SUNNYVALE, CA and LIMA, PE – October 21, 2013 – Ruckus Wireless, Inc. (NYSE: RKUS) announced today that Digital Way, a fast growing service provider based in Peru, is deploying Ruckus indoor and outdoor Smart Wi-Fi products to support the expansion of its popular WIGO Libre!™ Wi-Fi service throughout Lima, the capital of and largest city in Peru, with a population of over 7.6 million.
Digital Way, a subsidiary of Grupo Romero, provides telecommunications services and solutions across Peru. Its advertising-supported WIGO Libre! service will now be delivered over Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi technology to enable more reliable and higher-speed Wi-Fi connectivity in several high-density locations frequented by millions of Lima residents and visitors.
“We continue to see high demand from operators of all types around the world for more carrier-class wireless solutions that enable them to deliver a Wi-Fi experience to their customers that is fast, reliable and pervasive. Latin America is proving to be a particularly strong market given how easy and economical our solution is to deploy relative to other broadband alternatives,” said Selina Lo, president and CEO of Ruckus Wireless.
According to recent data from IDC, Wi-Fi network expansion in Latin America is indeed surging, with the region experiencing 38.8% year-over-year growth in 2Q13. IDC also expects Wi-Fi product revenue in Latin America to eclipse $425 million (USD) by 2017.
Hundreds of Ruckus ZoneFlex™ indoor and outdoor access points (APs) are being installed by Digital Way, including at the National Stadium of Lima (soccer); Coliseum Bonilla (volleyball); Centro Empresarial (Lima’s Central Business District) Miraflores (a huge outdoor tourist destination by the sea and home to 3 million residents); and four shopping malls in Lima, including Jockey Plaza, Mega Plaza, Larcomar, and Minka.
According to Digital Way, historically, the availability of free Wi-Fi services has been extremely limited in Lima to locations such as Starbucks coffee shops, which support small numbers of concurrent users while generally providing a poor user experience.
“There is a significant opportunity within Peru to offer a better wireless experience for millions of users and this is just the start,” said Carlos Andres Lopez, CEO of Digital Way. “With Ruckus, we plan to grow our WIGO Libre! service across the whole of Lima, along with other parts of Peru. Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi has excellent scalability, which allows us to increase capacity over time, with robust management capabilities and the outdoor deployment options we need to expand our service quickly and easily. We looked at other products, but they simply didn’t have the capabilities and performance that Ruckus has. We need carrier-class, high-density, high-capacity Wi-Fi to build our networks, and that’s why we chose Ruckus.”
WIGO Libre! Outdoor Wi-Fi Kicks Off at the National Stadium
Digital Way kicked off its free WIGO Libre! Wi-Fi service on September 6th at the National Stadium. The Stadium WIGO Libre! network currently features over three dozen Ruckus ZoneFlex 7782 carrier-class, outdoor dual-band (2.4 and 5 GHz) APs. The ZoneFlex 7782 is ideal for service providers like Digital Way that are deploying wireless networks like WIGO Libre! in order to offload high volumes of data traffic from struggling cellular networks.
The Ruckus ZoneFlex 7782 Series comprise the industry’s first 802.11n outdoor access points featuring the option of a 30 degree narrow beam antenna, a 120 degree antenna, internal omni-directional antennas, or an external antenna version along with patented Ruckus BeamFlex™+ technology to deliver up to 6 dB of additional signal gain and up to 15 dB of interference mitigation. The ZoneFlex 7782 Series was specifically designed to address the needs of very high-density deployments such as the National Stadium. Stadiums are characterized by tens of thousands of people in close proximity to each other, and most are carrying mobile data devices of some sort. These are amongst the most challenging wireless environments imaginable and are ideally suited to Wi-Fi technology.
For Digital Way, leveraging the ZoneFlex 7782 offers an easy to use and deploy Smart Wi-Fi environment that provides extended range, reliable connectivity and consistent performance at range for the 50,000 fans that regularly pack National Stadium.
Next up, Digital Way plans to deploy Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi technology to enable WIGO Libre! free Wi-Fi at the 5,000 seat Coliseum Bonilla, Peru’s national volleyball stadium.
WIGO Libre! Wi-Fi for Business and More at Centro Empresarial
Known as the “World Trade Center of Lima,” Centro Empresarial is the city’s Central Business District. It’s home to various financial and high-tech companies, with approximately 4,000 employees working there and in the various other business parks, making up a large portion of the daily foot traffic that frequents the many restaurants, bars, and discotheques that also make up the District.
