North America's Largest Wholesale Sporting Goods Distributor Hits Home Run with Ruckus Wireless Smart Wi-Fi

Maurice Sporting Goods Standardizes on Smart Wi-Fi to Reduce Wireless Network Administration by 90 percent with Fewer APs That Deliver Greater Coverage

SUNNYVALE, CA, March 19, 2008 – Ruckus Wireless today announced that Maurice Sporting Goods (Maurice), the largest wholesale distributor of outdoor sporting and athletic goods in North America, has selected and deployed its popular ZoneFlex Smart Wireless LAN system for its corporate operations.

Headquartered in Northbrook, IL, Maurice made an invaluable trade – replacing its previous DLINK Wi-Fi system with a high-performance, centralized wireless LAN from Ruckus Wireless. Since the installation, the Ruckus ZoneFlex system has had a profound effect on WLAN administration and management, reducing the time spent babysitting the network by 90 percent.

"It became a daily occurrence to have to reboot the Wi-Fi system and to troubleshoot Wi-Fi user problems," said Michael Wozny, network administrator at Maurice Sporting Goods. "Wi-Fi was initially deployed as candy for the executives but quickly became one of the primary means of connectivity. Our initial focus was cost and ease of use so we purchased a bunch of consumer-grade D-Link APs and sprinkled them around. That's when the phone started ringing."

According to Wozny, users complained about not being able to connect to the Wi-Fi network. The network was time-consuming to administer as each access point needed to be configured and managed separately.

Maurice needed a WLAN system that would work with its existing infrastructure, and also support multiple SSIDs to provide guest networking without compromising the corporate network. The challenge was how to meet these requirements with a strict budget and busy schedule.

"We needed a more robust, centrally managed system that was easy to use and quickly found that these things don't necessarily go together," Wozny lamented. "The last thing I wanted to do was purchase more consumer-grade APs that didn't offer the performance, stability and range to support a corporate environment."

Maurice began evaluating all of the popular WLAN systems from vendors like Cisco, 3Com, HP and others, and was drawn to the Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi system because of the combination of reliability and affordability ? priced at roughly half the cost of a comparable Cisco WLAN system, according to Wozny.

Performance, Ease of Use and Affordability: a Homerun Combination

Maurice's previous network – which comprised one D-Link router, nine D-Link access points and Power over Ethernet (PoE) injectors – was plagued with constant problems: coverage was spotty, performance was unreliable, and the system had to be re-booted almost daily. It offered no centralized management, which made it a real headache for Wozny and his team to deal with the constant barrage of user complaints.

Increasingly, Wozny and his team and were spending most of their day troubleshooting the network, and it became unbearable, he said. "We needed a way to solve it fast, and without a big expense. That's when we found Ruckus."

To provide ubiquitous coverage across the entire L-shaped facility, Wozny installed six Ruckus ZoneFlex 2942 802.11b/g APs and one ZoneDirector 1006 central WLAN management system.

"I was immediately wowed by the fact that with fewer APs than we had before, we now have complete saturation of our building. There are no more coverage holes or signal fluctuations, and we're consistently getting a much higher throughput than we did previously." said Wozny.

Each ZoneFlex AP is built with Ruckus' patented beamsteering technology, a smart antenna array that steers Wi-Fi signals around interference and toward the user in real-time to provide consistent, higher capacity coverage and extended range.

The Ruckus ZoneDirector acts as a central point of configuration, management, administration and security for all Ruckus ZoneFlex APs, and gives Wozny complete visibility into the Wi-Fi network.

At any time, he can open his dashboard and see how many people are connected to each AP and how well the APs are performing. He can also throttle bandwidth usage up or down for specific users or groups, depending on how many users are connected and what applications they're using. In this way, he ensures that guests don't take needed bandwidth away from employees, and if a particular department's throughput requirements increase for a special project, he can accommodate their needs with just a few mouse clicks. Additionally, Wozny and his team receive email alerts any time a rogue AP attempts to access the network so they can immediately block access.

Secure Guest Access Made Super Simple

Another issue Wozny and his team had to tackle was the ability to provide temporary, secure access to visiting vendors, consultants, customers and contractors. This was impossible before since the D-Link system didn't offer multiple SSID support or guest pass generation.

"We use WPA encryption to secure our corporate network, and since we couldn't segment out a separate network for guests, we had no way to offer visitors wireless access," explained Wozny.

Using the configuration wizard in ZoneDirector, Maurice created two SSIDs on one discrete virtual LAN (VLAN) – one network for guests and one for employees. The corporate network gives employees secure, mobile access through a WPA encryption key. Visitors are granted access to the guest network through the Guest Pass feature in ZoneDirector, which creates a unique access code for each visitor. Network administrators can set the access code to be in effect for a certain length of time, and provide simple instructions to visitors for how to quickly log on to the network to access the Web and HTTP/S applications.

The ZoneFlex system works seamlessly with the Ethernet infrastructure already in place at Maurice's corporate office – an added bonus that confirmed Wozny's decision. Looking ahead Maurice is planning to roll out the Ruckus system to other branch locations and facilities across the country.

"The benefits from using the Ruckus system are too numerous to mention. We have reduced network support and turned what used to be an administrative nightmare into one of the least worrisome areas of my job," said Wozny.