Ruckus Wireless announces Metro Wi-Fi home gateway

Sunnyvale (CA) - Ruckus Wireless today announced the commercial availability of a wireless home gateway designed for connection to city-wide Wi-Fi networks at "better than DSL speeds".

Ruckus’ MetroFlex is an 802.11b/g wireless access gateway designed to provide better in-home connectivity to outdoor metro-scale Wi-Fi networks. It uses the company’s "smart" antenna array technology incorporating four horizontally and two vertically polarized arrays connected through a high-power amplifier. System software automatically selects the combination of antennas to yield the "best possible RF path" at any given time. Other features include WPA PSK wireless security, 802.1x authentication, dynamic channel selection and Tropos Networks’ Metro Compatible Extensions Specification (TMCX) program compliance.

The company claims that the Ruckus MetroFlex system is "the most sensitive and reliable in-home Wi-Fi receiver in the world" and has demonstrated the ability in rural environments to sustain "above 5 Mbps at 1 km [0.62 miles] away from the nearest Wi-Fi node".

The MetroFlex Wireless Access Gateway is priced at $130 and will be resold by customer premise equipment (CPE) supplier and systems integrator Expressnets. Among the system’s first deployments are Cheetah Wireless Technologies of Las Vegas, Nevada, Atria Networks in Ontario, Canada, and Rightway Online in Corpus Christi, Texas.