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Ruckus Wireless (News - Alert), a provider of indoor and outdoor "Smart Wi-Fi" products for mobile operators, broadband service providers and corporate enterprises, announced that its Smart Wi-Fi solutions have been selected by the Indian Wells Tennis Garden (Indian Wells, Calif.), to provide support for a wide range of indoor and outdoor wireless applications. 

Sports teams, stadium operators, as well as stadium vendors depend on public-access Wi-Fi as an avenue to enhance customer experience and improve their revenue opportunities via mobile apps that are specific to stadium use. However, like most sports venues, the Indian Wells Tennis Garden faced the problems associated with decreasing wireless coverage across the facility as soon as obstacles and users start to appear. Eventually, they decided to deploy a wireless system which could automatically adapt such fluctuations in real time.

The Indian Wells Tennis Garden has been designed to operate as a multi- sporting facility featuring a 16,100-seat stadium court and 23 match/practice courts, as well as box office facilities, a fitness center, in addition to 45 VIP suites on 54 acres.

After a careful assessment of its Wi-Fi needs, The Indian Wells Tennis Garden decided to deploy unified Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi indoor and outdoor solutions. The system will be used for the delivery of wireless access at the BNP Paribas Open (March 5-18, 2012), for players and VIPs as well as for officials and coaches. The system will also offer services such as box office credential scanning among a host of other vendor services. Long-range point-to-multipoint bridges will be used to enhancing and extending wireless connectivity for remote will-call ticket operations. The sports facility will further benefit from capabilities of the Ruckus system such as smart meshing, client isolation, dynamic pre-shared keys as well as dynamic VLAN deployment for improving security of wireless network and to support easy deployment.

By enabling smart meshing over Ruckus APs, the facility will be able to effectively broaden their wireless coverage both at the facility and at remote locations with cabling issues. The Mesh AP establishes a dependable mesh connection with a close-by AP with optimized capacity as soon as it is plugged into a power source. The adaptive antenna array native to each Smart Wi-Fi access point is capable of delivering longer range and dependable wireless links to close-by APs as it channelizes transmissions over the most optimized signal paths while effectively decreasing interference. 

Utilization of dynamic pre-shared keys allows the sports facility to offer secure access to its corporate users via encryption keys generated by the ZoneDirector. These are then employed for each user device automatically which effectively improves network security as its clients can’t see each other over the open network. Dynamic VLANs enables automatic assigning of VLAN to separate vendors with authentication at the venue which help in bringing down tasks associated with configuring networks for the purpose of providing separate Wi-Fi network to each vendor.

Wi-Fi provides the ideal solution for Indian Wells Tennis Garden for enabling the offloading of data traffic from crowded cellular data networks enhancing the online experience for spectators. Furthermore Wi-Fi is the perfect platform for supporting advanced wireless applications such as IP security cameras, VoIP communications, as well as IP-based video streaming. The sports venue will be implementing high-speed, dual-band (2.4 and 5GHz) 802.11n wireless environment via the Ruckus ZoneFlex 7363 indoor and 7762 outdoor units managed by redundant centralized ZoneDirector WLAN controller.

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