Interview with Selina Lo, President and CEO, Ruckus Wireless
What is the significance of the word ‘Ruckus’ in the company name?
‘Ruckus’ represents our spirit of making a lot of noise in the market. 
Most people basically said WiFi is unreliable technology and we are able to make it reliable enough to be used as a utility.
You seem more inclined towards leveraging WiFi for Video.
Yes. Look at iPhones and devices like that. Video is already in our culture, and if there is no cable involved they are going to love it even more.You have many customers for IPTV like Singtel etc. Is that a niche market for you or we are talking about a huge opportunity here? Television has largely remained fixed within homes.
IPTV subscribers are expected to grow to around 20 million by 2009 worldwide. Each of the subscribers is a target customer. Typically DSL modem tends to be away from the STB in homes. People normally run an Ethernet cable between their STB and home gateway which is not a graceful way to do things. Service providers have been looking for a non-cable solution for in home distribution. Ruckus brings this option to the market.
The extra effort that you put in making WiFi more reliable, does that not mean extra work you need to put in working with partners. That kind of business model does not scale unless your technology becomes a standard in the industry. Right?
No. We use standard solutions. We use standard chipsets. So this is not an issue with us at all. We actually use commercial chipsets from Atheros. It’s just the Antenna implementation which makes the difference. We have no interoperability issues. In Hong Kong, for instance, PCCW has deployed around 2000 hotspots based on our technology.
How do you see Wireless Multimedia standards of WiFi Alliance? Do you find them enough to address QoS for Multimedia over WiFi?
The WiFi Alliance basically specifies Wireless MultiMedia (WMM) standard. QoS alone is not what is required. It can only prioritize applications over the available bandwidth. The problem is when there isn't enough bandwidth or when the bandwidth fluctuates, it is not enough for the top priority applications as well. So what you need is to make WiFi more stable first.
Can you share with us names of some of your bigger deployments?
Belgacom is our biggest subscriber. Then there is Portugal Telecom and Telefonica del Sur in Chile as well.
You don’t have any IP PBX vendor partner. Does that mean enterprise VoIP is not an important market segment for you?
We will be announcing some partners very soon. On the enterprise side we only launched that product line couple of months ago.
Do you have any deployments in VoWiFi area or any FMC deployments?
Truphone is a good example. Just a week ago, we announced that they are using Ruckus for their internal network that connects their WiFi phones for their day-to-day use on site. It is a pure WiFi network but Truphone has a proprietary solution that allows users to make calls to cellular network from WiFi as well.
Are your WiFi boxes going to serve niches in the end or will you compete with mainstream WiFi box vendors like Cisco, Linksys, D-Link and Netgear?
We are never going to be the cheapest solution for WiFi.
You have shipped around 150,000 units so far. Which product are you selling the most and which parts of the world have accounted for most of these shipments?
It is the IPTV product line and most of the shipments were for Belgacom, Telefonica del sur and others.
