Wifi Revolution

Ruckus Wireless (News - Alert) launched its Smart Wi-Fi for Education program that gives school districts, colleges and universities affordable access to the next stage of Smart Wireless technology to enable more reliable, better performing and farther reaching Wi-Fi.

 

The company also announced a deal with Delta School District in Vancouver, British Columbia, to outfit 33 schools with its ZoneFlex Smart WLAN system over the next 12 months. The district has more than 16,000 students. In the past 60 days, more than 50 schools throughout North America have standardized on the Ruckus ZoneFlex.

 

“Schools everywhere are looking beyond the current generation of Wi-Fi technology to support more users and diverse applications,” said Selina Lo, president and CEO of Ruckus Wireless. “Cost, complexity and poor coverage have been preventing many schools from making Wi-Fi a ubiquitous, multimedia communications utility that provide students a better learning experience. With our Smart Wi-Fi, this is now history.”

 

Under the education program, Ruckus is offering specially priced ZoneFlex Smart WLAN packages to educational institutions. These packages include the unique combination – not found in other WLAN systems – of three cutting-edge technologies: 802.11n, adaptive beam steering and SmartMesh networking. Armed with these technologies in one simple-to-use, affordable system, educational institutions can now implement higher speed WLAN environments more quickly and at a fraction of the cost and complexity of alternative offerings.

 

“We are very excited to work with Ruckus and introduce Smart Wi-Fi to the Delta School District,” says Delta School District Superintendent Steve Cardwell. “This technology is of tremendous benefit to our community of schools and reinforces our commitment to innovation in education. I welcome this program as an opportunity to enable our students to remain connected to the modern digital age in which they learn and live.”

 

The National Center for Education Statistics estimated a 50 percent increase in students that took at least one online course over the past year. A WLAN facility that enables access and communications anywhere, anytime helps schools increase enrollments and competitiveness by fostering a more collaborative and creative learning environment.

 

At the same time, schools today face greater financial and staff resource constraints. Many have found conventional WLAN technology to be overly costly and complex while delivering inconsistent performance and inadequate signal coverage. Insufficient capacity and roaming support required for converged communications are other pain points cited by schools with early WLAN experience.

 

“As educational institutions move towards 1:1 computing they’re looking to move beyond traditional Wi-Fi and implement more professional-grade technology that fixes the coverage and reliability issues that have relegated Wi-Fi to an occasional tool,” said Paul Parsons (News - Alert) of the Electronic and Computer Services (ECS) Group within Delta School District. “If I were to grade existing wireless LAN systems for being easy-to-use, affordable, robust and adaptive, I'd fail almost all of them.”

 

Ruckus Wireless Smart Wi-Fi technology uniquely eliminates the Wi-Fi barriers for schools with state-of-the-art technology that directs Wi-Fi signals only where needed and adapts transmissions around environmental problems such as interference. By controlling the form and direction of signal energy rather than radiating omni-directionally all the time, Smart Wi-Fi delivers higher reliability and more extensive coverage.

 

Furthermore, it provides for a "greener" Wi-Fi environment as fewer APs are needed to provide ubiquitous coverage. In addition, Smart Wi-Fi incorporates the use of 802.11n SmartMesh networking to streamline deployment by obviating the need to run Ethernet cabling to every Wi-Fi access point.

 

Delta was drawn to the Ruckus ZoneFlex system due to its simplicity and use of advanced technology that ensured better coverage, reliability and consistent performance without a lot of IT administration.

 

“Our budget constraints meant that it would be about five years before we were able to have complete wireless coverage at every one of our schools. But with the Ruckus ZoneFlex system we can deploy a more robust wireless LAN in about a year at about 70 percent of the cost,” Parsons said.

 

 

 

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