New Ruckus Smart City Specialist Program Delivers Full Solutions to Cities

By now, you’ve heard about Smart Cities and how new networks, devices and applications are enabling dramatic operational improvements as well as entirely new city services.  Ruckus is a major player in this market thanks to our strong service provider business and a large number of cities interested in connecting their city with great Wi-Fi.  Ruckus excels in these outdoor and sometimes challenging city environments. To fully realize their potential, Smart Cities require many different technologies and applications, as well as fundamental changes in organizations and processes.  From a networking perspective, this means dealing with more than just Wi-Fi.  As IoT solutions make their way into cities, a robust network infrastructure that is capable of supporting a variety of IoT wireless protocols such as LoRa, Bluetooth, Zigbee is required.  The IoT market is somewhat fragmented today with many different wireless protocols that can quickly create a complex IoT networking environment. Ruckus understands these complexities and is investing resources into a new Smart City Specialist partner program.  The program enables system integrators to work with cities to understand, deploy and manage networks that will provide Wi-Fi and support IoT applications.  The specialists are experts in deploying solutions in cities including knowing how to deploy outdoor Wi-Fi on city assets such as streetlights, bus stops and digital signs. “The Smart City specialist program addresses one of the major concerns that delay city deployments,” said Steve Wimsatt, Ruckus Smart City lead.  “Cities are fully stretched meeting their current activities, and don’t have the resources or expertise to master additional technologies or services.” Ruckus Smart City specialists have demonstrated experience deploying and managing Smart City networks and applications for cities.  Some examples of their expertise and how they can help cities include:

• planning and designing networks to achieve complete network and wireless coverage throughout the city
• tapping into streetlights and other street furniture to power Wi-Fi access points
• overlaying LoRa or other networks over the same backhaul infrastructure
• delivering a single, integrated city network that can be deployed and managed with lower cost, complexity and time
• providing expertise in city-specific applications such as traffic management, parking control, public safety, waste collection and any of the new IoT solutions for energy, environment, water and other city needs.

For Ruckus, these Specialists provide a critical differentiation to help cities implement smart city solutions. They represent Ruckus to municipal customers and help to ensure success, from planning and design through deployment or even an ongoing managed service.  Our Specialists’ history of working with cities, knowing their unique requirements and the available solutions, and the wide range of referenceable customers are key factors in successful deployments. To learn more about this program, send us an email (Ruckus Smart City Specialist).  If you are a Ruckus systems integrator and have experience selling and deploying Smart City solutions, we’d also like to hear from you.