Ruckus Wireless Delivers First Carrier-Purposed 802.11n System, Enabling Picture-Perfect High Definition IPTV Without Cabling

Belgacom Among the First Customers to Adopt New Ruckus Wireless MediaFlex 7000 to Accelerate HD IPTV Service Deployment and Reduce Installation Costs

SUNNYVALE, CA — Ruckus Wireless®, a Wi-Fi technology pioneer in the carrier and enterprise wireless LAN markets, today announced the immediate availability of its new MediaFlex™ 7000 series, the first commercial 802.11n system specifically developed for operators to distribute multiple streams of high-definition (HD) IPTV content throughout a subscriber’s home without costly and time-consuming cable installation.

Belgacom is among the first service providers to select the MediaFlex 7000 for its BelgacomTV service, one of the most successful IPTV services with over 390,000 subscribers throughout Belgium. The Ruckus MediaFlex 7000 beat out competitive 802.11n products in a series of stringent lab and home trials conducted by Belgacom, including a test to deliver 20 hours of non-stop HD IPTV streams at 20Mbps aggregate, to six different locations throughout a simulated home environment with injected interference, without dropping a single packet.

“The IPTV market is moving quickly to high-definition service and we’re helping providers get there as fast as possible by eliminating serious pain points in the installation and upgrade process,” said Selina Lo, president and CEO of Ruckus Wireless.

“We are the only Wi-Fi company that has focused on the unique needs of service providers and it has paid off. Our carrier business continues to grow as providers focus on streamlining the last hundred feet of the IPTV delivery infrastructure. Extending our IPTV success with 802.11n is a natural next step and one that is greeted with great enthusiasm by providers everywhere,” concluded Lo.

To date, nearly a million Ruckus MediaFlex 802.11g/a systems have been installed around the world by over 140 broadband providers including Deutsche Telekom, Telekom Austria, Swisscom, TeliaSonera, Telenor, Fastweb, Telefonica Del Sur, PCCW, SingTel, Elion, Belgacom and many others.

Lo noted that the success of the Ruckus MediaFlex stems from its ability to help providers reduce installation times and labor costs by 50 percent or more, speed time to revenue by turning up more subscriptions per day, and provide greater flexibility and better experience to subscribers who want to add or move televisions without being tethered by cabling.

“With high definition IPTV content, the need for a reliable distribution network in the home has never been more important,” said Robin Bellière, product manager of Residential Terminals at Belgacom. “Having now deployed the Ruckus MediaFlex in tens of thousands of subscriber homes over the last two years, we have found it to be among the best performing and most reliable in-home platforms we have ever worked with. We are now extending this unique technology to new high definition IPTV services with the new 802.11n MediaFlex system.”

Bellière said Belgacom is quickly moving to offer HD IPTV and needed a higher bandwidth system to support the simultaneous transmission of multiple HD streams. “With the Ruckus MediaFlex 7000, our customers can self-install the system in a matter of minutes where and when they desire with the assurance of high quality. It also gives our subscribers greater flexibility while helping us to bring more users online faster at a lower overall deployment cost,” said Bellière.

HD over Wi-Fi: Easier Said Than Done

While Wi-Fi is widely recognized as the home networking technology of choice, inconsistent performance, interference, insufficient range and unreliable signal quality had prevented carriers from using the technology to distribute real-time TV services in the home. Many service providers have opted to manually wire subscriber homes with Ethernet or other cables which results in high installation costs, long installation times and slow subscriber acquisition. The existing Ruckus MediaFlex 802.11g/a systems were the first and only in-home Wi-Fi solution that overcame these problems to deliver whole-home sustainable performance that supports multiple streams of standard definition IPTV.

While off-the-shelf 802.11n products demonstrate markedly higher average throughputs compared to their 802.11g/a predecessor, it is not a foregone conclusion that they could deliver the sustainable throughput required to support real-time HD IPTV. In fact, as 802.11n performance depends on the use of multiple radios for simultaneous signal transmissions (a technique called spatial multiplexing), it is more sensitive to noise and subject to environmental variability.

By integrating next-generation 802.11n with Ruckus’ state-of-the art beam steering technology, known as BeamFlex™, the new Ruckus MediaFlex 7000 controls and coordinates the forms and directions of multiple signal streams in real time to maximize 802.11n spatial multiplexing while navigating around interference and physical obstructions.

The MediaFlex 7811 also offers unique remote management capabilities through the Ruckus FlexMaster system, a remote wireless LAN and service management platform. FlexMaster gives broadband operators complete visibility into subscribers’ home networks and enables them to securely monitor, update, provision and troubleshoot a large number of devices from a central location.

Remote Wi-Fi Management is Key to Delivering a World-Class IPTV Service

The Ruckus FlexMaster is the first TR069-based system to provide complete control of and visibility into hundreds of thousands of MediaFlex units from a single console.

With FlexMaster, providers can visualize remote RF environments, configure individual Ruckus MediaFlex systems or bulk-configure groups of systems over any public, private or hybrid IP network. Once installed, each Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi AP automatically “phones home” to the Ruckus FlexMaster system to register and gain its configuration. FlexMaster streamlines deployment and minimizes problems that occur from manual configuration of devices. It also allows more efficient troubleshooting, management and monitoring of Ruckus MediaFlex systems. Operators can group Ruckus APs by geographic region, device type, serial number, MAC address or customer name enabling providers to create unique service level agreements for each client in order to offer revenue-generating services.

FlexMaster also enables operators to remotely run diagnostic tests on MediaFlex systems located within the home and automatically upgrade firmware to ensure MediaFlex devices are kept up-to-date with the latest software. Service providers can also remotely upgrade a subscriber’s MediaFlex 7000 system and trigger a restart or let the system automatically restart when it becomes idle.

FlexMaster provides detailed real-time and historical statistics such as the amount of traffic transmitted and received by each device, packet error rates, signal-to-noise ratios and throughput, and also includes a NOC mapping capability to display where each device is being deployed and how it’s used in the home. This comprehensive reporting engine gives the service provider a quick at-a-glance view of network health.

Product Details, Pricing and Availability

The Ruckus MediaFlex 7000 series includes the MediaFlex 7811 multimedia 802.11n one-port access point and MediaFlex 7111 one-port multimedia adapter. With the system’s self-installing and auto-configuration features, subscribers can easily self-deploy and set up the MediaFlex access point and adapter in plug-and-play fashion in the home, in a matter of minutes.

The Ruckus MediaFlex 7111 adapter also provides video-grade, 802.11n connectivity to any Ethernet-equipped video server, including set-top-boxes; personal video recorders, media centers and media center extenders. The MediaFlex adapter is one of the most sensitive Wi-Fi receivers on the market with the ability to reliably receive Wi-Fi signals down to -96 dBm.

The list prices for the Ruckus MediaFlex 7811 access point and 7111 adapter are US $199 and US $139 respectively.