Meru and Avaya have begun deploying what may be the largest private wireless LAN network in the country. The Wi-Fi hardware maker and enterprise platform provider are in the process of building a WLAN architecture covering 268 schools in Philadelphia, connecting 166,000 students and 10,000 teachers.

Using Meru’s smart access point, the RS4000 Radio Switch, Avaya has deployed the solution in 90 schools already, but when the buildout is complete, the network will have 7000 switches, supporting 14,000 dual-radio access points for a total of 28,000 802.11a/b/g radios. Meru director of education services Sarah Kim said the scale of the School District of Philadelphia’s network is the largest the vendor has ever worked on and will likely be the largest in the world once completed.

“The size of it is gargantuan,” Kim said. “They have a network that would be the envy of most corporations.”

While the WLAN network will blanket the entire premises of the school, Meru and Avaya designed it to deal with concentrated use cases. The school district can’t afford to supply laptops for every child, but it will have ‘laptop carts’ that circulate among the classrooms, allowing teachers to design computer days into their lesson plans. But since a typical classroom will have up to 30 students, those lessons will create a huge demand for broadband resources in a single location, Kim said. The radio switch and controllers, however, are designed to concentrate bandwidth in a small area, effectively giving all of the laptops full broadband connectivity despite the volume, she said.

Philadelphia is also home to one of the largest municipal Wi-Fi projects in the country. Wireless Philadelphia and EarthLink have begun building out a 135-square-mile Wi-Fi network with the aim of putting both cheap computers and cheap broadband access in the hands of the city’s urban poor. EarthLink has recently stepped back from its muni-Wi-Fi business, but it has said it will continue to support its existing deployment in Philadelphia. The school district and city deployments are separate—one is a private, while the other is a public network—but the two have been in discussions to avoid interference between each other’s access points.

The school network will be used primarily for Internet access and teaching applications, Kim said, but it is ready to support more administrative and communications needs as the schools are ready to deploy them. Meru’s Air Traffic Control software is embedded in the RS4000 switches, meaning the networks will support full quality of service, allowing the schools to shift to wireless voice-over-IP and support more bandwidth-intensive real-time applications like video streaming and conferencing.