Ruckus ZoneFlex R720 Wireless Indoor Access Point

Overview:

Organizations must support accelerating demands on their WLAN infrastructure with the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), bandwidth hungry applications and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). The need for employees and customers to have the best user experience is driving organizations in every vertical to adopt the best possible network infrastructure. The Ruckus R720 allows all enterprises to deploy an affordable, high performance and highly resilient Wi-Fi network.

The R720 indoor AP is the industry’s highest capacity four-stream 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless access point. The R720 delivers reliable connectivity for high-density Wi-Fi environments where noise and interference are a big challenge. With MU-MIMO, the R720 can simultaneously transmit to multiple Wave 2 clients in the widest available channels, drastically improving RF efficiency even for non-Wave 2 clients. In today’s networks, it only takes a few 802.11ac clients to impact overall network performance by overdriving a 1Gbps backhaul network connection. This problem is easily solved by the R720’s 2.5Gbps backhaul connection, eliminating the need for additional cable runs and switch ports.

Large enterprises, office buildings, university campuses, convention centers—these are just some of the environments where high-speed, high-capacity Wi-Fi is critical to productivity, revenue generation, and customer satisfaction.

This high-end 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless access point incorporates patented technologies found only in the Ruckus Wi-Fi portfolio.

• BeamFlex+ adaptive antenna technology directs each packet over the best performing signal path, extending coverage range and mitigating interference automatically.
• ChannelFly technology chooses the best channel to give users the highest throughput— delivering up to 50 percent capacity gain over competitive dynamic channel selection approaches.

Whether organizations are deploying ten or ten thousand APs, the R720 is also easy to manage through Ruckus’ appliance, virtual and cloud management options.

Patented BeamFlex+ technology extends signal range, improves stability of client connections

The R720 integrates patented software-controlled adaptive antennas that delivers additional signal gain per radio chain. As BeamFlex+ adapts to client locations and antenna polarity, the smart antenna technology optimizes the RF energy toward client on a per packet basis. This allows for substantial performance improvement and a reduction in packet loss from the ability to automatically mitigate interference. BeamFlex+, with PD-MRC or polarization diversity, ensures the R720 listens in all polarizations simultaneously. This results in significant receive signal gain from mobile devices with weak transmitters.

Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO)

802.11ac MU-MIMO allows the R720 to transmit multiple spatial streams to multiple client devices simultaneously, increasing the total throughput and capacity of the wireless network. The R720 is able to provide up to four clients each their own dedicated fullbandwidth channel using an MU-MIMO technique known as spatial reuse. This capability enables several benefits:

1. Efficient use of available spectrum effectively multiplies the total capacity of a network, allowing it to meet the increasing data demand driven by the proliferation of mobile Wi-Fi clients and data-hungry applications such as high-definition video streaming.
2. Additionally, MU-MIMO does not require client devices to time-share connections with other clients on the network as in legacy Wi-Fi, which means each device experiences less wait time and makes the network more responsive overall. Even legacy clients benefit from MU-MIMO on the wireless network, because substantially increased efficiency for MU clients leaves the network with more free time and capacity by supporting multiple users.

Advanced WLAN applications

When used with the Ruckus WLAN management systems, the R720 supports a wide range of value-added applications such as guest networking, Dynamic PSK, hotspot authentication, wireless intrusion prevention and many more. WLANs can also be grouped and shared by specific APs. In a centrally managed configuration, the R720 works with various authentication servers including AD, LDAP, and RADIUS.