Ruckus Wireless may cause a ruckus in the mobile access point industry with today's unveiling of the ZoneFlex R710, a device designed to extend Wi-Fi to enable multi-gigabit performance and offer unprecedented capacity for enterprise users and service providers.
The Ruckus ZoneFlex R710 is one of the first Wi-Fi access points based on Wave 2 features of the 802.11ac standard, including multi-user multiple input/multiple output (MU-MIMO) technology. MU-MIMO enables more than twice the number of mobile devices allowed than the previous generation, and it aggregates data rates exceeding two gigabits per second.
The Ruckus ZoneFlex R710 supports up to four spatial streams and up to 500 concurrent clients, and it has a built-in USB port to accommodate Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The City of San Jose, CA, was one of the first to deploy the new tech, and they saw dramatic improvements in performance, reportedly reaching over 445 megabits per second on two–stream-devices and over 200 megabits per second with single-stream smartphones.
"We are at an inflection point in the industry as we deal with insatiable demand for wireless capacity and speed," said Vijay Sammeta, Chief Information Officer for the City of San Jose, in the press release. "We need to be able to plan and prepare for devices and services we haven't even seen yet. Wave 2 represents an investment in a platform that not only meets our current needs, it will also meet those in the future that we can't even predict."
With municipal and public Wi-Fi becoming more common, the need for high capacity and speed from our access points has never been higher, and Wave 2 802.11ac technology seems to give us a fairly high ceiling for potentially game changing innovation in the wireless segment.
Speaking of innovative features, the R710 includes the patented BeamFlex+ Adaptive Antenna Technology, which claims to deliver up to three times the performance and range, eight times the expanded coverage, maximum power efficiency, and interference mitigation. The dual-polarized antennas are capable of dynamically creating over 4,000 unique directional antenna patterns per radio, allowing the R710 to adapt to the changing physical orientation of mobile devices, improving connectivity and performance.
The Ruckus ZoneFlex R710 will be available this quarter from authorized Ruckus BiG DOG resellers with an MSRP of $1,295.
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