Meru

Ruckus makes aggressive push into enterprise WiFi

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:59:56 -0400

Ruckus Wireless is taking aim at the enterprise WiFi market, competing head to head with the likes of Cisco, Aruba and Meru with the introduction of SmartMesh--a WiFi meshing technology that the company says enables enterprises to deploy WiFi networks in half the time and half the cost to get three times the performance of typical WLANs.

Ruckus, most known for its WiFi platform that delivers IPTV, has been playing in the mid-market enterprise market for some time with a self configurable WiFi product designed for enterprises that lack extensive IT staffs. Now the company is moving up to compete with bigger WiFi enterprise players with a new class of WLANs that self-organize, self-optimize and self-heal, eliminating the costly cabling to every WiFi access point and complex RF planning, according to the company. Ruckus' SmartMesh technology includes the company's in-house developed smart antenna technology.

"During these economic times, systems like ours become more palatable and enterprises are becoming more willing to use them even though they haven't heard of us," said David Callisch, vice president of marketing with Ruckus.

Ruckus says the cost of a typical 500-user WLAN using the industry's most popular enterprise 802.11g WLAN systems is approximately $35,000. Ruckus' SmartMesh solution with 802.11n technology is under $15,000, says the company.

Lodgian, one of the largest independent owners and operators of full-service hotels in the United States, is among the first companies to deploy the Ruckus SmartMesh and 802.11n solutions.

For more about Ruckus' new SmartMesh technology:
- read this release

Related article:
Ruckus Wireless named to Fierce 15 list

Enterprise vendors put pre-802.11n stakes in the ground

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 06:59:58 -0500

The enterprise 802.11n market has officially taken off now that Aruba, the last major holdout, has entered the market. Things certainly changed in this market in a matter of months. Earlier this year, Aruba had said that 802.11n wasn't ready for the enterprise since the standard wasn't finished. Cisco also warned that the draft 802.11n product had no guarantee of working together. But Cisco jumped into the 802.11n space in September. Now many enterprises are pushing video services and looking for strategic replacement of of the wired Ethernet in certain areas of their businesses. 802.11n significantly improves data throughput and coverage of existing 802.11-based technologies, and vendors are convinced that the standard won't change much when it is finally ratified. They are also comfortable that the Wi-Fi Alliance is certifying these products.

Meru, the first vendor to announce Draft 2.0 802.11n plans earlier this year, said it plans to announce a number of customers shortly in verticals such as healthcare, retail, higher education and hospitality. Girish Baht, director of enterprise solutions with Meru, said Meru is in a situation where it can't often meet customer demand for 802.11n products. In fact, its recently introduced Video Unplugged Program, a video over WLAN partner program, which aims to certify video products and guarantee QoS, was introduced partly to take advantage of 802.11n's ability to handle larger amounts of data.

All of the draft 802.11n announced deals so far are in the higher education space. Meru has a deal with Carnegie Mellon, Cisco with Duke University and Meru with Morrisville State University. These are typically the entities that are less risk-adverse and want the latest cutting-edge technology.

How many pre-802.11n deals we'll see throughout 2008 remains to be seen. Stan Schatt, vice president and research director with ABI Research, doesn't expect massive adoption because most enterprises don't like the idea of using pre-standardized equipment. We'll likely see adoption in certain verticals that need lots of bandwidth or want to heavily take advantage of VoIP, he said.

After all, no vendor can make a 100-percent guarantee that the final standard will match what it is selling today. Even though most vendors expect a software upgrade, enterprises will have to foot the bill for a full hardware upgrade. As Schatt says, "Any time you lock up a bunch of engineers in a room, you just never know what is going to come out." -Lynnette

SPOTLIGHT: Juniper: Enterprise wVoIP market to reach $15B

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:01:32 -0400

Juniper Research estimates the enterprise VoIP over WiFi equipment market will grow from $2 billion in 2007 to $15 billion in 2012 with Cisco being the main beneficiary. Switches/mobility controllers will account for $8 billion of that. In addition to Cisco, Aruba, Trapeze, Proxim and Meru are expected to reap significant amounts. For handsets, Juniper says Spectralink, whose sale to Polycom closed last week, will lead the market. Article

Trend: Bonded wireless for back haul

Tue, 09 May 2006 20:01:38 -0400

Meru is a company which likes to make news. At last year's Interop it offered "single channel WLANs" (together with Extricom). This year, the big new idea seems to be wireless backbones--systems in which wireless links push the wires one step further back toward the wiring closet. And, yes, Meru is pushing it with a system which bonds channels to make a 100 Mbps back haul from APs to distribution switches. Not only Meru: Xirrus also talked of a bonded back haul for enterprise WLANs, in the form of a software upgrade--Release 2.0--of its Integrated Access Point, which bonds three radios together for links which it claims are up to 162 Mbps. The software will be available at the end of May.

The Meru and Xirrus systems offer a bonded channel, with greater capacity than a normal WiFi link, and both offer features above and beyond what we typically see in a regular mesh. Meru's system offers a full-duplex link with quality of service, which Meru's director of product management says is different from a mesh. Xirrus' system appears to be faster, but the 162 Mbps may well be based on multiplying the theoretical 54 Mbps rate of three 802.11g channels by three. The actual throughput is likely to be half of what the company claims it to be.

Note also that Meru uses a "blanket" architecture, in which the APs all use the same WLAN channel(s). The bonded back channel benefits from the fact that with all the APs using specific channels, other channels are free for back haul. Xirrus, on the other hand, uses a sectorized architecture in which one AP contains up to 16 radios, which use directional antennas to reach a wedge of the building. The Xirrus sectorized architecture thus makes it possible to bond channels together without danger of their interfering with radios which are beaming out in a different direction.

For more on bonded channels for back haul:
- see Peter Judge's Techworld report

Juniper to use Meru's WiFi voice technology

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 20:01:35 -0400

A few weeks ago Meru made the headlines for signing the largest contract to date to build a WiFi voice network. The network would link up to 10,000 staff at 50 offices of Osaka Gas, one of Japan's largest utilities. The employees will use converged handsets capable of making mobile calls on the Japanese FOMA system and in-building WiFi calls using SIP. Networking vendor Juniper has adopted Meru's innovative WiFi architecture for voice over WiFi, and perhaps there is a hint here as to Juniper's overall WiFi strategy, a source of much head-scratching among industry observers. Meru certainly hopes that Juniper has more in mind than merely using Meru's technology for voice applications.

Juniper currently offers a security gateway with a wireless AP which it inherited, and then tweaked, as part of its NetScreen acquisition. It also resells public WiFi hotspot kits from Colubris. As is the case with Merus, Colubris, too, hopes for more from Juniper. Colubris has developed an interesting WiFi switch system which merges wired and wireless switches, and it needs a collaborator that sells wired Ethernet switches to help it sell the system to the enterprise. Juniper would be a good candidate for such collaboration.

It is high time Juniper developed a strategy -- any strategy -- to compete more effectively with Cisco, what with the latter having acquired Airespace. Broader collaboration with Meru and Colubris may well provide Juniper with the making of such a strategy.

For more on the Juniper-Meru deal:
- see Meru's press release
- read Peter Judge's Techworld report