Ruckus Wireless Adds 802.11ax Access Point

Ruckus Wireless, a unit of ARRIS, today unveiled an 802.11ax wireless access point that promises to deliver a four-fold capacity increase over existing 802.11ac Wave 2 access points.

The Ruckus R730 wireless access point marks the arrival of yet another transition point where vendors that deliver offerings based on a new wireless networking standard have an opportunity to gain share at the expense of incumbent rivals, says Dennis Huang, director of product marketing for Ruckus Wireless.

Overall, Ruckus Wireless expects about one-third of the available wireless networking market to start making that transition over the next one to two years, says Huang.

To help drive that transition Ruckus is also focusing on new use cases for wireless networking, says Huang. Ruckus today also unveiled Ruckus Ultra-Density Technology Suite of software, which leverage technology developed by Ruckus that makes it possible to effectively deploy 802.11ax wireless access points in venues such as stadiums, airports, and train stations where network latency needs to be optimized to ensure quality of service (QoS), says Huang.

A big driver of those new cases will be increased consumption of 4K video in, for example, stadiums where network latency will become a bigger concern as fans begin to want to replay events on the field on their smartphones, notes Huang.

“There’s going to be a lot of 4K video,” says Huang.

The R730 complies with both the WPA3 security protocol as well as the Wi-Fi Enhanced Open specification. The access point supports eight spatial streams on 5 GHz and four spatial streams on 2.4 GHz and is designed to support both LTE and Internet of Things (IoT) deployment scenarios.

The intensity of already fierce competition between manufacturers of wireless networking equipment is only going to become more intense in the months ahead. The latest generation of mobile computing devices coupled with increased consumption of video has already put a strain on wireless networks, many of which were based on previous generations of 802.11 networking standards.

It’s also worth noting that, in many instances these days, the quality of the wireless networking experience has a direct impact on brand perception. Retailers, for example, that provide what is perceived to be sub-optimal wireless networking access are often considered behind the times by a younger demographic that values Internet access above all else.

In fact, in all probability, the transition to 802.11ax wireless networks is going to occur at a much faster rate than any previous generation of wireless networking here to date.