Ruckus targets mobile operators with Wi-Fi solutions

Wi-Fi technology, which used to be the red-headed step child of wireless operators, is getting renewed interest from those operators as carriers look to offload traffic from their 3G networks onto Wi-Fi systems, a move welcome by Ruckus Wireless, a six-year-old private company that makes smart Wi-Fi solutions.
The company, which counts $42 million in venture-capital funding from VC firms including Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill, T-Ventures, WK Technology Fund, and Motorola Ventures, says it has built the largest Wi-Fi-based mesh network in the world, with India’s Tikona. The network is comprised of 40,000 indoor and outdoor nodes, serving residential and small business customers in 29 cities in the country, said Selina Lo, Ruckus CEO and president. Ruckus also outfitted Germany’s Hamburg Sports Club’s soccer arena with an 802.11n wireless LAN system, covering 57,000-plus seats. These types of deployments offer wireless operators new revenue opportunities, Lo said.
“More and more operators are now looking for differentiation. With the mobile Internet they have lost a lot of control to device makers like Apple and content providers like Facebook so they don’t want to be relegated to providing pipes,” Lo said. “At the Hamburg stadium, they went to T-Mobile to install a line because they needed to provide Wi-Fi services for photorgraphers and journalists.” However, T-Mobile instead secured a contract with the stadium to provide managed Wi-Fi services for journalists and anyone else who wanted to use the network.
Wireless operators including Deutsche Telekom, as well as China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom also are using Ruckus equipment to offload cellular traffic onto Wi-Fi systems, as well as with PCCW in Hong Kong.
The company started offering its BeamFlex smart Wi-Fi technology to help IP-TV cable operators provide real-time video streaming solutions in the home, and won contracts with companies including AT&T Corp., Deutsche Telekom, SwissComm, Telia and Telenor, among others. In 2008, Ruckus extended its solutions to the enterprise space. Fixed wireless operators and Internet service providers were first to embrace Wi-Fi, but mobile operators are now recognizing how Wi-Fi can be part of their network portfolio. “Prior to the arrival of the iPhone, mobile operators had all been cautious about Wi-Fi.” They dismissed Wi-Fi initially because it uses unlicensed spectrum, Lo said, but now with Wi-fi technology built into devices, they are taking a second look at the technology as not only a way to offload traffic from the wide-area network, but also as a way to offer mobile broadband, especially since Wi-Fi is a cheap network solution.
Ruckus’ equipment uses a smart antenna system based on a compact antenna that can steer the signal on a per-packet basis. “Every time we transmit a packet we steer the signal using our smart antenna toward the receiver.” Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum and can be prone to interference, but Lo said Ruckus’ technology gets the signal farther and makes the signal more stable, but it also steers around interference. Beyond the smart antenna technology, Ruckus provides a range of wireless access points, indoors and outdoors, and for home use and at the tower, all of which can be used together and which are self-organizing and self-healing.