Ruckus Wireless, Inc. has unveiled the Ruckus ZoneFlex R700, the world’s first dual-band, three-stream indoor Wi-Fi product specifically designed from the ground up built on the new 802.11ac standard. The R700 is the only 802.11ac product on the market that integrates patented Ruckus BeamFlex+ adaptive antenna array technology to extend the range, reliability and speed of indoor Wi-Fi services, giving enterprises and service providers the ability to offer reliable, gigabit-class Wi-Fi performance.

Operating as a standalone access point (AP) or part of a centrally managed wireless LAN (WLAN), the Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 is purpose-built for the 802.11ac standard, and is ideal for high capacity and challenging Wi-Fi environments such as airports, hotels, schools, hospitals, warehouses and high-density venues.

The ZoneFlex R700 is also the only 802.11ac product on the market to incorporate six custom smart antenna arrays—one for each band and spatial stream. This unique capability allows Wi-Fi transmissions to be focused and automatically directed over the fastest signal paths for each client. The result is better signal decorrelation, stronger signals to client devices, higher sustained data rates at longer distances, increased AP capacity and gigabit-class Wi-Fi performance.

Backwards compatible with existing 802.11 devices, the Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 operates with full functionality using standard 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) ­– delivering aggregate data rates of up to 1.75 Gbps using the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands while offering an improvement in Wi-Fi signal coverage.

“While 802.11ac promises improved performance across the board, realizing that promise requires sophisticated RF controls and advanced WLAN system architecture and product implementation,” said Craig Mathias, a Principal with the mobile and wireless advisory firm Farpoint Group. “With the announcement of the R700, Ruckus Wireless is building upon years of innovation with exactly the techniques required for success in the gigabit-WLAN era.”

Equipped with patented BeamFlex technology, each ZoneFlex R700 can automatically select, on a per packet basis, from thousands of potential directional antenna patterns, transmitting and receiving traffic using horizontally and vertically polarized radio waves for more reliable Wi-Fi connections to low-powered handheld devices, such as smartphones and tablets, that are constantly changing their orientation.

With per-packet adaptive antenna control, polarization diversity, and active channel selection techniques, The Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 is uniquely able to:

Increase the useful uplink and downlink range of more efficient 256-QAM introduced by the 802.11ac standard to yield higher performance at longer ranges,

Adapt Wi-Fi signals to changing client device orientation for more stable client connectivity, and

Mitigate RF interference by selecting channels with more capacity and less noise.

To further improve performance and ensure the best possible user experience, the Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 uses a unique channel selection approach called ChannelFly™ that is capable of yielding significant capacity gains over alternative background scanning approaches. This distinctive capacity-driven channel selection technology helps to avoid Wi-Fi interference by predicting and automatically selecting the best performing channels at any given time using statistical, real-time capacity analysis of all RF channels.

One of the first customers to deploy the Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 is Sejong Smart School in South Korea, which has just installed over 500 ZoneFlex R700 APs. “We’ve always been impressed with the performance and reliability of Ruckus, and believe Ruckus is indeed the Smart Wi-Fi choice for deploying 802.11ac, as the R700 is powerful and feature-rich, and easy to install,” said Sung-jin Hong, Officer of Sejong City office of Education, Republic of Korea (South Korea). “Our initial deployment is working very well, and we look forward to completing additional stages of our deployment to provide an exceptional user experience.”

Used with a Ruckus ZoneDirector Smart WLAN controller, the ZoneFlex R700 supports a wide range of enterprise WLAN capabilities such as hotspot and 802.1X authentication, guest networking, automatic user and device policy enforcement, client and band balancing, per client performance thresholds, client blacklisting, the creation and installation of dynamic pre-shared keys, and wireless intrusion prevention.

The Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 is priced at $1,295 (USD).

Ruckus is also offering a special 802.11ac Buy Up Program. Under the Program, customers that have previously purchased a qualifying Ruckus ZoneFlex 802.11n Smart Wi-Fi indoor access point (products include the ZoneFlex 7363, 7372, 7982, and 7962) between May 1, 2013 and March 31, 2014 can purchase the equivalent number of new Ruckus ZoneFlex R700 access points for $499 (USD) each, if purchased by June 30, 2014, while keeping their existing Ruckus ZoneFlex 802.11n access points.