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30 Minute Interview
‘‘There is a great market opportunity for Wi-Fi in India’’
Selina Lo, President and CEO of Ruckus Wireless spoke
to Vinita Gupta about the potential market for Wi-Fi technology and her
company's offerings in India
Selina Lo |
Solutions for the Indian market
Ruckus Wireless is a next-generation Wi-Fi company credited with pioneering
Smart Wi-Fi technology. It was formed in 2004 at Sequoia Capital. We design,
develop and market industrial-strength Wi-Fi systems that provide distribution
of delay-sensitive multimedia content and services over standard 802.11 technology.
WiMAX is not widely available in India as the infrastructure is incomplete;
moreover, WiMAX modems tend to be expensive. Today almost all laptops, MP3 players
and even mobiles are Wi-Fi enabled and therefore we believe that there is a
great market opportunity for Wi-Fi in India. In the future, we will interoperate
with WiMAX but will not build it.
We announced our outdoor dual-band 802.11n and single-band 802.11g Wi-Fi access
points in India with dynamic beamforming to overcome problems that have hindered
outdoor Wi-Fi deployments—including interference, unanticipated physical
obstructions such as foliage, network management complexity and cost—in
July. We will provide both indoor and outdoor access points.
Our flagship product, ZoneFlex, is the first wireless LAN system to combine
Wi-Fi advances such as smart antenna arrays and wireless meshing. The MediaFlex
line of multimedia wireless routers is used by more than 125 broadband operators
around the world to extend digital services such as IPTV throughout the home
without wires.
Dynamic beamforming
The air is full of signals; someone else’s signal is noise for you. So
it’s important to shut out the noise but, in such a scenario, an omni antenna
will not work. We have multiple antennas managing this interference. We have
a smart antenna system that is controlled by software and hence an IT expert
is not required. The software can combine this antenna to form different beams.
Pioneered by Ruckus Wireless, dynamic beamforming is the latest Wi-Fi innovation
that automatically directs transmissions to the best performing signal path
on a per packet basis using real-time feedback mechanisms inherent in the 802.11
protocol. The ability to adapt to changes in the RF environment on-the-fly results
in three- to four-fold improvement in range/performance while providing wire-like
reliability.
Outdoor Wi-Fi
Our new Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi outdoor products are ideally suited for enterprises
or service providers needing to provide reliable Wi-Fi access to outdoor hot
zones, seamlessly extend wireless LAN (WLAN) services to outdoor areas for sites
such as school campuses and resort complexes where Ethernet cabling is not available
outdoors, to dense user communities such as multi-dwelling units (MDUs), resort
complexes and condominiums and improve mobile user experience by offloading
data traffic from increasingly congested 3G cellular networks.
Differentiation
Our competitors are either focusing on Fortune 500 companies where their product
offerings are costly or are providing low-cost solutions that are standalone.
So there is a vast gap between these two segments and hence we would be targeting
the SMBs (the companies having more than 100 employees).
Our technology can reach larger distances, that is one access point can cover
4,000-5,000 square feet of distance than competitors’ 1,500-2,000 square
feet, thus instead of having 10 access point a company can just have our six
access point that will provide speed, reliability and coverage.
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