The Ruckus Room

About Selina...

We get asked a lot about our CEO. There are just so many anecdotes about her; it's hard to know where to begin.

Basically, she's this little firecracker-of-a-lady who lives to be productive. If she's not productive, she's sleeping.

Her whole existence centers on efficiency and adding value. She despises complacency, ambiguity, politics and waiting for anything. She's best known for her rants, raves, "SLO drive by's" and peculiarities - slamming her fist down on tables during meetings, walking into poles, burning competitor t-shirts worn by users trying to piss her off, tequila shots with customers. Yes, it's all true.

She flashes $50 bills to off-duty cab drivers to get them to take her where she wants, when she wants (and it always works). She tears ads out of fashion and home magazines like it's a national pastime. Brevity is her strong suit. One-word answers to long, important questions, her trademark.

Born in Hong Kong, when she talks, she's been known to mix English and Cantonese. It's wild. It's freaky. She loves expensive clothes (shoes in particular and lots of them) and shops like a drunken sailor. On a recent press tour in NY, she actually asked to reschedule two interviews so she could hit Bergdorf's. When she was shopping, she turned and asked (in all seriousness) "do you think the next reporter would meet us here?"

Yet Selina is unlike any other CEO you'll ever meet. You see, she doesn't have the pride that typically dooms most CEOs. She's unbelievably loyal to customers and employees, her work ethic is unmatched, and she doesn't take no for an answer. And she's brutally honest but never malicious. People don't understand this about her because all they see is the hard exterior and not the soft and chewy center inside. She really doesn't care much about how she's perceived (she lets us write all this about her), nor does she crave recognition or power. She just likes to solve big problems and basically have fun doing it. She wanted to move her TV into her bedroom and was mad when she found out all the money she had to pay and time it took to rewire everything.  That's one of the reasons she's raising a Ruckus.  And if you cross her (read compete against her), you’d better wear some sort of protective covering (notice we didn’t say a cup).

She sports a Computer Science AND English degree - a lethal combination for any CEO. And she's got this uncanny ability to find unique and compelling technology that others haven't found or developed to solve big market problems. Basically she doesn't get involved in something unless she knows she can win.  Just keep your hands and feet away from her mouth.

Why Airgo is Beneath Us...Literally

It's an ugly and messy argument. And we usually like to take the high road, keeping out of the mud on these sorts of things. But we only have SO much patience.

We were called again today and asked to compare and contrast ourselves to Airgo. OK, fine. So here goes (it gets a bit techy so our apologies in advance for the anal retentiveness).

Airgo makes chips that split Wi-Fi traffic into multiple streams for simultaneous transmissions, (part of the new MIMO technologies on which the future Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n, is based). This technology gives you a bigger pipe, although the actual bandwidth still fluctuates from moment to moment, just like good old 802.11b/g/a.  This approach is also more expensive, as it requires more complex RF silicon on both ends. 

We don’t make chips.  Repeat: we are NOT a semi-conductor company!  We design complete systems for robust transmission of multimedia traffic over Wi-Fi.  Our technology intelligently steers Wi-Fi signals away from interference, motion and obstructions in real time to preserve signal strength and stability.  This is particularly important for finicky applications such as real time video streaming.

We are constantly compared to MIMO vendors because we use MIMO diversity techniques to do the signal steering, not with new silicon but with our physical antenna and our very smart control software.  We do not implement proprietary multiplexing schemes to transmit packets in parallel.  Thus you don’t get a bigger pipe; you just get more and better bandwidth from the standard 54Mbps pipe.  

Also, because our smart antenna system has better steering, traction and all that stuff, we don’t need a big arse engine to go far.  Our transmission system is agile enough to navigate the RF obstacle course to reach all the nooks and crannies throughout the home.

Let's face it, consumers don't care about MIMO or even know what it stands for.  They want capacity, coverage and reliability. All the MIMO vendors want to give them is a bigger pipe in the air. That's great. And they think that a bigger pipe is enough to reliably support multimedia.  It's not.

Our technology uses any (and we mean any) commodity, standards-based Wi-Fi chipset, to deliver what chip vendors gunning after highest throughput numbers can’t: whole-house coverage and a steady, reliable link (look closely at the recent MIMO review in Tom's Networking where we got lumped with all the other MIMO guys).

A stable Wi-Fi link, in our opinion, is only a foundation on which to build the priority queuing to allow a single network to service voice, broadcast quality video and data in the home. Some Wi-Fi vendors would have you think that the 802.11e QoS standard will make wireless multimedia a breeze but in reality, it is just not enough.  It does not regulate how Wi-Fi devices classify traffic to the various priority levels, nor does it make any specifications on how to direct the traffic queues.

Our systems can inspect traffic packets and differentiate them by applications, jitter and loss characteristics and prioritize transmissions to prevent your kid’s online gaming session, for example, from destroying your IPTV experience. Putting together the unifying technology which spans from bottom of the phy layer to layer 7 is out of the realm of pure Wi-Fi silicon vendors (see George Ou's recent review).

Period.

Home Networking Alternatives That Suck

Two of the more popular in-home networking approaches are Wi-Fi and home powerline (HomePlug, a system that run IP packets directly over the electrical wiring that connect your power sockets).

