Ruckus Wireless has launched the Ruckus ZoneFlex R700, a dual-band, three-stream indoor Wi-Fi product specifically designed from the ground up built on the new 802.11ac standard.
Now shipping worldwide, the new Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 is priced at $1,295 (USD).
The product integrates Ruckus BeamFlex+ adaptive antenna array technology to extend the range, reliability and speed of indoor Wi-Fi services, allowing enterprises and service providers to offer reliable, gigabit-class Wi-Fi performance, Ruckus Wireless said.
While 802.11ac promises improved performance across the board, its benefits can be realized only through sophisticated RF controls and advanced WLAN system architecture and product implementation.
Supporting 802.11ac standard, Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 is ideal for high capacity and challenging Wi-Fi environments such as airports, hotels, schools, hospitals, warehouses and high-density venues. It incorporates six custom smart antenna arrays—one for each band and spatial stream.
The solution allows Wi-Fi transmissions to be focused and automatically directed over the fastest signal paths for each client. The result is better signal de-correlation, stronger signals to client devices, higher sustained data rates at longer distances, increased AP capacity and gigabit-class Wi-Fi performance.
Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 is also backwards compatible with existing 802.11 devices. It operates with full functionality using standard 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) – delivering aggregate data rates of up to 1.75 Gbps using the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands while offering an improvement in Wi-Fi signal coverage.
Thanks to the BeamFlex+ technology, each ZoneFlex R700 can automatically select, on a per packet basis, from thousands of potential directional antenna patterns, transmitting and receiving traffic using horizontally and vertically polarized radio waves for more reliable Wi-Fi connections to low-powered handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablets that are constantly changing their orientation.
With per-packet adaptive antenna control, polarization diversity, and active channel selection techniques, the Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 is uniquely able to increase the useful uplink and downlink range of more efficient 256-QAM introduced by the 802.11ac standard to yield higher performance at longer ranges, adapt Wi-Fi signals to changing client device orientation for more stable client connectivity, and mitigate RF interference by selecting channels with more capacity and less noise.
The Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 also uses a unique channel selection approach called ChannelFly that is capable of yielding significant capacity gains over alternative background scanning approaches. This distinctive capacity-driven channel selection technology helps to avoid Wi-Fi interference by predicting and automatically selecting the best performing channels at any given time using statistical, real-time capacity analysis of all RF channels.
Ruckus is also offering a special 802.11ac Buy Up Program for customers that have previously purchased a qualifying Ruckus ZoneFlex 802.11n Smart Wi-Fi indoor access point between May 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014.
