Response from: David Callisch

You've got to give Meru credit. They're tackling a common gripe of enterprise networkers: "why can't you make it so Wi-Fi signals stop where I want them to?" And Meru is at least trying to address this problem in a creative way. But the problem is that Wi-Fi signals bounce around and a simple 180 degree antenna is no match. If you compared this to turning on a radio, where the noise is everywhere, the only way to really control the broadcast is to put a big tube over the speaker so the sound is confined. That's essentially what we (Ruckus Wireless) do with Wi-Fi. Meru's suggestion is to effectively scramble internal corporate Wi-Fi signals by mounting APs outside the building (broadcasting in 180 degrees which is next to impossible), thereby creating interference for the would be hacker trying to steal the internal signals. But most Wi-Fi signal patterns have side lobes and back lobes which tend to project the interfering signal into the internal space where you don't want it. This means that the signals, by definition, will self interfere,to a great extent, with the rest of the system. Meru's approach (in addition to attacking the 802.11 fair access procedures) purposely creates unwanted and nasty interference, violating the general intent of the 802.11 protocol. This ‘bad, bad neighbor’ behavior would certainly be viewed as very problematic from the WiFi Alliance’s point of view. What if you happened to run your business network on the other end of the unfortunate parking lot of a Meru barrier system? Instead of defending, Meru decided to offend. Not good (unless you have Ruckus smart antennas working for you). We blogged about this very topic and offered more detail about why Meru's approach is flawed: http://www.theruckusroom.net/2008/08/can-you-really.html