Digital Way is strategically deploying Ruckus ZoneFlex 7762 outdoor APs on exterior building walls throughout Centro Empresarial to enable free WIGO Libre! Wi-Fi to businesses, their workers, and visitors.
The ZoneFlex 7762 is one of the industry’s highest performing access points, uniquely combining Ruckus BeamFlex adaptive antenna technology with adaptive meshing to enable a new level of outdoor performance at the lowest cost. Built to withstand harsh outdoor conditions, the ZoneFlex 7762 supports high client density counts and enables high performance back-haul mesh connections between nodes at distances of up to 300 meters or more.
Wi-Fi By the Sea
In addition, Digital Way is deploying Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi gear throughout the popular Miraflores area, a very large and popular tourist destination in Peru, and home to 3 million residents in Lima. This is the largest of Digital Way’s Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi deployments, with 150 Ruckus ZoneFlex 7762 outdoor APs being installed on lamp posts throughout this popular coastal area for high-density, high-capacity WIGO Libre! Wi-Fi coverage.
No More Shopping for Wi-Fi Indoors with WIGO Libre!
Digital Way’s free WIGO Libre! Wi-Fi networks also will extend indoors in Lima, with four shopping malls getting Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi. At 100,000 square meters, Jockey Plaza is the biggest mall in Lima, and Peru. Ruckus ZoneFlex 7363 high performance, mid-range Smart Wi-Fi indoor access points are being deployed, along with ZoneFlex 7762 outdoor APs for full coverage both inside and outside of this massive shopping center.
Other WIGO Libre! Wi-Fi network deployments utilizing Ruckus technology in popular Lima malls will include:
- Mega Plaza, an indoor mall with a large outdoor food court
- Larcomar, a small indoor mall located within Lima’s sprawling Miraflores tourist area
- Minka, a small outdoor-access mall (courtyard design)
For simple and centralized management of the WIGO Libre! Wi-Fi services across all its different deployments in Lima, Digital Way is using a single Ruckus ZoneDirector™ 5000 controller—a highly scalable, high-end wireless LAN (WLAN) controller that supports up to 20,000 clients, 1,000 APs and 2,048 WLANs within a single, easy-to-use platform—combined with the Ruckus FlexMaster™ management platform for building and managing Enterprise and Carrier-Grade Wi-Fi service infrastructures like Digital Way’s WIGO Libre! networks. FlexMaster enables optimization of hundreds of thousands of remote Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi APs or Smart WLANs from a single point, in this case, the ZoneDirector 5000 housed in a central datacenter managed by Digital Way. Ruckus FlexMaster provides a unique collection of automated and customized facilities not found in other management platforms such as an automated and customized super dashboard, trending reports and customized graphs, detailed client data for planning and troubleshooting, and comprehensive events management.
Concludes Lopez, “For Peruvians, the exploding growth of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets is putting increasing pressure on the existing 3G cellular networks here. Additionally, users in Peru don’t want to expend their cellular data plans because they are expensive and limited—they are hungry for reliable, free Wi-Fi, and look for it everywhere. WIGO Libre! fulfills that need, and Ruckus is helping us make it a reality.”
ABOUT RUCKUS WIRELESS
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Ruckus Wireless (NYSE: RKUS) is a global supplier of advanced wireless systems for the rapidly expanding mobile internet infrastructure market. The company offers a wide range of indoor and outdoor “Smart Wi-Fi” products to mobile carriers, broadband service providers, and corporate enterprises, and has approximately 24,400 end-customers worldwide. Ruckus technology addresses Wi-Fi capacity and coverage challenges caused by the ever-increasing amount of traffic on wireless networks due to accelerated adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Ruckus invented and has patented state-of-the-art wireless voice, video, and data technology innovations, such as adaptive antenna arrays that extend signal range, increase client data rates, and avoid interference, ensuring consistent and reliable distribution of delay-sensitive multimedia content and services over standard 802.11 Wi-Fi. For more information, visit https://www.ruckuswireless.com.
BeamFlex, FlexMaster, Ruckus, Ruckus Wireless, ZoneDirector, and ZoneFlex are trademarks of Ruckus Wireless, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other product or company names may be trademarks of their respective owners.