The Ruckus Wireless demonstration at CES will showcase, for the first time, remarkable advances in Wi-Fi technology that make it possible to reliably transport many HDTV streams, digital voice, music and data throughout the home without costly and cumbersome cabling.
Current products based on draft 802.11n specification allow devices to transmit at speeds greater than 70 Mbps, but they all have problems sustaining the high performance at far distances, challenging locations or in noisy environments.
The Ruckus "Smart-N" technology rejects noise and delivers consistent throughput regardless of location and device placement. By combining the award-winning Ruckus BeamFlex smart antenna technology and SmartCast traffic engineering software with commercial 802.11n silicon, the Ruckus Smart-N system automatically adapts to environmental challenges such as physical obstacles and radio noise to maximize sustainable throughput and minimize performance variability.
"Early Pre-N products failed to fulfill the promise of delivering solid, stable bandwidth to support whole-home high-definition video streams," said Selina Lo, president and CEO of Ruckus Wireless. "This is the killer application that consumers and carriers really care about, and this is what we're demonstrating to the world."
Despite the popularity of wireless IPTV in Europe and Asia, incumbent carriers in North America still rely on wires and are waiting for higher speed wireless technology to support multiple HDTV streams within a home.
802.11n Technology Truths
Heralded as a panacea for bandwidth-hungry applications, 802.11n is the newest Wi-Fi standard developed to dramatically increase the capacity of Wi-Fi networks.
802.11n requires new Wi-Fi silicon equipped with multiple radios on both transmit and receive ends of the connection. To boost overall bandwidth, traffic is segmented into different signal streams and sent simultaneously by the transmit radios. Likewise, multiple radios on the receiver accept and reassemble the parallel signal streams. Current Wi-Fi technology, 802.11a/g supports theoretical maximum performance levels of up to 54 Mbps. 802.11n promises theoretical performance maximums of up to 600 Mbps.
However, the actual gains that consumers experience with the current "Pre- N" products are significantly lower and hampered by wild performance fluctuations caused by interference, obstacles, distance and other uncontrollable determinants. Consequently, despite the periodic high bandwidth bursts, delay- or loss-sensitive applications such as streaming video or voice have remained elusive on "Pre-N" implementations.
