The University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, turned to Ruckus after it decided to upgrade its wireless LAN to 802.11n. Students had been using a Wi-Fi network on campus for several years, but the university wanted to move faculty and staff onto wireless as well, said Network Project Leader Ha Nguyen. Faculty members frequently moved, so the IT department faced repeated rewiring projects and wasted resources as rooms changed from offices into labs and back again, he said.

Nguyen's team narrowed down its 802.11n product options to those that could deliver strong, stable performance both upstream and downstream.

"To make people move from wired to wireless, we'd better (allow) them to get good performance," Nguyen said. "As a university, we cannot impose anything. We need to convince them."

The Ruckus gear has long-enough reach that if an access point on one floor stops working, users can still get a usable signal from the floor below, Nguyen said. In addition, the beta version of Ruckus' new software for large enterprises was more stable than some shipping software, he said.

But one of the biggest benefits of Ruckus was its approach to controllers, according to Nguyen. The university had worried that on an 802.11n network, with theoretical data rates over 100Mb per second, wireless LAN controllers switching traffic from the access points would become bottlenecks. But the ZoneDirector 3500 doesn't switch packets itself. It manages the WLAN and leaves packet switching to standard, low-cost gear from any vendor. This cut the overall cost of the network by at least half, Nguyen said.