IP Communications

Halifax Health hospital has picked high-performance wireless LAN from Meru Networks for its new 500,000-square-foot state-of-the-art medical facility in Daytona Beach, FL.

 

Meru Networks’ (News - Alert) solution will help improve medical professionals' mobility, productivity and accuracy as they treat patients. Based on the latest 802.11n wireless standard, the Meru virtual cell WLAN will span all 10 floors of the new North Tower, including 180 

private rooms and a 89,000-square-foot emergency department containing the area's only trauma center.

 

The high-performance wireless LAN will provide connectivity for "Workstations on Wheels" mobile workstations. The contract with Halifax materialized only after Meru passed a live test Halifax Health set up to evaluate performance, voice-data roaming capabilities, ease of operation, and equipment and maintenance costs for wireless in the North Tower.

 

Network architect Tripp Sills said that Meru passed the test easily and was rated the best solution among the competing vendors.

 

“Many of our key mobile applications – Meditech EMR, Motion C5 tablets for clinical data entry, Siemens (News - Alert) VoIP phones, LifeLinks remote video interpreting – are highly delay-sensitive yet need 100 percent availability," Sills said in a statement. “802.11n gives us the high bandwidth these applications need, but the assurance of seamless roaming is equally important, especially as we continue to roll out our VoIP solutions.”

 

Before picking Meru, Halifax Health was using conventional "micro cell" WLANs in the other buildings on its campus. The hospital was not happy with its performance and experienced problems with channel interference and disconnections while roaming.

 

But the hospital is satisfied with Meru’s unique "virtual cell" approach allows all Meru access points to be on the same channel and share a common BSSID. This also enables the controller to dictate which access points a given client connects to. These capabilities lead to huge benefits in terms of roaming and elimination of interference.

 

Sills said the technology is also easy to deploy and manage. Halifax Health wanted a wireless system which didn't force them to hire RF technical experts, but which existing network engineers and system administrators could set up and maintain.