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Beam-forming WLAN implementation targets A/V usage
By Maury Wright -- EDN, 9/19/2005
Yet another company has emerged with an approach to the problem of wirelessly moving digital video and audio around the home. Vendors have proffered one of the many standard or enhanced flavors of 802.11 or WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) WLAN (wireless-LAN) technology as cable replacements, but each has so far met insurmountable obstacles in data rate, range, or cost. The WLAN industry hopes to solve the problem with the 802.11n standard that the IEEE is now developing. Ruckus Wireless (formerly, Video54), meanwhile, claims that its beam-forming antenna technology can now enable video distribution and later further extend the capabilities of 802.11n.
Ruckus is already shipping the technology in the Netgear RangeMax family of products. The company refers to its beam-forming technique as MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output), but it doesn’t include the baseband-resident spatial multiplexing technology that first carried the MIMO label (see “The greed for speed,” EDN , Feb 19, 2004). Of late, companies that want to cash in on the popular MIMO label are using the term on any implementation with multiple antennas. Pioneer Airgo Networks has taken to labeling spatial-multiplexing technology as true MIMO, which the 802.11n standard will mandate. Still, the beam-forming offering from Ruckus does boost range, as well.
The latest Ruckus announcement combines the BeamFlex beam-forming capability with the SmartCast software stack that ensures quality of service for video streams. The company will license both technologies to OEMs, as it did BeamFlex to Netgear. And Ruckus will now supply access points and wireless adapters to service providers. The initial target customers are the major phone companies worldwide that are seeking to deliver IPTV (Internet Protocol television), or video over their phone lines. According to Michelle Abraham, an analyst with In-Stat, there were 1.6 million IPTV subscribers at the end of 2004, although In-Stat projects that market to grow to 32 million subscribers by the end of 2009.
IPTV schemes typically deliver video packets to a broadband modem/router that in turn must send packets to a set-top box in the living room. Most early players in IPTV are simply rolling trucks and installing Ethernet cables between routers and set-top boxes, but Ruckus believes it can make that connection wireless and user-installable. The company estimates pricing of $169 for the MF2900 access point/router and $129 for the MF2501 set-top adapter, although service providers could subsidize such gear.
Ruckus claims that its implementation supports greater range and is less sensitive to interference from nearby wireless networks or other noise sources, such as a microwave oven. For service providers, the company is offering a product using six antennas in the access point. Software that controls the antenna operation adopts one of 63 antenna configurations for each wireless client and therefore sends a relatively narrow beam of energy that minimizes interference to nearby networks. Moreover, the ability to dynamically adapt signal paths through antenna patterns allows the receiver to adapt for interference. Along with announcing the Ruckus access point and adapter, the company also announced its first customer, PCCW, a Hong-Kong-based IPTV-service provider.
The Ruckus technology looks promising, although it will be more applicable once 802.11n and data rates in excess of 100-Mbps are prevalent. Ruckus claims it will extend range by two or three times even on those next-generation MIMO systems. Today the company claims it can reliably support rates of 11 to 25 Mbps using 802.11g chips. It’s unlikely such a system could handle an HDTV stream, although Ruckus claims it can. A live, action-packed program, such as a football game, would need speed at the upper end of that range. And supporting multiple standard-definition streams could also be an issue. And finally, so many WLAN video approaches have failed coming to market that all new ones have questionable credibility.
Ruckus Wireless, www.ruckuswireless.com.
