A Technical Knock Out

Lots of people thought 802.11n would kill us. But it's done the opposite.

In our last two quarters, 802.11n "smart" APs have accounted for 52% of all APs we've shipped (and we shipped nearly 150,000 this quarter).

These same people have been surprised that our fancy-ass (that's what we call it) beamforming technology works extraordinarily well on top of 802.11n. 

Before the company even started, our two founding fathers (though one of them has yet to breed) got a lot of questions that hinted at the belief that "MIMO chipsets" and multi-radio techniques such as spatial multiplexing would eventually put a silicon dagger through the heart of our innovative, adaptive, state-of-the-art, revolutionary, breakthrough, one-of-kind (this is the paragraph our marketing people wrote) smart antenna array that we talk so much about. 

Bill and Victor (as they are known) simply smiled and tried to explain the big gains and interference rejection properties that smart antennas could provide on top of ANY wireless system - regardless of the number of radio chains. They (VC's usually) would smile too but still suspected in their semiconductor-schooled heads that we might go the way of the math-coprocessor. 

Fortunately, half of us came from the network school where we had learned to appreciate the immediate competitive advantage conferred by simply throwing bandwidth at a problem. The other half, RF-schooled, understood how precious and hard to come by were those extra antenna dB's. We knew that our technology had long legs, and quite sexy ones at that.

Fast forward five years later to 2008. The most trendsetting of our IPTV customers start making the upgrade from standard definition to high definition. For that they needed 802.11n. And for the first time we found ourselves with actual "competition" in the form of video dongles sporting off-the-shelf 802.11n silicon. 

But what a joke those turned out to be. If it had been a boxing match the referee would have declared a technical knockout (TKO...get it?). 

Here is an example of the performance disparity seen between Ruckus 802.11n systems and other 802.11n systems. In this case the "competition" is a Netgear 802.11n system with a really nice Atheros chipset similar to the one we use. This product actually has an internal antenna array designed apparently by Rayspan, so the comparison is particularly enlightening. 

This graph (click on it) shows the probability of getting a particular minimum throughput if the client is placed at a random location in a typical home. 

Yikes! These guys better hope the referee shows up soon - they are wobbling. 

Contrary to VC wisdom, 802.11n is driving our explosive growth. This is because signal path control and interference mitigation become even MORE important. We'll cover the reasons for all this some other time (hint: more radios means MORE ANTENNAS....go figure).  Until that time, don't believe everything you read...or hear.  Believe what people are paying money for and actually using.