Channel Change Clarification

I'd like to congratulate you on your terrific work. Network Computing is by far my most valuable periodical in general, and the Real-World Labs® evaluations in particular are right on target.

However, the article "Why Not Cisco?" (May 11) leaves the misimpression that Meru is a single-channel solution, which isn't the case. For a dense deployment, one can run multiple Meru APs and use the bandwidth on all three channels.

It's true that a set of APs using a particular channel appear as a single AP to the client. However, another set of APs in the same area can be configured to use a different channel. This is an important aspect of the Meru architecture. Otherwise one would have to be skeptical that a single-channel solution could possibly deliver the same total bandwidth as an old-fashioned "fat AP" architecture.

Tom Zeller
Telecommunications Technical Analyst
Indiana University
[email protected]

Dave Molta replies: If we left the impression that Meru was limited to a single radio channel, we apologize. In fact, we highlighted some of its multichannel capabilities in a recent story written by Frank Bulk on dense Wi-Fi deployments. Although Meru chose not to participate in our recent enterprise WLAN evaluation, we are testing Meru products in our labs and plan to report those results in the near future.

We've clarified the information on Cape Clear's pricing, registry support and process-management capabilities that ran in our March 16 enterprise service bus cover story. The updated article can be found here.