By 2017, ABI Research estimates that the indoor locations services market will eclipse $2.5 billion.
Embedded with a patented Indoor Positioning Algorithm gained from the company’s recent acquisition of YFind Technologies, new and existing Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi access points are now capable of powerful and accurate client positioning for indoor or dense urban environments, where GPS doesn’t always work.
By knowing where clients are located, companies are able to help them get wherever they need to go, making the network experience better for them, or use data from their location to optimize their experience. In addition, network operators can deliver location-relevant content to users based on their proximity to points of interest, including timely retail offers—even security and safety notices.
With the skyrocketing popularity of Wi-Fi driven by a new age of Wi-Fi-enabled smart devices, new requirements have emerged for an indoor GPS-like positioning service that uses Wi-Fi to enable value-added services. Though today’s cellular technologies support outdoor location services, they don’t always work well or sometimes even at all indoors, due to the inability of cellular signals to extend into buildings well. Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi coupled with advanced LBS technology is an ideal solution to this problem.
“Our innovations in location-based client positioning are driving new opportunities for operators and enterprises to easily leverage their Ruckus Wi-Fi infrastructure to support intelligent positioning services indoors, where people use Wi-Fi most,” said Selina Lo, president and CEO of Ruckus Wireless. “Our unique Cloud-based service approach gives customers a simple and powerful way to add immense value to their Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi networks, and the ability to easily enable new services. Cloud-based service enablement also allows for instant service provisioning without significant CAPEX contribution.”
“We see location-based services to be one of the key drivers for wireless LAN market growth starting in 2014,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure, International Data Corporation (IDC). “As with other Cloud applications, Cloud-based location services can offer scalable, elastic compute resources for enterprises and service providers to collect, monitor, and provide real time analytics that are essential to providing rapid insight on user location and behavior, enabling improved user satisfaction or other business services that can be monetized."
Ruckus SPoT is based on the technology recently acquired from location based services pioneer YFind Technologies. It gives service providers and enterprises the ability to leverage Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi access points with the latest location technology and techniques that can automatically pinpoint and track the physical location of Wi-Fi- enabled devices, without having to deploy a substantially higher density of additional Wi-Fi hardware or any client software.