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Wireless systems specialist Ruckus and WiFi provider Boingo Wireless are partnering to deploy thousands of Ruckus indoor and outdoor Smart WiFi access points across dozens of United States Army, Air Force and Marine Corps bases.
Boingo is currently deploying Ruckus Smart WiFi technology bases across the United States, with Boingo Broadband and IPTV service going live as each base installation is completed.
“With myriad obstacles and thick concrete walls within a constantly changing environment, both indoors and out, military bases can be a challenging setting for delivering reliable high-speed wireless access,” Marc Patterson, vice president of product management for Boingo, said in a statement. “We found Ruckus Smart WiFi technology to be ideally suited for tackling these challenges by providing extended WiFi coverage and signals that adapt within these changing environments.”
The wireless network design for military bases will utilize centrally managed Ruckus ZoneFlex 7372 and ZoneFlex R300 dual-band WiFi access points (APs), which include technology that is designed to extend the range and increases the reliability of signals in difficult environments.
The company said the equipment is being used to support a wide range of onsite, IP-based applications such as social networking, gaming, voice over IP (VoIP) and streaming online videos.
Ruckus’ Smart WiFi platform is a collection of technologies, all designed to extend the range and reliability of wireless signals and can help eliminate much of the cost and complexity of conventional wireless local area network (WLAN) deployments.
Smart WiFi includes recent technical advances in beam steering, beam forming, adaptive signal path selection, quality of service, traffic classification, and radio frequency (RF) routing.
For example, ZoneConnect streamlines the provisioning, authentication, security and troubleshooting of client devices, while SmartSec is a collection of advanced security mechanisms, including the ability to dynamically generate pre-shared keys, plus role-based user access, wireless client isolation and wireless intrusion detection.
Earlier this month Ruckus debuted a carrier-class virtualized wireless WLAN controller, the virtual SmartCell Gateway (vSCG), designed to streamline the creation of highly scalable and resilient cloud-based wireless WLAN services.
Designed for use with the company’s Smart WiFi ZoneFlex APs, the vSCG runs as a virtual application within either the KVM (Kernel-base Virtual Machine) or VMware vSphere virtualization environments.
The vSCG is the first component in a larger Ruckus solution based on the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV architecture, with future plans to provide a virtualized infrastructure and services manager that handles management of Ruckus virtualized appliances.