Multimedia (voice and video) is the next big thing to travel over a wireless LAN. While products designed specifically for multimedia traffic are geared mostly to the residential market, it's clear that improving video quality over a WLAN link will also interest businesses.

Enter the Ruckus Wireless Multimedia System from Ruckus Wireless, which includes the company's MF2900 Multimedia Access Point and the MF2501 Multimedia Adapter. Ruckus says its equipment gets multimedia content from one fixed location in a residence to another (such as a home theater system) with absolute video and audio fidelity.

Ruckus uses a six-element digital beam-forming technique it calls BeamFlex - akin to multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) technology - that lets its products select a combination of transmitting and receiving antennas. The antennas remain optimal because they change as the radio environment changes (because of other radio-frequency traffic or as people move around near their equipment). Ruckus also embeds firmware called SmartCast, which provides "advanced packet inspection, handling queuing and scheduling" for optimal performance.

WIRELESS MULTIMEDIA SYSTEM RUCKUS MF2900 AND MF2501 Ruckus Wireless. Related Content

4.1

Price: MF2900: $149; MF2501: $99 Pros: Great performance, easy to configure. Cons: Very limited retail availability. The breakdown Performance 40% 4.5 Scoring Key: 5: Exceptional 4: Very good 3: Average 2: Below average 1: Subpar or not available Features 20% 4 Management 20% 3 Installation 10% 5 Documentation 10% 4 TOTAL SCORE 4.1

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The system we compared against Ruckus combined a Linksys router and PCI card. Setting up the two systems via a browser was easy; we changed RF channels and IP addresses but left all other parameters at their defaults. Wireless Protected Access with Pre-Shared Keys (WPA-PSK) security, the minimum we'd suggest for a corporate environment, was used on both system setups. We noted that the Ruckus client attached via an RJ-45s Ethernet port. We don't believe the differences in the systems affected our results, because network traffic was moving at well below the peak speeds of both interfaces.

In our performance tests (see "How we tested Ruckus" ), the Linksys system turned in a consistent speed of 16.3 Mbps for three test runs, while the Ruckus system produced speeds of 16.5M, 17.1M and 13Mbps. We assumed from these results - given our particular workload, the geometric relationship of the nodes and the environment - that the two systems would yield similar results with typical network-oriented applications.

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