While everyone is talking about Wimax...

While everyone is talking about Wimax,Wifi seems to have quietly grown up.
I came across an interesting article in "the Ruckus room", Ruckus Wireles's corporate blog.
The blogpost give an insight on how WiFi has matured as a technology of choice in a market that we hear very little about. Service providers all over the globe (be in Internet service providers, Telco's or TV companies) are all looking at the tripple and quadruple play market. And seemingly they all have been looking at WiFi as a technology to distribute the service/signal around your home.
It maks sense; your ISP also wants to provide you with a phone service, IPTV, VOD etc.
Your phone company also wants more than a slice of the cake and your TV company most likely already has a cable into your house.
All they need is a way to distribute the signal around the house without the need for a rats-nest of cables and while allowing them to manage QoS and preferrably also allow them to manage the services in a transparent manner.

To quote from the post: "New technology is now letting operators not only integrate Wi-Fi but control things they haven't been able to control before. Things such as signal path selection, being able to see into the home RF spectrum, allocate different SSIDs for different services, prioritize traffic, monitor packet error rates, SNR, signal strength in different areas of the home. Blah, blah, blah."

It's interesting to see that a technology that grew from use in a LAN environment and that subsequently was adapted in long distance links and to cover large urban & rural areas has now gone full circle and is coming back into the home.

It also puts a different slant on the whole Wimax vs WiFi debate. While Wimax is full of great promises and is able to cover large distances and has a throughput that far exceeds WiFi, it is still best suited for backhaul applications. WiFi has been around much longer and has matured to such an extent that it has ensured it's place in the market for quite some time to come. Also looking at the millions of WiFi devices currently in use it would be lunacy to expect Wimax to capture this market....

E.

Let me tell you what the ruckus is all about...

We have been testing the Ruckus Wireless hardware during the past month and I am happy to say that I am very impressed.
I will give a quick overview of our findings below;

• The devices look great, they are far removed from the box like shape that wirelessrouters used to have. In looks they can easily compete with Apple's Airport basestations. And they have flashing lights!
• The range is great. I set one up in my office and went walkabout with my PDA running Airmagnet. The SNR didn't drop below 60 dBm until is was outside, 100 yards from the building and behind a wooden shed. I can honestly say that I have never seen any wireless router with that performance.
• The devices are easy to setup and configure. Just plug an ethernet cable in the Mediaflex router and conenct it to your laptop or PC, enter the IP address into a browser and youcan log straight into the configuration GUI. The options are well laid out and very extensive. I won't list all configurations here but the people behind these devices have clearly done their homework. If you use the router together with Ruckus' wireless adapter and want to run IPTV through it the system almost completely self-configures. For a more graphic explaination of what it can do and how it works just click on this link.
  
• The data throughput is indeed very good, I was able to upload & download large files to a remote server at a respectable rate, conduct a VOIP call, stream a Divx file and play MP3's from my fileserver al at the same time. All without delays, stutering or quality loss. This link will give you an insight on how it does this.

I am probably biased but I really have not seen anything currently available that can meet all those criteria. They might not be the cheapest product on the market with the router retailing around €125 but it sure offers the best value for money.

What I also like is that the developers at Ruckus are not sitting still either. They are presentng a 802.11N "smart wifi" product in at the CES show in January. See here for more details.
They are also releasing an update version of their Metroflex wireless gateway that will propogate the signal into the customers premises via wireless instead of the Ethernet feed it has now.

Now you know what the Ruckus is all about.
'Nuff said...

E.