The Ruckus Room

The Inappropriate Advert

All companies have them, they just don't show them to you.  With a name like Ruckus, how can we NOT?

At Ruckus (if you've read any of our BLOG posts), we tend to have too much fun from time to time. This is one of those times.

Recently we were bitching to each other about the fact that (at the startups that will actually employ us) we can never seem to work for companies that advertise. Or when they do, the ads just suck.

Interestingly engineers are often waaaaaay more creative (and generally way funnier) than the marketing "team." They're just never given a chance to be odd in public. Not here.

And NOT having butt loads of money (like at Cisco) has never stopped any of us. So we created our own ad. Though it will never see the light of day, it amused us (in an irreverent, we work at a startup kinda way).

Just like we built our product because it's something that WE (ourselves) would want to have in our own homes, we created an ad that entertained us.  This probably means we have some issues. Well, we do. Who doesn't.

So in the spirit of full (privately-held) disclosure, we thought we'd (hopefully) entertain you.

Please understand that this is merely a parody that we did for fun.  Obviously (as far as you know) this is not a real ad.  We "just did it." :) 

802.11n: What they won't tell you

While we've touched on this before, we wanted to dig a bit deeper. We continue to get bombarded with questions and snide remarks about 802.11n and how it effectively eliminates the Ruckus around multimedia over Wi-Fi.

It doesn't.

Most folks still believe that 802.11n will solve the problem(s) of sending video and real-time multimedia over Wi-Fi.

It won't.

But don't get us wrong....802.11n will be fantastic, and we'll be one of the first ones out there spewing 802.11n in all its glory. But caveat emptor.

802.11n could actually be more prone to interference and performance fluctuations than previous Wi-Fi technologies. Here's why (strap yourself in...this will get controversial, quickly).

802.11n splits a data frame into multiple pieces. It then transmits these pieces in parallel using multiple radios that are attached to multiple antennas (this is where MIMO - multiple in, multiple out - comes from). The receiving device also uses multiple antennas, radios and processing to recover the streams. This technique, known as spatial multiplexing, relies on different RF "propagation" paths.

Each path, though, has a slightly different delay between the time the signal is transmitted and received. If the paths between the sender and receiver are similar, then the transmitter reduces the bit rate by reducing the number of "spatial" streams. Basically 802.11n relies on this delay to work.

The benefit of doing all this is to increase performance and throughput. But it also increases the number of things that can go wrong with any of those streams. While three antennas give you a better chance to get a better RF signal, there's still interference with which to contend. And these (typically) omni antennas that are used just blast out signals from virtually the same vantage point - scattering the signals everywhere. Being able to control where the signals go and when would be ideal (we can do that with smart antennas).

Significantly more complex than the current 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n also introduces a new range of parameters that need to be controlled. These include things like:

1. Channel bandwidth (20 MHz vs. 40 MHz)
2. The number of spatial streams (1,2,3 or 4)
3. Space-time block coding options (don't ask)
4. Beamforming options
5. Variable guard intervals (don't ask again)
6. Frame aggregation
7. Block acknowledgment(s)

All this points to the need for control algorithms that can intelligently and dynamically tune these parameters to ensure predictable performance.

In marketing spew: "an application-focused control framework is essential for dealing with difficult real-time optimization problems and will prove to be a vital technology for maximizing 802.11n performance" (yeah I don't know what that means either but I literally wrote it down when one of our founders said it to me).

What he was trying to say was that 802.11n needs stabilizing. Our stuff does exactly this and can be layered on top of new 802.11n chips to stabilize the link so performance can be predicted. Smart antenna technology greatly enhances 802.11n by being able to mitigate interference...picking the best TX/RX signal path for multiple simultaneous signals.

This turns Wi-Fi from a toy into a useful tool.

Home Ecophobia

We loathe the word "ecosystem" ...mostly because

1. we didn't come up with it
2. it sounds too political while at the same time to "naturey"
3. it reeks of John Chambers (we're big fans of him and will vote for him when he runs for office)

Yet since Ruckus came out of the closet, we've had a ton of folks come show us cool new stuff they're building for the home that will incorporate Wi-Fi and will need a stable Wi-Fi connection.

You see, now that Wi-Fi has found a true home with consumers, there are going to be countless companies and new products that will incorporate Wi-Fi. There already are. But the current iteration of Wi-Fi isn't industrial-strength enough to help the technology become the utility in the home that it needs to be. And 802.11n isn't the panacea (more on that in the next post).

That said, here's just a smattering of hot and interesting home eco-phobes that (we believe) are working on some really interesting consumer electronics products:

http://www.slimdevices.com/
These guys make a cool product called Squeezebox (great name).  It's a very small device with built in 802.11g that uses Wi-Fi to stream digital music from your MP3 Jukebox to any room. You can have one of these things in any and all rooms and stream different songs to different rooms over Wi-Fi.  The Squeezebox connects to the audio system in each room. And it supports a myriad of digital music formats like MP3, WMA, FLAC, AAC, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis.  Wow.

http://www.avegasystems.com/
Avega integrates surround decoding, power amplification, 802.11 and UPnP connectivity directly into speakers. The system eliminates the stack of A/V boxes and myriad of wires found in a traditional AV setup. Their technology overcomes key technical challenges associated with the networking of loudspeakers based on 802.11 and TCP/IP,including speaker synchronization, reliability of data transmission, lip-sync, and interoperability.

http://www.kaleidescape.com/
If you're an entertainment junkie, do these folks have a system for you! This company builds a fairly (mid to high-end) revolutionary system.  It consists of a multimedia "entertainment" server, movie player, music player and reader that helps people collect and manage digital content.  Basically it's a large, super fast RAID with a fantastic and intuitive user interface that let's you literally build a digital Blockbuster store in your home. They use high-speed 100BASE-T connections to move the movies around the home (if you have an 100BASE-T jack in every room).

http://www.streamium.com/index.cfm
Streamium is a very cool line of wireless home entertainment products from Phillips - who are really interested in using Wi-Fi in the home to leverage digital multimedia.  Their Streamium stuff includes a Wi-Fi entertainment system, a Wi-Fi music center and Wi-Fi PVRs (ultimately).  Their Streamium MX6000i lets you stream digital audio, video and photos directly from the Internet.

"I want my IPTV" WIKI

We're big believers in new media tools (like this BLOG) that break down the corporate gatekeeping and open communications to a larger audience. 

So we're conducting a little experiement.  We've created a "Wiki" on IPTV.  Wiki's are a great way to develop a grass roots conversation about a particular topic. Wikipedia is, by far, the most popular Wiki.

The idea here is that we believe there are not many consumers, content providers and other important folk in the U.S. that actually know what IPTV is or can do for them - largely because the providers haven't been able to promote.  They are madly working to get it to consumers now (eg. Verizon and AT&T).

Basically we wanted to volunteer to organize a classmoom to educate the masses on IPTV to help quicken and further its adoption.  The teachers?  All of us. We will share information on market data, adoption, success stories, news, etc.

The link to the Wiki is to the left under our BLOGroll (or CLICK HERE)  Yes, we're trendy.  That's why our product looks so Apple-esque (and Apple should integrate our antenna into their Airport...wouldn't that be fantastic?  For heaven's sake...they are big fans of location-free TV right?...someone tell Jobs).

We hope you can visit our Wiki and chime in. 

Also keep coming back as we'll get into some more controversial topics that should get us in some trouble.  Don't forget, we're called Ruckus Wireless.