Ponca City Public Schools. "Meru's intelligent Wi-Fi and MobileFLEX architecture makes it easy to deliver great Wi-Fi to all of our schools. With Meru's single-channel architecture, we can block out the other RF channels, so students can't jump onto free Wi-Fi. It keeps kids on task and they're not accessing Internet content."

The MEG solution is designed to solve schools' BYOD issues and support their learning-essential applications. MEG starts with three simple steps:

1. On-board quickly with BYOD provisioning and secure wireless access mapped to IT policies.
2. Connect all BYOD devices reliably anywhere on campus.
3. Learn by deploying validated learning and teaching applications on BYOD devices over the MEG wireless solution.

"Leveraging Wi-Fi in the classroom enables schools to bridge the gap between how students live and learn," said Sarosh Vesuna, vice president and general manager, business units at Meru. "With the MEG intelligent Wi-Fi solution, students can follow their intellectual curiosity, developing the skills and knowledge to be competitive, without worrying about whether they can connect to the Wi-Fi."

Additional information about the Meru MEG solution is available here: http://bit.ly/MGBWiU.

For more information about MobileFLEX, visit the Meru web site: http://bit.ly/ZNqPEc.

About Meru Networks
 Meru Networks (NASDAQ: MERU) is a leader in intelligent 802.11ac Wi-Fi solutions delivering uninterrupted user experience for education, healthcare, hospitality and enterprise. The Meru open-standards-based architecture is designed to enable unified management of wired and wireless networks. Its end-to-end application QoS enables enforceable service-level agreements. Meru provides top performance and high capacity in high-density environments. Visit www.merunetworks.com or call (408) 215-5300 for more information.

©2014 Meru Networks. Meru and Meru Networks are registered trademarks and the Meru logo is a trademark of Meru Networks, Inc. in the United States. Apple and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple. Google and Chromebook are registered trademarks of Google Inc. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.