SUNNYVALE, CA — June 3, 2013 — Ruckus Wireless, Inc. (NYSE: RKUS) announced today that its Smart Wi-Fi technology has been selected by the Xiamen International Conference & Exhibition Center (XICEC), located in China’s eastern Fujian Province, to provide comprehensive, reliable Wi-Fi coverage across the XICEC’s three exhibition halls, 15 ballrooms, 300+ conference rooms, and its 50,000-square-meter plaza. A combination of more than 500 Ruckus ZoneFlex™ 7363 indoor and ZoneFlex 7762 outdoor access points (APs), along with six Ruckus ZoneDirector™ 3000 controllers have been deployed, with the network designed to provide high concurrent client capacity during large-scale, heavily attended events. The new Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi system is able to reliably support up to 5,500 simultaneous users, as proven at a recent stone and materials fair held at XICEC, greatly enhancing the user experience.
Overlooking a scenic spot by the sea, XICEC has a total floor space of 350,000 square meters, and ceiling heights of 7 to 15 meters, hosting all kinds of exhibitions and expos, and is one of the largest exhibition centers in China.
Trouble with Conventional Wi-Fi
XICEC was built in 2000 when wireless local area networks (WLANs) were not common in China. Since then, China Telecom was responsible for building the first WLAN in XICEC in 2006. China Mobile and China Unicom then deployed their own WLANs shortly thereafter. This resulted in the networks from the three operators all interfering with each other, creating a bad user experience. It was at this point that XICEC decided to build their own Wi-Fi network independently, deploying their own WLAN system in 2008, with products sourced from another vendor. This solved the interference problems among the three operators’ networks, but it also brought new challenges.
When smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices became popular a few years ago, traditional wireless networks faced two challenges — high concurrent usage and reliable deployment for large areas. ”To offer high concurrent usage, we needed an AP that would be capable of supporting 100+ concurrent users,“ said Fan Hongdi, Network and IT Department Manager at XICEC.
For large coverage areas such as an exhibition hall, APs are often deployed at high points or critical locations in the venue, exhibition hall or banquet rooms. The XICEC layout is something that the more traditional products they had installed simply could not provide adequate Wi-Fi coverage for.
XICEC Got Smart About Their Wi-Fi
Knowing they still hadn’t solved their Wi-Fi challenges to meet growing demand, at the end of 2011, XICEC invited 5 vendors for a field test. ”One of our customers held their micro-blogging marketing event in one of our meeting rooms, said Fan. ”There were over 2,000 people simultaneously logged onto the Internet in the room measuring approximately 1,000 square meters. The users were mainly engaged in micro-blogging, sending and receiving emails, and watching online video. We deployed 12 Ruckus APs, with the results showing strong network performance to satisfy the concurrent usage of all 2,000+ attendees.“
With strong proof of performance data in hand, in 2012, XICEC started construction of phase 3 of the exhibition center, and chose Ruckus for their wireless network system. The deployment was very simple. Only three engineers were assigned and they were able to complete the Smart Wi-Fi installation in just 3 days.
The Ruckus ZoneFlex 7363 APs are ideal for the new facility, as their built-in adaptive antenna arrays using Ruckus BeamFlex™ technology deliver consistent and reliable connections to mobile devices by adapting to and overcoming physical obstacles and disruptive radio frequency (RF) interference. After a few more trials at other large-scale tradeshows held at the Center, the outcomes were consistently favorable. For instance, XICEC successfully served over 3,000 Internet users at a leather trade fair across a 20,000 square meters exhibition hall.
Unlike other Wi-Fi products, Ruckus APs incorporate technologies like BeamFlex and automatic interference mitigation that more effectively eliminate wireless blind spots. Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi also provides a broader range of signals, with fewer APs needing to be deployed, meaning reduced costs. XICEC deployed just 25 Ruckus ZoneFlex APs to effectively cover their 50,000 square meter outdoor plaza.
Based on these excellent results for their phase 3 deployment, XICEC decided to upgrade their previous phase 1 and phase 2 deployments using Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi. The transformation was simple. The existing cabling system was reused and only two engineers were needed to complete the network transformation in just two weeks.
With other Wi-Fi vendors, large venues like XICEC would need hundreds of access points to provide acceptable coverage. The convenience of installation and minimal deployment requirements of Ruckus APs helped save XICEC significant time and labor costs in rebuilding their Wi-Fi network.
6 Ruckus ZoneDirector controllers at the Center are deployed in full redundancy mode, while 3 active ZoneDirector controllers are deployed in the front end, and are backed up by another 3 controllers. In case of any controller failure, the backup controllers take over automatically.
Smart, Easy Management with Comprehensive Reporting
XICEC is very demanding when it comes to their network management platforms. Operations need to be simple and easy-to-follow, and then the systems need to do rate limiting for clients to optimize traffic, and apply certain restrictions on access points.
”The Ruckus network management platform completely fulfills our requirements. With powerful monitoring and analytical functions, it can show all the APs’ link status and even all clients’ throughput, data exit points’ usage, and many technical details,“ said Fan.
Ruckus continues to impress not just XICEC, but other similar large venues, including Rio Tinto Stadium a 28,000-seat outdoor stadium in Salt Lake City, UT, the Chennai Stadium, a 50,000-seat stadium in India, Asia World Expo in Hong Kong, the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre in Malaysia, and several other high-density public venues around the world — all of whom have chosen high-capacity Smart Wi-Fi products and technology to provide the most reliable Wi-Fi possible for a variety of public access applications.
Fan concluded: ”Reliable, high-performance Wi-Fi networks have become a key selling point for attracting new events and customers.“
ABOUT RUCKUS WIRELESS
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Ruckus Wireless (NYSE: RKUS) is a global supplier of advanced wireless systems for the rapidly expanding mobile internet infrastructure market. The company offers a wide range of indoor and outdoor “Smart Wi-Fi” products to mobile carriers, broadband service providers, and corporate enterprises, and has approximately 24,400 end-customers worldwide. Ruckus technology addresses Wi-Fi capacity and coverage challenges caused by the ever-increasing amount of traffic on wireless networks due to accelerated adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Ruckus invented and has patented state-of-the-art wireless voice, video, and data technology innovations, such as adaptive antenna arrays that extend signal range, increase client data rates, and avoid interference, ensuring consistent and reliable distribution of delay-sensitive multimedia content and services over standard 802.11 Wi-Fi. For more information, visit https://www.ruckuswireless.com.
BeamFlex, Ruckus, Ruckus Wireless, ZoneDirector, and ZoneFlex are trademarks of Ruckus Wireless, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other product or company names may be trademarks of their respective owners.