Ruckus targets WiFi at last-mile access

If an operator is looking to penetrate the home with wireless, WiMax and other broadband wireless technologies immediately come to mind. But specialty WiFi equipment maker Ruckus Wireless is asking why not consider WiFi?

The increased range of the recently certified IEEE 802.11n solutions have eliminated a good deal of the barriers on wireless LAN networks, and new techniques like beamforming allow carriers to aim their beams directly into homes and small businesses, said Steve Glapa, Ruckus director of product management. Ruckus is traditionally a provider of in-home secure WiFi solutions but has applied its technology to a new access product line that delivers last-mile wireless access in two stages, both using standardized WiFi equipment.

Using 802.11g access points mounted on poles or buildings in a neighborhood, Ruckus’ beamforming techniques direct signals toward specific customer premise equipment in a customer’s home or office—even circumscribing obstacles—rather than just function as an omnidirectional hotspot, Glapa said. “Let’s put the radio energy where we know people will pay for it,” Glapa said. Those access points, in turn, are backhauled via 802.11n radios to a point of presence where the data is offloaded into a backbone wireline network. Using similar beamforming techniques, however, Ruckus is able to greatly extend the range of 802.11n: up to 5 km while still maintaining 100 Mb/s of capacity and as far as 12 km if the carrier is willing to sacrifice bandwidth.

While such an architecture might resemble the mesh networks that governments and enterprises are building in cities around the world, Glapa said there are some key differences. Rather than blanket an area in coverage, creating a public hotspot network, the access solution is aimed at creating a private network with capacity directed at specific paying customers, Glapa said. Also, while a muni-WiFi network also uses WiFi radios for backhaul, the mesh architecture sends the signal in hops back to a point of presence, using up valuable capacity on the network. Ruckus’ architecture uses WiFi in much the same way as a dedicated IP point-to-point radio, focusing a single wireless beam over long distances to the point of presence, Glapa said.

The biggest advantages to Ruckus’ architecture are operational and deployment savings, Glapa said. Since WiFi uses the unlicensed bands, there are no spectrum costs. Even where WiMax can be deployed over unlicensed spectrum, the cost of WiMax gear and planning is much higher than that of purchasing and planning a WiFi network. Given the downward pricing pressure on broadband access, operators are looking for every advantage in deployment costs, Glapa said. “If you are going after $5 ARPU customers, those cost savings really matter,” Glapa said.