Ruckus announces a gateway design for bridging metro-scale networks into the home: The competition for so-called customer premises equipment (CPE) devices that will bring the weakly penetrating signal of a metro-scale Wi-Fi network into the home is certainly heating up. The once-loved high-gain Senao bridge--not designed purposely for this market--is never mentioned these days, although it was favored. Now it's all about PePLink Surf, which comes in 200 milliwatt (mW) and 400 mW flavors for the home Wi-Fi band, or anywhere from two to 15 times more power than a regular laptop adaptor. (30 mW was once routine, but 100 mW isn't unusual.)

Ruckus will be taking on PePLink and other players for the tens of millions of CPEs that will be sold worldwide as part of the massive rollout of metro-scale networks. Doesn't matter whether you like networks of this scale or not, or prefer WiMax, cellular, or tin cans to outdoor/indoor Wi-Fi. The CPEs will be sold.

The Ruckus MetroFlex Wireless Access Gateway uses its multiple-antenna beamforming technology to pull a better signal out of the air than a traditional antenna design can. The MetroFlex is loud--200 mW--but broad, using six antennas to pull signals out of the air. Four are horizontally polarized and two vertically, which should allow the unit to better handle the extensive multipath reflection that will come with metro-scale deployments.

The firm is claiming -99 to -108 dBm receive sensitivity for 1 Mbps 802.11b and -93 to -96 dBm for 6 Mbps 802.11g. This should allow quite weak signals to be used without sacrificing speed, as metro-scale networks will generally operate at 1 Mbps or slower.

I suspect to avoid prejudicing these networks against older 802.11b adapter that the slowest speeds of 802.11b will be supported--it runs from 1 Mbps to 11 Mbps in four increments--or supported on particular channels. (Metro-scale hardware on and coming to market can cajole different devices onto different overlapping Wi-Fi networks, and speed will be one parameter used to force associations.)

The MetroFlex is designed for remote management, which is going to be a key component, too, of any CPE released at this point. Centralized tools will need to push firmware updates and even reconfigure routers remotely--including, perhaps, forcing a channel change or tweaking power control--to best keep a network adapting to changing conditions, or whenever nodes are added or taken offline.

Right now, the MetroFlex, like other CPEs, requires yet another Wi-Fi node inside the home to redistribute services. There's a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port to which you would, say, connect a switch, and then connect another gateway or wired PCs.

However, good to note that the unit's specifications talk about multiple SSIDs. More on that when I interview Ruckus for a podcast later this week.