By Bruce McClelland
The world is watching what's happening with the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum in the United States — and ARRIS's Ruckus Networks team is leading the transformation.
The U.S. government is exploring new uses for a large, underused portion of the country's communications spectrum, and there have been multiple proof-of-concept trials that adopt a new network approach using LTE wireless technology in the CBRS spectrum. The results have been more than encouraging. So encouraging, that an entirely new class of high-performance networks — using our Ruckus Networks LTE portfolio (under the brand name OpenG™) and Wi-Fi access points— could begin appearing before the end of the year.
The new approach is tailored to situations where spectrum is limited but demand for data is not. Leveraging CBRS shared spectrum, networks will cost a fraction of both the capital expense and operating costs of other next-generation wireless networks in development. Indeed, telecommunications operators are among those conducting proof-of-concept trials to explore how OpenG can cost-effectively augment their current networks, especially in the thorny case of in-building network coverage, capacity, and quality.
The new network approach also opens the door to non-traditional service providers. And here, interest is already significant. More than 20 proof-of-concept trials using Ruckus equipment have been successfully completed. And more than 30 are in the pipeline. The applications span improved in-building cellular communications, mobile point of sale, industrial IoT, public-space networks, remote data transfer of critical communications, wide-area surveillance, and private LTE networks. The market potential is very promising.
The new approach scales from in-building through distributed campuses (think sports stadiums, apartment complexes, and hotel resorts) all the way to smart cities. We've completed trials large and small, from as few as 3 access points to almost 100, and Use Cases spanning corporate and industrial enterprises, cable and mobile operators, and managed service providers.
The approach is also showing promise as a backbone for industrial-grade IoT networks — and that's important because more than 20 billion items are predicted to be connected to the Internet globally by 2020.
I mentioned that we're leading this transformation. As a founding member, we've helped lead the industry consortium coordinating the rollout of these networks (the CBRS Alliance) since its inception. And today, we're announcing two important points of progress:
- ARRIS's Ruckus Networks is the first technology provider to achieve FCC certification for CBRS.
- Ruckus equipment will be at the core of an important new trial near the University of Illinois with Pavlov Media, one of the country's largest private providers of broadband services to multi-family real estate owners.
This success is a testament to more than two years of development inside Ruckus Networks and now ARRIS.
Congratulations to all.
