Pioneer Telephone Cooperative Starts Ruckus with Wi-Fi

Pioneer Telephony is planning a phased rollout of the Ruckus Wireless Inc. Wi-Fi system as part of its popular broadband services, including commercial IPTV, throughout 2006 in a move to lower in-home installation costs and give its services a broadband footprint in the home.

Until now, Pioneer had to send technicians to install Category 5 wiring or coaxial cabling throughout a subscriber’s home. With the Ruckus System, Pioneer expects to reduce installation times from three hours to 45 minutes, and cut in half the amount of labor and truck rolls to turn up and support services in the home. Pioneer expects the technology to ultimately be able to be self-installed by the subscriber.

The third-largest U.S. telephone cooperative now is beginning a customer trial of the in-home “smart Wi-Fi” system to enable subscribers to stream digital TV content throughout the home using standard 802.11g Wi-Fi technology. Pioneer did its commercial IPTV launch in June of 2004 and is among the nation’s largest providers of such services, with more than 20,000 broadband subscribers throughout 76 cities and towns.

The Ruckus smart Wi-Fi system is based on patent-pending technology that selects the best path through the air at any given time for a specific type of multimedia content, and directs Wi-Fi signals over that path to a given receiver instead of broadcasting it in all directions. If, however, that path experiences interference, the Ruckus system automatically steers the traffic over another path in real-time and ensures up to 20mbps of consistent bandwidth to every location in the home so there is no interruption in Wi-Fi transmissions.

Pioneer Telephone Cooperative www.ptci.com
Ruckus Wireless Inc. www.ruckuswireless.com

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