BackHow Ruckus Wireless is Different
Hello,
Saar here, resident engineer at Myriad Supply. Today I’ll be talking about Ruckus Wireless.
How Ruckus Wireless is Different:
1. Ruckus makes and designs their own antennas. If you need an analogy, you can use the V-22 Osprey, which the Marines had custom-designed from scratch to perfectly fit their needs, instead of just taking some plane from the Air-Force.
Other manufacturers may simply buy some “general” antenna and may have poor performance. Because Ruckus can manufacture their own antennas, they can provide you with “BeamForming” or “BeamFlex”.
2. Beam Forming:
Normally an antenna sends radio waves in a circle, in the same fashion as a pebble in a pond would send circles of movement.
Ruckus is a bit smarter, since it can simply concentrate the energy in one direction.
For example:
Let’s say I walk out my office and I am an access point. Rather than yell in all directions for Eric to answer me, I can simply tilt my head towards him and yell to him. This lowers the amount of “shouting” or noise in the room. So if I want to yell at Ryan I can use less energy and simply focus the energy in his direction.
BeamFlex: The access point remembers the last location you sent data from and will try to concentrate the energy towards it. None of the competitors have anything like it.
Now, how does this translate into more money for you? If you have a stronger access point, that creates less noise. You have a more reliable network. The more reliable the network, the less time IT STAFF have to spend with users. Now remember IT people are hard to come by, require constant coffee in order to run and cost money. An average IT person is 40-100K a year before healthcare etc. Now instead you can spend that “money” on hardware like Ruckus that will save you money.
Extras:
Site Survey:
Before installing WI-FI it is recommended to run a “Site Survey”. This is billable and basically involves someone walking around mapping the location so they can estimate where to put the access points.
This is similar to surveying the land before running train tracks.
If you are “low cost” or want an estimate without any guarantees, we have a special program called “ZONE MAPPER”.
In order to run it, Myriad simply needs your floor plans and we can estimate how many AP s will be needed for the site or sites. We estimated that you need 50 access points, 4 per floor (random numbers).
You will need to control those access points. A controller looks like this, and is simply an appliance that will control all of the access points from a central location.
The last thing is if you have MANY controllers, one in each site for example. Then you can purchase something called the FLEXMASTER. This is a license that will allow you to place a master controller in the cloud that controls all controllers from the cloud. It basically looks something like this:
Meraki BIG buyers:
Let’s start- Cost effective companies can opt for the older access points that are 802.11G
This was the “original” Ruckus access point.
Hotels, dormitories or anybody that wants an AP in each room can opt for the specialized.
This is a special AP that you will have in a hotel. It has limited Wireless and regular ports if you want to plug your laptop. Next time you are in a hotel, check, they might have one.
Newer companies can go for the more modern 802.11N
They all basically look like this and have different speed levels.
Ruckus also offers OUTDOOR access points.
This is an External Outdoor access point.
Now who would buy them? Let’s say the City of NY or any other city council. The reason to buy them is so they can then provide internet services to their Fire Department or police.
When you pass by a cop car, you will notice that besides the Automatic rifles, Mr. Police officer usually has a laptop or fixed computer attached so he can get information. The information needs to travel to him.
The second buyers would be MAN providers. MAN stands for Metro Area Networks. They install them and then charge the City Councils for using them or other parties like your phone providers. There are many way to connect them and Ruckus is extremely good at this type of deployment. This is an example:
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If you drive around the city you might see these or other ones hanging from the Electric wires. The Copper Wire will carry the data and the electric wire will power it up.
This is another type:
This is the same type but you can connect this one to a FIBER cable as some MAN providers prefer using FIBER cables.
The last type that Ruckus excels at is the POINT to POINT. Let’s say I own two buildings and I want to securely communicate from one building to another. Then I simply run a POINT to POINT.
Another example is I only get internet at home and I have a guest house. Now I don’t want to order another internet connection for the guest house, so I simply “point to point”.
Last one (I promise):
RFID TAGS
RF stands for Radio Frequency. RFID is using Radio Frequency to identify items. An RFID tag is a device that you attach to something. It looks like this:
You cable tie it to something. For example:
Then on your “controller”, which we sell, you can track the location of the device.
A big buyer would be a warehouse or similar. Another big buyer of this would be a hospital. Let’s say you have just had a nose job. (I did, I got twice the nose for the same price. What a great deal!!!!!) Now you are in bed passed out on a cocktail. Let’s say I got misplaced. Well with a simple look at the screen they can find me, instead of having to go crazy searching the hospital, wasting valuable employee time.
Let’s say you have a kid in school, you want to track him. Again, RFID.
Let’s say you voted for the wrong political party. With a small RFID, we can track you.
Anyway, because of the “Beam Forming” and the strength of their antennas, Ruckus has an advantage in this aspect. They are also partners with AeroScout which builds RFID devices. So they can offer you a full solution of this, which should save you a few more Dollachis.
If you are interested in Ruckus Wireless, or have any questions, please feel free to check us out at http://www.myriadsupply.com/
Saar Harel is a resident Engineer at Myriad Supply, and has been in the Networking Field for over 20 years. You can check out his Google+ and ask him questions!
