Ruckus and Aruba Address the Growing Carrier Hotspot Model

At the Mobile World Congress Show this week in Barcelona two wireless network solution providers have announced new solutions aimed at a growing trend in the Wi-Fi space. Aruba Network and Ruckus Wireless have announced new solutions targeted at hotspot and hotzone configurations developed by carriers and service providers. As Wi-Fi and core mobile network converge these solutions will help service providers develop more complete hotspot setups for both indoor and outdoor locations.

Ruckus in bring a new series of 802.11n access points to the table. The ZoneFlex 7782 series offer four models all with three transmit and receive antennas. The new series bring Ruckus’ traditional BeamFlex antenna technology to the access points along with GPS capabilities that service providers can use for location based services. Ruckus has also announced SmartPoint which offers a USB port that can accept a 3G, 4G, or WiMAX external dongle. This essentially allows for wireless backhaul where cabling options are not available.

Ruckus is also bringing more analysis to their users with SmartCell Insight. This analytics engine bridges the gap between cellular and Wi-Fi networks and provides deeper insight into usage, bandwidth and activity. Aruba’s service provider play comes in the form of software updates. Aruba HybridControl allows their 7200 Mobility Controller to scale on a large level for providers and carriers. The software updates apparently allows for management of 32,000 hotspots with more than 100,000 access points make up those hotspots. Computer world writes that, “The scaling lowers carriers’ backend capital costs, cuts data center power demand, and needs less rack space, according to Aruba. The Aruba Instant model offloads cellular traffic locally to the Internet, while centralizes selected traffic such as billing and legal intercept via an IPSec connection to the 7200 controllers at the core.” Click here to read more about these announcements.