Service-provider Wi‑Fi is a major and expanding market, growing at roughly 7% year over year as operators use Wi‑Fi to differentiate their services and to offload mobile data traffic from cellular networks. The market surpassed $1 billion in Q2 2014 and is expected to continue growing as mobile operators increasingly rely on Wi‑Fi for capacity and coverage.
The WLAN equipment market is highly competitive, with many vendors vying for position, though none has yet overtaken Cisco. Ruckus Wireless stands out as a strong challenger, making notable gains and positioning itself as Cisco’s most significant competitor in the service-provider Wi‑Fi segment.
Industry observers have highlighted Ruckus’s antenna-based beamforming as a potential game changer. By focusing beamforming at the antenna level, Ruckus aims to improve range and throughput in real-world environments, an approach that could influence future wireless design.
Cisco still leads the market by a wide margin, holding about 52% share, but it has ceded ground in areas where Ruckus has strengthened its presence, according to research by Synergy Research Group. Ruckus follows with roughly 20% market share. Other vendors — Aruba, Alcatel‑Lucent, HP, and Motorola — compete closely for remaining share, each holding between approximately 3% and 10%.
“Overall growth rates for service-provider Wi‑Fi have moderated somewhat and have not sustained the levels some expected,” said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “Nonetheless, the market is still showing solid double-digit growth on a rolling annualized basis, and I expect growth rates to accelerate again in the future.”
Service-provider Wi‑Fi accounts for a larger portion of Ruckus’s revenues than it does for many of its competitors. Independent testing has shown Ruckus solutions performing strongly in real environments: in an open-air evaluation conducted by Tom’s Hardware, the Ruckus ZoneFlex 802.11n Smart WLAN outperformed Cisco and Aruba across five locations. The tests measured range and throughput, with Ruckus showing throughput improvements in the tests ranging from 36 Mbps to 180 Mbps compared with comparable systems from Cisco and Aruba.
Those tests also included an assessment of Cisco’s then-new chip-based beamforming technology. Reviewers noted that beamforming — a directional signal-boosting technique — is important for Wi‑Fi that reliably supports video and other bandwidth-intensive applications. They suggested that Ruckus’s on‑antenna beamforming approach could be influential in shaping the next generation of wireless networking designs.
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