* Proxim, Ruckus make outdoor announcements, unify management
Stretching wireless networks of various kinds across campuses with a unified management system seems to be a growing theme these days. Wi-Fi providers Proxim Wireless and Ruckus Wireless, for example, have made recent outdoor announcements that address customer requirements for a centrally managed end-to-end wireless infrastructure.
Proxim has focused its latest attentions on creating high-bandwidth, non-line-of-sight backhaul equipment (which I call “wireless bridges” for simplicity’s sake). In an enterprise scenario, the newest Proxim wireless bridges would be used most often to provide 300Mbps-and-up fixed wireless links among enterprise campus buildings to interconnect enterprise pockets of Proxim wireless LAN (WLAN) users. There are carrier and wireless ISP applications for the products, as well.
Proxim’s new Tsunami QB-8100 point-to-point and Tsunami MP-8100 point-to-multipoint bridges operate at 300Mbps, and 600Mbps versions are scheduled to ship later this summer. They reach about 70 kilometers with stated latency of 1-2 milliseconds to accommodate real-time traffic. A 1Gbps version is on the drawing board, the company says.
The ProximVision ES collectively manages Proxim WLANs as well as its outdoor bridge products. Proxim’s primary competitor in the end-to-end RF space, Motorola, unifies indoor/outdoor management of its WLAN and bridging products with its One Point Wireless Manager system.
For its part, Ruckus’ announcement revolves around bringing its dynamic beamforming technology to ruggedized outdoor dual-band 802.11n (ZoneFlex 7762) and single-band 802.11g (ZoneFlex 2741) APs for user access, Wi-Fi meshing and backhaul applications. Adding these pieces to the wireless puzzle allows enterprises to create localized Wi-Fi “hot zones” across the enterprise campus and to combine indoor and outdoor WLANs into one large meshed network. The two environments can be centrally managed with the Ruckus FlexMaster network management system, the company says.
Ruckus estimates that its smart antenna beamforming technology, which dynamically adapts to RF environmental changes to choose best over-the-air paths and reject interference, offers three- to four-fold performance and range improvements over other Wi-Fi vendors’ products. These stated benefits can now be extended out of doors.