Some of the newer powerline systems tout a 200Mbps top-line performance.  But you don't get anywhere near that. We tested this stuff (fairly and objectively, we swear) and here's what we found (we'll publish full results on our site as soon as we have the time):

• Performance degradation with increasing load:  Each additional load will change the impedance profile of the power line.
• Location dependent performance:  Performance deteriorates when the signal crosses circuits, breaker boxes, and surge protectors.
• Interference from household equipment:  Anything with a duty cycle (eg. a dimmer or microwave oven) will interfere with powerline networking.
• Interference from neighbors: In multiple-dwelling-units, interference from neighbors causes interference with the powerline network.
• Inconsistent performance:  A halogen lamp to the same circuit, has shown to degrade performance by 30 - 60%; a surge protector on one end of the link saw drops of 15 – 100%; a hair dryer can reduce throughput by 60 – 100%

Conventional consumer Wi-Fi equally sucks.

• Poor range: RF signals weaken with distance lowering their transmission rate
• Performance oscillation: interference and multipath fading result in reduced and unpredictable signal strength, coverage holes and packet errors
• Bandwidth sharing: A single large file transfer can screw with your streaming video
• Multicast: Wi-Fi networks can’t detect Wi-Fi signal quality or transmission errors in multicast mode because there is no frame acknowledgement from the receiver.  IPTV happens to use multicast to deliver scheduled programming to the set-top-boxes

So what's the answer?  If we told you, we'd have to sell you.

Problems at Home?

Seems everyday we read about some new broadcaster or video content provider announcing big plans to make content available over the Internet or their broadband provider partners’ network, giving consumers a plethora (yeah we know what it means...we looked it up on dictionary.com) of new digital entertainment services. 

But what you DON'T read about is all the problems in getting this done.

U.S. carriers, for instance, are arguably behind (relative to the rest of the world) in delivering IP-based digital TV (IPTV).  Here are some ugly factoids:

• Local loops in North Amercia(the distance between homes and the nearest carrier central office) are typically much longer, making it much more difficult to provide the access bandwidth necessary for video services

• The U.S.has now fallen to 12th in the world in broadband connectivity per capita, more than half of the American population don't even have broadband yet

• Less than 9% of U.S.households have a network at home.

• Compelling new content and services, enough to make subscribers change, hasn’t yet been developed

Check out this great piece that looks at the IPTV regulatory environment in the U.S.: http://news.com.com/If+you+believe+in+broadband%2C+free+IPTV/2010-1034_3-5928655.html

Many of the reasons behind the U.S.lag time in these areas have nothing to do with technology.  We have it and know how to get it to the consumer.  Many believe that the problem centers more on the government’s desire to over regulate and our inability to create compelling content that drives consumers to brow-beat Washington, D.C. into submission.   Maybe.  Maybe not.

But most analysts will tell you that one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) obstacle inhibiting the mass deployment of so-called “triple play” (voice, video and data over a single IP connection) is finding a way for consumers to distribute this new multimedia content around their homes.

The problem is that these services now come into the home over the DSL or broadband connection, typically located in the basement or office and is never near to TVs and other A/V devices.  IPTV providers in Hong Kong and Italy (two of the world's largest markets for the new service-and THEY should know cuz they're offering services right now to hundreds of thousands of broadband users) both say that the rejection rate of the new service (i.e. people who send away the installer) can be as high as 20 to 30 percent as soon as the consumers find out they have to have wires installed.

Basically, as an industry, we haven’t made it simple or compelling enough for consumers to install a home network.  Most people have a voice line coming into their home, a coaxial cable connection for TV signals, a broadband DSL line (if they aren’t getting Internet over cable) and a Wi-Fi network for data applications.  That’s four different in-home networks they must pay for and keep going.

So what do consumers have to do to get these great new services (sarcasm implied)? Sometimes they pay the carrier to wire Ethernet or coaxial cabling around their homes which, according to providers, typically costs a few hundred dollars and takes around four to six hours. Sometimes the service providers have to eat the cabling costs in order to increase penetration of their new IPTV service.  Sometimes, (if the IPTV service offers really compelling content that consumers cannot live without) the consumers just put up with ugly exposed wiring. Better ways are becoming available now, such as IP over home power lines and multimedia over Wi-Fi but even those technologies have their problems. 

We’ll explore that next.

Welcome to the Ruckus Room

Welcome to the Ruckus Room. Yes, Ruckus Room. 

It took some real private parts for us to name our company Ruckus Wireless.  Lots of people, inside and out, hate the name and like to tell us why. And don't ask us why our dog doesn't have a tail. We think it says a lot about us, our attitude and what we're trying to accomplish.

We hate most corporate BLOGs that basically do nothing more than push the corporate agenda, products and narrow-cast a one-sided "vision of the networked world."  Forget visions.  They're passé. We're not like that.  We don’t have a crystal ball. If we did, we wouldn’t have a blog.  We’d be sitting in that Starbucks in Incline Village in Lake Tahoe looking at the latest Smith and Hawken catalogue.

But we CAN tell you what's going on out there – like how SureWest is delivering 20 Mbps pipes and IPTV services to tens of thousands of consumers in Sacramento TODAY and how they’re scratching their heads wondering if there’s a better way to network the home other than spending $500 and 5 hours of an installer’s time to wire up each home with Cat5 cable.  Or why Cisco REALLY bought Scientific Atlanta.  For that you’d have to buy us a drink though.

The Ruckus Room will raise some well-deserved hell about many of the things people think but don't want to say. And we'll focus on a single topic: home networking.

Sure we'll veer off on tangents such as our CEO's shopping disorders, the disconnect between Wi-Fi chip vendors, equipment suppliers and consumers, who we think will win the latest Apprentice (and we know), and how our government should stop trying to regulate city-wide Metro Wi-Fi networks, but ultimately we'll return to what we know. And we want you to talk back sans superlatives.

So where to start.  How about at home?