Ruckus Wireless Receives Voice Certification from Polycom, Lands InterContinental and Four Seasons Resort Whistler VoFi Deals

Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi VIEW Certified for Use with SpectraLink Wireless Telephones, InterContinental Mark Hopkins and Four Seasons Resort Whistler Make the Call with Ruckus

SUNNYVALE, California – March 30, 2009 – Ruckus Wireless™ (Ruckus) today announced that its ZoneFlex™ 7962 access point (AP) – the newest dual-band access point supporting beamforming – has received VIEW (Voice Interoperability for Enterprise Wireless) certification from Polycom for use with its SpectraLink 8020 and 8030 Wireless Telephones.

In addition, Ruckus said today that it was selected by the InterContinental Mark Hopkins and Four Seasons Resort Whistler to provide Smart Wi-Fi gear to support voice over Wi-Fi applications.

The Ruckus ZoneFlex Enterprise Smart wireless LAN (WLAN) system is based on patented beamforming technology that delivers superior and consistent performance for Wi-Fi client devices with wire-like reliability. The SpectraLink Wireless Telephones are designed for high-use enterprise environments in which employee mobility, responsiveness, and productivity are essential. Polycom’s VIEW Certification provides customers with proven Wi-Fi telephony solutions using enterprise-class WLAN infrastructure products – like ZoneFlex 7962 – and Polycom’s SpectraLink Wireless Telephones.

“Voice is brutally intolerant of poor network performance so specialized AP algorithms are needed to avoid call-dropping jitter, packet loss, and irksome power-save synchronization problems,” said Bill Kish, co-founder and CTO at Ruckus Wireless. “Intelligent antenna designs coupled with smarter algorithms that determine best path signal selection help to solve these problems.”

Intercontinental Mark Hopkins Perfects Voice over Wi-Fi Communications

Built in 1926, San Francisco’s historic and luxurious InterContinental Mark Hopkins hotel needed to use Wi-Fi to support new push-to-talk VOIP communicators for hotel employees. Because of the building’s old construction, which used metal lathe walls coated in concrete plaster, reliable Wi-Fi for anything other than providing high-speed connectivity to guests was problematic. And the more APs the hotel’s IT staff threw at the problem, the more interference was created.

“We had relied on Cisco access points with amplifiers and high-gain DB cones to give our guests Wi-Fi connectivity throughout most of the hotel,” said Robert Cantrell, IT director for the Mark Hopkins. “When the voice system started to perform poorly, some groups of employees refused to use it because they believed it was unreliable,” said Cantrell. “Our initial assessment was simply to add more APs with high-gain amps and antennas. But that didn’t fix the problem. In fact, we ultimately found that interference, not coverage, was the main culprit – and the additional APs just added more noise into the environment.”

After thorough site analysis, Cantrell identified the three main problems with his current network: weak signal levels in various parts of the hotel, too much “noise” which degraded voice call quality, and roaming problems — meaning, when a mobile VoIP user crossed from one coverage cell into the next, rather than a seamless transition between APs, the call would often drop while the device reassociated itself with the new AP.

Cantrell realized he needed a system that would not only provide a strong signal but that could deal with surrounding interference. Also, because the voice badge communicators transmit at much lower power levels than other handsets, Cantrell needed a wireless system with high receive sensitivity that wouldn’t add more interference to the airwaves. To solve this problem, Cantrell installed a Ruckus ZoneFlex Smart WLAN system. Cantrell noted unlike other products its unique beamsteering technology deals intelligently with interference by continually monitoring the signal path and choosing the best one at any given time.

Unlike any other WLAN system available today, the Ruckus ZoneFlex Smart WLAN integrates BeamFlex, a patented high-gain directional antenna array in every AP. BeamFlex forms and directs Wi-Fi signals only where needed. Meanwhile, automatic interference mitigation (AIM) technology rejects unwanted RF noise by ignoring energy from other devices that would otherwise degrade performance. This same antenna technology is used to focus reception of faint signals from devices such as VoIP badges that would not be heard by conventional APs.

According to Cantrell, since the Ruckus Smart WLAN system was installed, the erratic behavior of the voice system has been stabilized and groups in the hotel that previously refused to use the system have now willingly adopted it. “A unified communications system for all employees in the hotel is essential to deliver the kind of quality services expected from a hotel such as the Mark Hopkins. Once we installed the Ruckus system, we experienced a demonstrable improvement in staff connectivity giving them the power to deliver unprecedented service to our guests.”