Mercury Makes First Entry into School Wireless Network Business with Wi-Fi 7 APs

Mercury, a company specializing in information and communication equipment, announced on November 4 that it has won the contract for the 2025 school wireless network installation project from five regional education offices (Seoul, Gyeongnam, Daejeon, Gwangju, and Jeju). After completing the pilot installation and operation of Wi-Fi 7 (IEEE 802.11be) wireless access points (APs), the company plans to supply more than 4,000 units by the end of the year.

Mercury has been developing Wi-Fi 7 APs since last year to address the rapidly increasing demand for wireless traffic, driven by the expansion of digital textbooks (AIDT), educational tablets, and electronic whiteboards. With this contract, the company is making a full-scale entry into the school wireless network market.

The products to be supplied feature MediaTek's high-performance flagship SoC (Filogic 880), delivering enhanced power efficiency and coverage. These new products have also received certification from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). They support integration with the School Wireless Infrastructure Management System (SWIMS) used by education offices, enabling real-time AP status monitoring and fault response. In addition, Mercury is in the final stages of developing integrated monitoring and fault diagnosis software independent of SWIMS, aiming to further improve operational and maintenance convenience.

From a security perspective, Mercury's Wi-Fi 7 APs mandatorily support the WPA3 (WiFi Protected Access 3) standard, providing enhanced encryption and authentication. The company explained that this improves the reliability and stability of in-school wireless networks in response to the recent increase in wireless network hacking attempts.

Mercury expects that as the wireless network upgrades are sequentially expanded to approximately 11,835 schools and 234,000 classrooms nationwide, the company’s business environment for winning additional contracts will also improve.

In addition, more than 70,000 public Wi-Fi devices-including those at about 40,000 public locations and 30,000 city buses nationwide-are reaching the end of their service life and are due for replacement. Mercury has already been carrying out Wi-Fi 6/6E projects in the public sector outside of schools and, with the completion of its Wi-Fi 7 product lineup, has established a system to respond to the network advancement projects.

Internally, Mercury plans to actively participate in the overall wireless network advancement projects in both the education and public sectors, including its first entry into the school wireless network business, and to lead the expansion of Wi-Fi 7-based infrastructure.

A Mercury official stated, "As the number of Wi-Fi 7-enabled devices such as smartphones and laptops increases, we will strive to ensure that various markets and users can experience a faster and more stable wireless internet environment," adding, "Mercury will actively adopt the latest ICT technologies to elevate the quality of educational and public infrastructure to the next level."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.