Ruckus Wireless, the US company that got big on moving IPTV video around in non-US IPTV installations, says it has made several breakthroughs in wi-fi based beamforming, which it is now using to bring broadband to parts of the world which are currently unwired. The move follows trials at Tikona Digital Network in India where the company says it has managed to run a directional Wi-Fi signal across 12 kilometers to offer a 150 Mbps backhaul to an apartment building’s wi-fi cloud. In one city it is installing these ‘backhaul’ spots at train stations and effectively bringing exceptionally cheap broadband to homes there, Wi-Fi end to end.
Most of the services so far are 250 kbps per home at present, but Ruckus insists that this is not a limit of the technology, only of this particular operator, and puts up the Wi-Fi backhaul pairs as viable to take on WiMAX in any application.
Existing Wi-Fi devices, such as pre-installed PC cards can receive these new Wi-Fi signals but the real downside of the Ruckus approach is that it really needs customers to buy the Ruckus multi-antenna CPE in order to get the best out of the new system. It also uses the beamforming in Wi-Fi mesh hops from device to device, as it distributes the broadband signal.
The resulting broadband performance is being hailed as a 5-fold reduction
in the capital cost of providing broadband coverage and it will target developing urban environments in India and other similarly underserved areas. The announcement cited UK partner Wi-Fi distributor Selcoms which operates mostly in the Middle East and Africa. ‘With this launch, Ruckus is really challenging the traditional wireless broadband market,’ said Hugh Garrod, managing director at Selcoms. ‘Its end-to-end solution is amazing in its reach and throughput ‘ before this, we just wouldn’t have thought Wi-Fi capable, but with its Smart Wi-Fi and beamforming technology, Ruckus has changed this.’
The Ruckus strategy now is to deliver the equipment for end to end installation, from backhaul to access points to CPE for a local telco, particularly in areas which don’t already have DSL capability. Given that India only has about 37 million physical fixed lines into homes, it is an ideal territory for this type of solution, which is why India has long been keen to experiment with WiMAX.
Ruckus calls the system its WBA system and it includes outdoor mesh Access Points, CPE, a the new line of smart Wi-Fi backhaul systems, along with system-wide remote management. One key is that the beamforming technology can aim a radio beam, as long as the target is within an 30o segment, so it claims that rigorous radio planning is not required, but that it IS required for WiMAX networks. The beamforming is standard on all of the Ruckus gear (which all rests on top of Atheros chips) so that the mesh also benefits from this beamforming accuracy, which cuts down massively on interference because the transmissions on adjacent mesh Access Points can often transmit on the same channels, maximizing network capacity.
Finally Ruckus says that its Smart Mesh networking can route traffic over both wired and wireless Access Points so the mesh element still works even if a wire has to be laid, or if something like the electricity cables are used to connect to another side of the building.
BelAir Networks and Tropos have made similar claims for their technology over the past few years, and so far none of them have really taken off as a replacement for WiMAX, which is rich in quality of service and management options compared to conventional Wi-Fi, and which these days is usually optimized for licensed spectrum rather than unlicensed. But this is something of a holy grail, unlicensed back haul with no radio planning and automatic mesh, backhauled safely on license free spectrum. We doubt that Ruckus has really managed this, but if it has, then WBA will sell and sell.
Ruckus says that WiNet Broadband, a broadband operator in the Asia Pacific region, is currently deploying a Ruckus WBA infrastructure to customers in Malaysia and will deploy 4,000 nodes by the end of 2010 and is targeting to attract 250,000 subscribers by the end of 2010 and one million over the next three years.
Tikona in India also says it is building a large, multi-city network that leverages Smart Wi-Fi from Ruckus. The Ruckus WBA system includes the ZoneFlex 7731 point-to-point 802.11n (5GHz) backhaul system, the ZoneFlex 7762 and 2741, dual-band outdoor access points and the MediaFlex 2200 indoor home gateway. Ruckus says that the 7731 costs just $2,398 per pair.