Press Releases
Ruckus Wireless Co-founder and CTO Provides Pragmatic Preview of 802.11n in the Enterprise at Interop in New York
“Smart Wi-Fi” Innovator Believes Forthcoming Wi-Fi Standard is Ideally Suited for Enterprises a High Speed Backhaul within a Wireless Mesh
SUNNYVALE, CA, October 19, 2007 – Ruckus Wireless announced today that co-founder and CTO Bill Kish, one of the original developers of the company’s patented “smart Wi-Fi” technology, will participate in a panel discussion on 802.11n in the enterprise at Interop New York next week.
Kish will offer a different take on how enterprises can deploy the next iteration of the Wi-Fi standard. Because of the initial cost and inherent complexity of the technology, Kish will discuss its use for backhauling 802.11g traffic within a wireless mesh as a practical way for enterprises to capture the performance benefits the technology offers.
“802.11n represents a huge leap forward for the industry, but will take a while to be digested by the market,” said Bill Kish, Chief Technology Officer at Ruckus Wireless. “While 802.11n is being quickly integrated into client devices, we believe its initial appeal within the enterprise will be as a high performance backhaul mechanism within an indoor wireless mesh infrastructure.”
Much the way gigabit Ethernet was initially deployed as a way to backhaul fast Ethernet traffic within wired networks, 802.11n is ideal to provide high speed wireless links using the 5 GHz band to aggregate 802.11g client traffic within the 2.4 GHz band.
Wi-Fi acceptance and adoption has traditionally been driven by rapidly declining price points. With 802.11n chipsets currently priced at five times the cost of 802.11g chips, it will be a while before the technology is deployed in a mainstream fashion. “Using it as a way to backhaul traffic with 802.11g clients is something businesses can do now to improve performance without a huge expense,” said Kish.
As part of the panel, Kish will also dispel some of the myths surrounding 802.11n, such as its ability to consistently deliver 100 Mbps everywhere; flawlessly handle video streams and other high-bandwidth applications; mitigate interference and eclipse 802.11g as the de facto wireless client access mechanism.
Kish continued: “802.11n is the wireless LAN standard for the next decade. Still, the technology has limitations that are not always accurately portrayed such as the impact of interference and the myriad parameters that must be dynamically tuned to achieve the best performance.”
The 802.11n standard is significantly more complex than current 802.11 a/b/g protocols. It introduces a new range of parameters which will have a dramatic impact on performance but require non-trivial control algorithms and system engineering to achieve its full potential.
Multiple simultaneous spatial streams and increased interference make 802.11n systems more susceptible to performance fluctuations. “With appropriate enhancements to address reliability and coverage, 802.11n will eventually become a wire replacement, and will be the standard wireless technology for the foreseeable future,” concluded Kish
The Interop panel, titled “802.11n: It’s Here” will take place Tuesday, October 23 at 11:00 a.m. at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, and will be moderated by Michael Miller of Ziff Brothers Investments and former editorial director of PC Magazine.