Satilla Regional Medical Center Selects Ruckus Wireless for Next-Generation Wi-Fi at Main Hospital and Nearby Medical Facilities

ATLANTA, March 1 /PRNewswire/ -- HIMSS Conference and Exhibition -- Ruckus Wireless™, the smart mobile networking company, today announced that Satilla Regional Medical Center (Satilla) has selected the Ruckus ZoneFlex Smart 802.11n Wi-Fi system at the main hospital, as well as at two nursing home facilities and rehabilitative centers it operates in the area.

The Ruckus ZoneFlex system will replace a legacy Cisco wireless LAN environment to provide ubiquitous hospital-wide wireless to support more than 300 Wi-Fi-enabled devices and a wide range of current and future applications such as the MEDITECH Healthcare Information System, PatientSafe IntelliDOT bedside medication system, Hospira Mednet Infusion System, RTLS/RFID, smart phones and guest Wi-Fi access.

"Wireless is no longer a technology of convenience for hospitals, it has become an absolute necessity," said Barry Rudd, director of information technology at Satilla Regional Medical Center, based in Waycross, Georgia. "Our fundamental goal was to find a wireless system that could deliver wire-like reliability and consistent coverage to every nook and cranny of our facility."

A full service hospital consuming over 370,000 square feet, Satilla Regional Medical Center employs more than 1,300 staff with more than 150 beds. The hospital comprises two conjoined buildings – one which was built in the 1950s, and a newer building constructed in 2002.

With a two-person networking team, Satilla wanted a wireless network that would be easy to install and maintain. "We're just like every other hospital in the country," said Terry Ammons, network administrator at Satilla. "We're quickly shifting to electronic methods of patient information management, and the many devices in use at any given time must be able to rely on a Wi-Fi network that doesn't fail."

RF interference was another concern for Satilla. "In such an interference-prone environment, achieving always-on reliability has been challenging at best with other wireless LAN systems we've used in the past," said Ammons. According to Satilla, the hospital evaluated a number of wireless suppliers including Aruba, Cisco, Meru and others but found that the Ruckus ZoneFlex system was best suited to address a wider range of RF and reliability issues that had been challenging its legacy wireless system.

According to Satilla, deploying a pervasive wireless network in both their new and old buildings presented a real challenge due to "RF-unfriendly" building materials, and the complexity of the facility that prohibited wireless signals from reaching many rooms that needed them. Additionally, microwaves, lab equipment and cordless phones wreaked havoc on stable wireless signals throughout the facility. "Our previous Cisco network simply couldn't perform – and it was a big problem for our doctors, nurses and lab technicians," said Ammons.

Dynamic Beamforming and a Smart 802.11n Implementation was the Wi-Fi Cure

With its previous wireless system, Satilla suffered from poor, inconsistent performance, low signal penetration and issues caused by interference from surrounding equipment. Cost and ease of use were two other major concerns.

"Most of the wireless suppliers we evaluated solve RF and coverage problems by throwing more APs at the problem," said Ammons. "Not only does this add cost and complexity but it also creates co-channel interference – and we already had loads of our own. We didn't want the biggest source of interference to be our own Wi-Fi network. We were really looking for a cost-effective wireless system that actually dealt with these issues more intelligently at the physical layer – and we finally found it."

According to Satilla, they considered a refresh on the network with Cisco 1142 802.11n APs but determined it would require 115 APs and three controllers. The hospital also considered Aruba's system that would have required 200 APs.

"Ruckus was able to deliver much more value with fewer APs and without all the traffic flowing through a central choke point," said Ammons. "We looked at everything from a future-proofing scenario. Because we plan to use the Wi-Fi network for video streaming, teleconferencing, as well as telemedicine in our ICU, we determined that the ZoneFlex system was fundamentally better to support these latency-sensitive applications because of its ability to provide adaptive and automatic RF control," he explained.

To unwire the hospital and additional medical facilities, Satilla purchased 65 ZoneFlex 7962 dual-band indoor 802.11n access points and two ZoneDirector 3100 controllers. The hospital also plans to utilize Ruckus smart wireless meshing technology, which will enable Ammons to deploy additional APs in areas where Ethernet cabling is not available – such as in training rooms and at the other medical facility sites.

Each ZoneFlex smart Wi-Fi access point integrates Ruckus' patented dynamic beamforming technology, a breakthrough Wi-Fi technology that constantly adapts to changes in the environment like those prevalent at Satilla hospital.  

Ruckus "Smart Wi-Fi" technology leverages dynamic beamforming to focus Wi-Fi signals (or beams) only where they are needed and over the best performing RF transmission paths while continually steering wireless signals around obstacles and interference. Dynamic beamforming uses constant feedback from each client to ensure that the path selected is performing properly using standard acknowledgements built into the standard 802.11 protocol. The result is an adaptive system that minimizes packet loss, extends signal range and ensures more consistent performance at longer distances.

About Ruckus Wireless, Inc.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Ruckus Wireless is supplier of advanced wireless systems for the mobile Internetworking market. The company markets and manufactures a wide range of indoor and outdoor "Smart Wi-Fi" products for mobile operators, broadband service providers and corporate enterprises around the world. Ranked as the top telecom company in the 2009 Inc. Magazine 500 list and named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, Ruckus Wireless has realized dramatic growth. Since 2006, revenue and shipments have grown by over 1000 percent. Ruckus invented, and has patented, innovative state-of-the-art wireless technology that steers signals around obstacles and interference. This unique capability extends signal range and ensures consistent reliable distribution of delay-sensitive multimedia content and services over standard 802.11 Wi-Fi. The company has shipped over 2 million Smart Wi-Fi systems around the world and has raised $51 million in funding from premier investors such as Sequoia Capital, Focus Ventures, Sutter Hill, Motorola, T-Ventures, Telus Ventures and Firelake Capital. The company is led by Ms. Selina Lo, president and chief executive officer. For more information, visit Ruckus Wireless at http://www.ruckuswireless.com.

SOURCE Ruckus Wireless