Ruckus Wireless has signed a small regional US telco, Consolidated Communications, to use Ruckus’ proprietary Wi-Fi network gear for home networking. Consolidated is Ruckus’ largest US telco customer, covering parts of Illinois, Texas and Pennsylvania. It’s certainly no Qwest or CenturyLink in size but does have about 255,000 phone subscribers, 96,000 DSL broadband subscribers and almost 20,000 pay-TV (IPTV) subscribers.
Ruckus’ “Smart Wi-Fi” enables the wireless streaming of HD video, including IPTV signals like Consolidated’s throughout the home. Being wireless saves Consolidated the cost and labor of installing new wires in the home. For that reason, wireless networking has long been the dream network for service providers, but standard Wi-Fi’s lack of sufficient security, and its inability to consistently deliver flicker-free video has prevented it from being used by pay-TV services.
JJ Hollie, product manager for Consolidated’s digital video services, said Ruckus’ Smart Wi-Fi provides three important benefits:
1. Accelerates new service and revenue opportunities.
2. Cuts in half the time and cost of traditional cabling required to enable television services.
3. Gives subscribers freedom, flexibility and control of where in the home they want to watch TV.
He said traditional Wi-Fi was never considered due to its lack of range and reliability issues.
Since it started in March 2005, Ruckus Wireless has shipped over 1.5 million Smart Wi-Fi units to hundreds of telcos such as Belgacom, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, SingTel, Telecom Austria, Telenor, Telefonica Del Sur in Chile and the US’ Pioneer Telephone. The main application is streaming IPTV signals.
AT&T is the US’ largest deployer of IPTV. It uses HPNA as its home network technology to distribute TV signals from room to room. Verizon has more pay TV customers than any other US telco, using technology similar to what the cablecos use for its FiOS pay-TV service. iSuppli predicts the IPTV market will grow 56% this year to 33.3 million subscribers worldwide, to 52 million by 2010 and to more than 115 million by 2013. The majority of subscribers are outside the US and half are in Europe.
Ruckus blames the low IPTV numbers in the States to “relatively weak broadband penetration, a legacy cable infrastructure largely used for the distribution of television and slower broadband speeds into the home unable to support the bandwidth requirements of IPTV.” The company says its “Smart Wi-Fi” products “deliver wire-like stability” and, as a result, have eliminated the need for in-home wiring, cutting installation times in half.
Consolidated uses ADSL 2+ broadband technology and MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 compression. It offers broadband speeds up to 35 Mbps. It said 3 Mbps is needed for standard-definition video and 7 Mbps for HD video.
Ruckus says its patented and proprietary technology extends signal range and allows for consistently reliable distribution of delay-sensitive multimedia content and services over standard 802.11 Wi-Fi.