Ruckus Wireless has acquired a location-based services company, YFind Technologies Private Limited. Terms of the deal were not disclosed; YFind specializes in indoor positioning and real-time location analytics.
Ruckus said that it “intends to enable new location-based services by combining its unique, Smart Wi-Fi technology with YFind’s range of location based services and analytical capabilities, transforming Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi networks into location-intelligent infrastructures. These solutions will address new emerging opportunities among enterprises and service providers to offer value-added services to their customers.”
Ruckus also said that hotel operators Accor SA — which operates more than 3,500 hotels in 92 countries — has standardized on Ruckus’ Smart Wi-Fi technology across 100 of its hotels in seven Latin American countries. The deployment started last year and has been completed with thousands of APs installed, the company said — and Accor was able to reduce its number of overall APs by up to 60% compared to its previous systems. The hotel brands involved include ibis, ibis budget, Merure, Novotel, Pullman and Sofitel.
The Wi-Fi is being used for guest access as well as point-of-sales activities and back office applications used by hotel staff.
— Aruba Networks’ new 802.11ac access points have been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The Aruba 220 Series of APs are “the first purpose-built enterprise access points for the 802.11ac standard,” according to Aruba, and the certification process aims to help ensure interoperability for supporting large-scale deployments of 802.11ac.
Aruba said that the University of Delaware is in the process of deploying almost 300 of its AP-225 802.11ac access points in three new buildings on its main campus in Newark, Del.
— Network evolution continues: TD-LTE and LTE-Advanced base stations will dominate the installed base of LTE macro sites as soon as 2015, according to ABI Research. While the FD-LTE variant will still represent a majority of LTE installations, ABI said that rapid growth in LTE-A and TD-LTE will drive that change globally, with operators such as SK Telecom moving to LTE-Advanced and China Mobile outlining plans for more than 200,000 base stations.
ABI predicts that by 2018, there will be 1.467 billion LTE subs worldwide, and 34% of those will be on LTE-Advanced networks.
“The rapid uptake in LTE-A comes as a result of the evolutionary nature of the LTE standards and the relative ease with which installed LTE basestations can be upgraded,” says Nick Marshall, principal analyst at ABI Research. “LTE-Advanced will progress in a phased rollout with Carrier Aggregation implemented first, followed by the eICIC, CoMP, Enhanced MIMO, and HetNet support features which will all help operators address the upsurge in network traffic.”
ABI noted regional strengths, with Japan, South Korea and China to have the largest LTE macro base station installed base by 2015, but North America accounting for the majority of LTE-Advanced networks.
