El Centro Regional Medical Center recently needed to overhaul and expand its outdated, fat-AP wireless LAN. A technical and economical bake-off helped the medical center - somewhat to its own surprise - decide on startup Aerohive for its 75-AP rollout, which began in April.

With its new WLAN, the 165-bed acute care facility in Southeastern California sought to enable physicians to place lab and medication orders and rapidly transmit patient medical data as they roamed throughout the emergency department. From there, a host of additional uses for the WLAN have sprung up, such as wireless guest access for visiting specialists, RFID asset tracking, IV pump reporting, a paperless operating room nurse documentation system and wireless voice.

The center is up to 57 APs as of this writing, according to John Gaede, director for information systems.

In its initial evaluation, El Centro brought in the Wi-Fi vendors it considers leaders in healthcare, including Cisco, Aruba and Meru Networks. Then it tossed a couple of startups into the mix for good measure: Aerohive and Extricom.

Gaede says he ultimately settled on Aerohive’s controller-less architecture for several reasons.

“It had the least packet loss of all the vendors, had the greatest reach in places with thick concrete walls and was the easiest to use,” says Gaede, explaining that the El Centro IT staffers wear a lot of hats. “None of us is a wireless expert.”

He adds: “It’s a low-cost architecture; we just keep adding APs and don’t have to keep buying controllers,” as with the other options, Gaede says.

Gaede said he also liked the idea of having security out at the APs, rather than back at a controller. Aerohive “takes a different tack than Cisco, Aruba and Meru – we can shut [out unauthorized users] right there at the AP instead of funneling them all the way back to a controller to do so.” Aerohive has a special guest module that interfaces with Microsoft Active Directory, he explains.

Aerohive APs function much like a mesh router network but over the airwaves. They use special control protocols to discover one another, exchange state and best-path information and locally forward traffic. Central IT, however, handles AP provisioning, configuration and policy setting at a management console. “But you can turn [the management system] off and the WLAN continues to run,” Gaede says.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.