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K-12 Success Factors12 Important Considerations When Selecting Your K-12 Wireless Vendor

MERU PROPRIETARY INFORMATION. © Copyright 2014. Meru Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

Plan for Capacity, Not Coverage

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Plan for more wireless LAN capacity than you think you will need—even if you can’t afford it currently.

With optimal planning upfront, you can make it simple to add capacity later without having to completely re-architect the network.

Don’t just design your network for coverage—plan for capacity, and lots of it.

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Don’t Discount the Importance of RF Capabilities

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RF channel design is a critical aspect of your deployment and ensure vendors can adapt to meet the changing needs of your environments and users.

Schools must properly account and plan for optimal channel usage.

Vendors that can provide enough capacity deliver a significant advantage in ensuring a stable environment.

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Buy for Tomorrow’s Specs —Not Today’s

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Assume that 80 MHz channels will be needed in the near future.

Video is the main medium, and bandwidth-intensive, high-definition video will be streamed over the wireless.

As schools purchase more and more high-density 802.11ac clients, vendors must provide a solution that can adequately handle voice, data, and video.

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Make Sure Your Wi-Fi Vendor “Knows” K-12

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Schools need a vendor that can work on the schedule of your school district and can assist with long-term planning.

Ensure your selected vendor focuses on education and is geared to support back-to-school timeframes in terms of support and software releases.

Your vendor needs to offer the flexibility required in K-12 environments.

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Consumer Devices on an Enterprise Network

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The wireless vendor must handle Apple Bonjour® to ensure that it can properly route traffic to the correct Apple device and secure it as well.

School IT professionals are seeing an explosion of Apple devices for collaboration in classrooms.

A successful vendor must overcome BYOD challenges by offering every school IT professional the freedom of choice, flexibility of deployment, and confidence of control.

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Network Control Vs. Client Control

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A top-tier vendor will have solutions to ensure control of your traffic, bandwidth, and seamless roaming.

A vendor should provide flexibility at the access layer to deliver fair, reliable, and predictable connectivity in classrooms.

Ensuring seamless mobility, predictable voice and video performance, and ample capacity in dense environments during peak usage is critical.

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Be Open

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Maximize the potential of software-defined networking (SDN), OpenFlow, and sFlow solutions.

Vendors should provide a solution that is OpenFlow-compliant and capable of supporting SDN applications.

Ensuring your network is equipped to handle the heavy bandwidth requirements of video streaming will become an everyday occurrence.

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Focus on the Teacher/Student Experience

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A successful wireless system must support 1:1 deployment and have at least 50 customer references.

Many schools believe that students need individual mobile access to online resources.

A 1:1 initiative allows teachers to provide instant feedback to students on weekends or after hours.

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Teachers Shouldn’t Be Helpdesks

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Onboarding, authentication, and guest management should be easy.

Network bandwidth and RF spectrum must be protected and leveraged for teaching and learning, not gaming and Netflix.

Vendors should have a formal and proven guest management system that provides student onboarding and off-boarding.

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Keep Your Cool With AC

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Choose a vendor who can provide a full suite of 802.11ac products for easy installation to fit your exact needs.

Vendors should view Wi-Fi as an “everywhere” service and provide a full suite of indoor and outdoor APs that are designed for a variety of environments.

The ability to make AP configuration changes is paramount.

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You Aren’t Getting 10 New Wi-Fi Support Techs

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Take the burden of support and troubleshooting away from your internal staff.

It is imperative that districts’ support organizations are armed with easy-to-use management and troubleshooting applications.

Management applications must be able to play back all details regarding prior events.

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Hidden Costs Are Everywhere

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Use existing infrastructure before incurring more capital expenses.

Seek vendors who’s APs are optimized for 802.11ac without requiring expensive PoE upgrades.

Make sure you can use your existing 802.3af power.

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To Learn More

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To learn more about Key considerations for K-12 schools when choosing a wireless vendor, download the full white paper.

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