WiFi makes a ruckus
One of the big impacts of smartphones has been a resurgence in WiFi as noted by, amongst others GigaOM and ABI; we believe that pretty much every smartphone worthy of the name will incorporate WiFi, to enable a whole bunch of convergence use cases, such as connectivity within the home and office for convergence. This may well extend to public spaces as well; we think that there’s a compelling case to be made for ‘drive by downloads’ to unload the cellular networks laboring under the impact of the smartphone surge.
Our Cambridge (MA) office is at Cambridge Innovation Center, at One Broadway, which is a great space, and the importance of WiFi is driven home by a recent post on the blog:
people are beginning to rely much more on Wi-Fi than they had in the past, with some companies dropping wired connections entirely. Some cell phones, such as the T-Mobile Blackberries our staff use, can now make and receive all their calls over Wi-Fi
There’s a great discussion of the challenges involved, and the outcome, for which are extremely grateful, of much improved reception and performance, thanks to Ruckus‘ BeamFlex (reviewed here)
After all the testing and analysis, one system stood head and shoulders above the others: the ZoneFlex system from Ruckus Wireless. I remember in particular one of the graphs comparing the performance of the various systems under heavy load. The other systems showed a jumble of jagged lines representing drop-outs, while Ruckus sailed smoothly through with none.
Another funny story from this effort was that after we were done, we had come to know some other support people very well, but didn’t have a read on the quality of Ruckus support. Why? Because we didn’t have to call them!
There’s a wider theme there that harks back to some of our early work with Virgin Mobile; the best customer service is the one you never need…
