The Ruckus Room

Metro Wi-Fi Imbroglio?

With Google soon to open their massive Mountain View Wi-Fi "experiment," metro Wi-Fi networks will only become more important not less. In fact they already have in places like Anaheim (CA), Philadelphia (PA), Tempe and Tuscon (AZ), Corpus Christi (TX), Henderson (NV), New Orleans (LA), Daytona Beach (FLA), etc. 

The big question is will users be able to actually get on these networks from inside their homes and offices and use them for anything other than getting to myspace.com?  And there remains a fair amount of skepticism about how these metro Wi-Fi networks will perform with lots of users on them....IF users can get on them.

There's recently been a ruckus about how hard it is for subscribers to reliably connect to these metro Wi-Fi networks despite the density of the node deployment. This AP story made the rounds across the country about how hard (and frustrating) it can be for people to connect.

Meanwhile Google's network in Mountain View (population 71,000+) is expected to go live (read FREE) over the next couple months and now has more than 400 nodes dispersed throughout the 12 square mile city. Google has recognized that the success with which people can connect to this network is extremely important. That's why they're fairly religious about having people use "purpose-built" metro devices in their homes to connect to the network.

The problem is that most people will expect to use a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop to connect to these metro networks.  That's great if you're close to a Wi-Fi node and sitting in your front yard. But most will want to be inside their home, behind walls and encumbered by trees.  The Wi-Fi cards in laptops are typically low power and make lousy roaming and association decisions.  Generally speaking, several times each minute the laptop will do a background scan to see if there are better access points with which to connect.   

This constant probing is useful for users walking around in a building where there are lots of APs from which to choose but can be detrimental for metro environments.  This adds a tremendous amount of overhead to these outdoor networks which need to conserve as much airtime as possible. And if and when they do connect to a metro node, they don't do it based on any real intelligence.

Using multiple antennas and software that determines the best metro node to use (based on things like fast probe responses, signal strength, etc.) would provide a much higher resolution picture of the Wi-Fi environment.  Add to this, more power and the ability to automatically alter the TX/RX path and you have a much better chance of connecting (and staying connected) to the best metro node even if stuff changes (and stuff changes).

Ultimately people will want to cut the broadband cord to the home if they can, just like they're doing with their cell phones. Though a "B" reality show at this point, these kinds of innovations and technical advancements are making metro Wi-Fi more real than ever.

How Well Do You REALLY Know Employees?

This is an odd story of one of our employees (and boy do we have some odd employees). 

Yes, like many companies we are a complete melting pot of cultures, tastes, attitudes and freakness. But with a name like Ruckus Wireless, we embrace this freakness and share it with others as long as it doesn't get in the way of revenue generating activities.

One particularly odd Ruckus employee is Mr. Hans Pang. 

Mr. Pang is a fairly free-loving, easy-going technical marketing person - having grown up from the IT ranks. But there's one freakish thing about him that defies logic....he has his own religion. He calls it Panglam.

Panglam has one simple creed: "happiness through respect for your fellow man." There are no offerings, no required text reading, no memorization or cultic-like rituals. Pang said he simply created Panglam to fill a void that certain people not associated with organized religion sometimes feel. Puleeeez. Off-the-record it seemed to be more a way for Mr. Pang to get girls than anything else.

Panglam has blossomed. According to Mr. Pang, Panglam is a simple, fairly straightforward "system of beliefs," as he likes to put it. Pang, at the ripe old age of 25, is the master. And over the last seven years, Pang has attracted over one dozen "followers" (Panglamists) who range in age from 18 to 45 (the demographic sought after by pretty much every advertiser on the planet).

Upon initiation, Pang forces would-be followers to watch this disturbing video in which he and two of his Panglamist followers uncontrollably gesticulate to some measurizing music while espousing Panglam's five fundamental tenets: respect, dignity honor, praise and glory.

Pang is no stranger to publicity.  At 16, while working as a summer intern in the IT department at Alteon WebSystems, Mr. Pang decided to take stock in lieu of cash.  When Alteon went public, Mr. Pang's stock was worth over $100,000.  When the press got a hold of this story they flocked to Mr. Pang (he asks to be referred to as "Mr. Pang" in any context related to Panglam).  Mr. Pang's story even reached the front page (with a picture) of the New York Times and pretty much every major newspaper in the country.

