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April - 2014 - issue > View Point
The Scalability and Accessibility of Wireless Networks - A Catch up Play
Giri Iyer
VP-Customer Support-Ruckus Wireless
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Ruckus Wireless (NYSE:RKUS) is a supplier of advanced wireless systems for the mobile Internetworking market. Headquartered at Sunnyvale, the company has a market cap of $1.12 Billion.

Today, the industry is going through exciting times with the introduction of novel technologies. The advent of new standards in the wireless market like the 802.11, which is the current standard, has transcended from its base standard increasing the entire capacity, performance and speed which is veritable with the proliferation of more and more devices. It has also taken care of the needs of the wireless network, the capacity, the performance.

The versions of the standard 802.11, namely 802.11a and 802.11c are emerging new technologies which are going to be rolled out shortly by access point providers. The greater anticipation, though, comes through improvement in speed and the capacity scaling almost three times on maximum theoretical range between 415 megabits per second and 1.3 gigabits per second ranges. Further, we have a huge performance rise of the wireless network which brings in an exciting transition in the industry both on client side and as well as the provider.

With a number of cloud based solutions sprouting out, many of cloud based technologies are being taken from traditional hosted environment and put on cloud, and wireless is no different in that regard. More and more gates have started operation for the WiFi management through cloud and services. The Solution providers, small or medium size enterprises that may not have the IT capacity or the talent to be able to administer and capacitate a fairly sophisticated WiFi technology to the enterprise, use simplistic tools by leveraging cloud that would allow them to manage these wireless networks. Since the proliferation of more devices, the ability of the carriers of the enterprise of the network has seen a jugular growth to level up and satisfy the needs of the mobile devices. There will be more proliferation of the BYOD type of devices in 2014.

The Challenges

The WiFi analytics is in its nascent stage and so the need to track its service and usability is ever increasing. Service providers have always incorporated better networks through the traditional Ethernet, router and the local area network which have a history of rich analytics, the legacy of which was not seen when it came to wifi until 2014.The fact that wifi has now started to follow the same footsteps is fairly progressive and is a positive sign in terms of integration and up gradation. This imperativeness for the technology comes because of the need for expansion in the wireless network.

With the expansion of the network, the number of devices connected to the access point also goes up. This cluster also results in resolving the network traffic, the number of people involved, as there is more data on the run in both cellular and wifi networks. The fact that wifi networks run both indoors and outdoors, there is more data traffic running. The need to optimize one's network is also critical so as to provide the kind of service that people expect in terms of ease of access and the fact that people have started to use wifi network as a utility, orchestrates the scale of its requirement and usage.

The Alliance with HotSpot

The much hyped speculation about the challenges circulating around wireless networks in coming years have also made eyes turn on to 'hot spot 2.0',another standard that is anticipated to be available in 2014. The fact that device vendors such as Samsung and apple have all hotspot 2.0 enabled, and also access providers like us have started to incorporate the technology to build products around are a favorable sign for the future as we target to provide a pleasant user experience. This is for devices to configure the public hotspots to be able to talk intelligently surrounding the facility and make out the best configuration enhancing simple login instructions. Hot spots are now found in the most common places to imagine, whether you walk across a shopping mall or at other public establishments, its ability to join the wifi networks seamlessly shows its working transparency. This is the big promise in the largely anticipated type of capability both on device side and also on access point side. The hotspot 2.0 initiative has driven alliance with wifi and also wifi broadband designed to make the wifi as simple to use as cellular technology. Thus, automating the process and making the infrastructure intelligent enough to decide for end users to get a secured connection automatically without the user having to do anything. In coming months and years of 2014 and 2015, there is going to be upsurge in wifi market as many segments of the economy will leverage the wifi technology apart from schools, hospital and hotels. (As told to Durgesh Prakash)

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