Wireless Field Day 3 - Ruckus Wireless

Wireless Field Day 3 - Ruckus Wireless

By CWNP On 09/13/2012 - 26 Comments

Ruckus Wireless is a WLAN vendor with a heavy focus on antenna and transmission technologies that use standards-based 802.11 communications but with proprietary hardware implementations that provide for directional links to clients (to over simplify what they do). Marcus Burton, much to our loss at CWNP and to Ruckus Wireless' gain, started out the presentation.

 
"The antenna is the exclamation point to everything that we do," Marcus Burton.
 
After he finished the opening welcome, GT Hill launched a round of introductions before we started into the agenda, which was titled, "Beyond the Reference Design." The focus is on what Ruckus Wireless does different in the industry. GT then passed control off to what he called, "the smart people."
 
When Ruckus Wireless uses the term reference design, they refer to the chip maker's design suggestions or recommendations. These represent software, board level hardware and so on. Vendors, such as Ruckus Wireless, AeroHive, and others (the named vendors are not listed by priority or preference by myself or CWNP), take that reference design and say, "how do we make it better?"
 
A big emphasis was placed on quality. When looking at balance of the RF performance and noise floor characteristics, they indicated that quality of hardware is essential. Having one of the best receive sensitivities in the business is important to them. They have a dedicated wireless performance testing group, which is eight people dedicated to just performance measurement.
 
Ruckus Wireless sells to both carriers and enterprise. From a development perspective, they attempt to address both markets. Much is the same between the markets, though unique features do exist. Sometimes, technologies are  developed for the carrier market, but prove useful for the enterprise side as well.
 
Recommendation from GT Hill - start learning cellular. The merge of Wi-Fi and cell providers will demand we have knowledge of it. While much of that knowledge is beyond the scope of CWNP certifications, the integration with it and connection to it is certainly an important part of modern WLAN implementations and will become more integrated into our certifications in the future thanks to 802.11u and other new directions in the wireless industry. As @wifidave put it, "Uh-oh, @GTHill's gonna make 'Rosemary's babies' out of all of us. The unholy union of WiFi and Cell."
 
@GregorVucajnk, one of our CWNEs, recommended An Introduction to LTE, available at Amazon.com http://ow.ly/dH8em as a great resource for this.
  Tagged with: Ruckus Wireless, tom carpenter, WFD3, wireless field day

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