Given all this attention and his own religion, Mr. Pang remains humble and interested in the propagation characteristics of radio frequencies.  Mr. Pang's employment remains a testament to the evolution of Silicon Valley and what they are willing to put up with to get a good employee.

(yes this was all levity at Mr. Pang's expense, yes he is an employee, and yes all of this is relatively true)

Why IPTV is Nowheresville in the U.S.

The IPTV hype is happening in a big way, just not in the U.S.

According to S2 Data Corp, of the 8.3 million IPTV subscribers in 2006 (expected to explode to 34 million by 2010),  the U.S. has only 500,000 of them.

So who's got them all?  The hundreds of rural U.S. telcos (the so-called independent operating companies or IOCs) who are actually rolling out IPTV services to consumers in places like Ramondville, Texas, Lenora, Kansas, Fallon, Nevada (they have their own theme song), Palmer, Alaska and Viola, Illinois. Make no mistake, these are the guys trailblazing IPTV in the U.S.

Meanwhile outside the U.S., IPTV has become a relatively mature service and is growing like gangbusters.  From Belgium to Brazil, Sweden to Slovenia, France to Finland, Ireland to Italy, IPTV is the thing with millions of IPTV subscribers paying real money for real services. 

In France, IPTV is even sold in consumer electronic stores like Darty (one of the largest consumer electronic stores in the country). That's why vast majority of our own puny Ruckus revenue (despite being based in Silicon-Valley) comes from outside the U.S.  Maybe we should have based Ruckus in the south of France!

A recent survey conducted by the EUI (Economist Intelligence Unit) and Accenture suggests that IPTV won’t generate “significant” revenue for North American telephone carriers within the next year, but that it will grow into a major cash cow by 2009.

So why is the U.S. so far behind? Here's the problem(s):

1) the "we've got coax everywhere" problem
Unlike almost any other country in the world, the U.S. has a legacy of cable companies delivering TV over a coaxial infrastructure. They've invested a lot of money in delivering digital TV using a special encoding technique (called QAM) and haven't been compelled to change. And this cable infrastructure isn't necessarily IPTV-friendly either. It's a shared medium where all channels are broadcast to all users all the time. Telephone companies don't have this problem and understand IP. But they have their own issues (below).

2) the crappy copper problem
The copper facilities used to connect phone companies to consumer homes (the so-called last mile or local loop) are antiquated and incapable of effectively supporting IPTV. (a single DVD-quality MPEG2 compressed video streams runs 5 to 7 Mbps). So telephone companies must either upgrade them to fiber (fiber to the home like what Verizon is doing with FiOS) or add repeaters that enhance the signal, allowing it to go farther and stronger. The enormous costs of upgrading these lines has prohibited new services such as IPTV.

3) the too many rules problem
The U.S. government (through the Communications Act of 2006 - the Stevens/Inouye bill) is trying to streamline the national franchise process to make it easier to offer IPTV without having to negotiate with each and every municipality.  They are also trying to eliminate multichannel video program distributors to deny access to content.  Keep in mind we said "trying" twice.  Outside the U.S., they aren't trying, they are doing.

4) the virgin problem
In the world of telecommunications, virgin is a bad word. Telephone companies have never delivered TV content and must now deal with content licensing, distribution and broadcasting rights and a bunch of other issues that take a lot of time to sort - while cable companies aren't really giving a rat's arse about IPTV - yet.

5) the home problem
Even after you solve all the problem above, how do you move this stuff around your home?  We've talked about this problem ad nauseum. The U.S. carriers have been so preoccupied figuring out how to solve the above problems that in-home IP distribution is simply an afterthought that's become a major deployment obstacle. Can you say "smart Wi-Fi?"

6) the bar problem
In the U.S., the IPTV bar has been set MUCH higher. U.S.cable and satellite companies offer premium services now. So in order to compete, the U.S. carriers must push the limits further than the folks in Europe and Asia.  This means they want to enter the market with multiple HD streams (each HD stream is 12 to 20 Mbps/piece) and "DVR networking" throughout the home out of the shoot. The big boys barely deliver 5 Mbps to consumers now (the IOCs do though).

So for now, the IOCs have become the IPTV innovators in America. Then again, America has always rooted for the underdog. We love dogs!