WineNation Selects Ruckus Wireless for Nationwide “Big Box” Retail Facilities
More Robust Wi-Fi Enables Employees’ Use of Handheld Devices for Price Checks, Inventory Counts and Orders; and Support for In-store Kiosks and Guest Broadband Access
SUNNYVALE, CA, November 22, 2010 – Ruckus Wireless™, the smart mobile internetworking company, today announced that WineNation (www.winenation.com), a big box specialty wine and spirits retailer, has standardized on Ruckus ZoneFlex “Smart Wi-Fi” to provide robust Wi-Fi services in its 25-50,000-square-foot retail facilities throughout the country.
PCI-compliant, the Ruckus Wireless Smart Wi-Fi equipment is being used to support higher efficiency standards for employees, enabling them to rely on laptops and handheld devices to help customers find products located throughout the store, check inventory levels, place orders and print signs and labels, among other things. The network will also be used to provide wireless broadband access for customers, to support forthcoming in-store kiosks and voice-over-IP (VOIP) handsets, and to facilitate operation of the store’s customer classroom.
eTribeca, llc, a long-standing Ruckus partner, worked with WineNation to provide rapid deployment of the Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi infrastructure. According to Gary Berzack, CTO/COO of eTribeca, “The business model for WineNation is to operate with a fast construction and turn-around of their new spaces, which demand flexible WiFi deployment. At any given time WineNation may identify a number of locations where we need to respond quickly to their deployment needs. The Ruckus equipment enables us to do that.”
WineNation is a wine lifestyle superstore, focused on the core product offerings of wine and beer. The store also provides an assortment of complementary products, including an extensive selection of gourmet foods, alcoholic beverage related gifts and accessories, and selected seasonal items. WineNation features 7,000 wines, 1,000 beers and 3,000 spirits.
“With recent technical advances, Wi-Fi has become a much more powerful utility. Our industry stands to benefit from being able to adopt next-generation devices and applications that deliver an enhanced in-store experience to our customers, while also enabling employees to un-tether themselves from back-room computers and perform their jobs more efficiently,” said Thomas Trone, president of WineNation, based in Potomac, MD. “As the world becomes more mobile and customers’ expectations for a state-of-art shopping experience grow, Ruckus’ Smart Wi-Fi system will allow us to create an environment where people want to come to shop, sample, learn and simply spend time. The possibilities are endless for us to utilize technologies of the future that will continue to improve the way our business operates.”
Trone indicated that the size and lay-out of his facility proved to be challenging for other Wi-Fi vendors’ systems to deliver the broad coverage and high performance needed to support his requirements, at an affordable price.
“The need for flexible high bandwidth and ease of installation and management were key factors in our selection of Ruckus,” he said. “With such a large building, and so many design obstacles throughout the store, we found that other Wi-Fi equipment we looked at couldn’t deliver what we needed, at such a low price-point. With Ruckus, we’ve found no dead coverage zones anywhere in the store, and performance is superb.
“Our Wi-Fi network was up and running in just three days, which utterly amazed me,” said Trone. To date we’ve had no outages, no performance problems or any issues whatsoever. Basically, it just delivers and I don’t even have to think about it.”
To cover a single 30,000-square-foot retail facility, WineNation, working closely with its IT integration partner eTribeca, deployed four Ruckus ZoneFlex 7962 dual-band 802.11n access points (APs) and one ZoneDirector 1000 controller for centralized network management. Berzack pointed out that with such a large space and so many bottles RF can do some strange things. Not an issue with Ruckus its beam forming technology was able to adapt to this type of environment wonderfully.
Each Ruckus ZoneFlex Smart Wi-Fi access point integrates a patented smart antenna array that focuses and directs Wi-Fi signals over the best signal path, automatically avoiding interference to ensure the highest data rates and consistent performance wherever clients roam. ZoneFlex Smart Wi-Fi access points can be deployed as standalone APs without a controller or with a controller as a fully centralized wireless LAN system.
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