Ruckus Wireless launches outdoor dual-band 802.11n access points

Ruckus Wireless has unveiled an outdoor dual-band (5.8 GHz and 2.4 GHz) 802.11n Wi-Fi access point (the ZoneFlex 7762) with dynamic beamforming to overcome problems that have plagued outdoor Wi-Fi deployments, especially over large, densely populated areas such as city centers, resort complexes, school campuses, and concert venues. According Ruckus, wireless broadband service providers can deliver Wi-Fi service over increasingly larger outdoor areas at a much lower cost using dual-band 802.11n and still experience a two- to four-fold increase in signal range and reliability. Ruckus is targeting service providers who want to:

• Deploy large outdoor Wi-Fi networks that have a lot of people using data-hungry applications;
• Extend an enterprise, school or resort network to outdoor areas where there are no Ethernet cables;
• Deliver Wi-Fi to multi-dwelling units (MDUs) such as condos; and
• Offload data traffic from 3G networks.

Recently Ken Biba wrote an article titled The King is Dead, Long Live the King: 802.11n dramatically improves Wi-Fi outdoors where he declared:

There has been much dispute about whether the specifics of 802.11n designed for indoor networks would apply to outdoor networks and bring the economy of scale of 802.11 to outdoor applications. At Novarum, we tested the effects of 802.11n on outdoor performance. We found dramatic improvements in using indoor 802.11n technology outdoors, so much so that 802.11n has become, for us, the recommended baseline for new network deployments.

Read more about the tests that Biba’s firm, Novarum, conducted on outdoor 802.11n networks.

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Related articles:

Real world measurements show muni Wi-Fi networks outperform WiMAX and cellular

Meraki releases 802.11n outdoor mesh product

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