FASTWEB Selects Ruckus To Outfit World’s 3rd Largest Exhibition Center with Smarter Wi-Fi Location Services
SUNNYVALE, CA – March 24, 2015 – Ruckus Wireless, Inc. (NYSE: RKUS) announced today that FASTWEB, one of Italy’s premiere telecommunications providers, has selected and deployed one of the most advanced indoor/outdoor Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi networks in the world, providing high-capacity, high-speed public access and innovative Wi-Fi location services throughout the Fiera Milano, the third largest exhibition center in the world, located in Milan, Italy.
Tweet this [ruckus-svg:social-twitter]The Fiera Milano hosts more than 50 professional exhibitions each year, serving approximately 23,000 exhibitors and five million visitors annually. The massive Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi network, owned and operated by FASTWEB, is comprised of 500 Ruckus ZoneFlex™ indoor and outdoor access points (APs), covering more than 400,000 square meters of space and including 20 pavilions. FASTWEB centrally manages the Fiera Milano Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi infrastructure through Ruckus ZoneDirector™ 5000 controllers within its data center.
Beyond providing free public Wi-Fi access and paid Internet connectivity to exhibitors, FASTWEB has also deployed the award-winning Ruckus SPoT™ location-based service (LBS) as a means to monetize their infrastructure, allowing exhibitors and organizers to gather more business intelligence about user behavior in order to help optimize them obtaining additional potential revenue.
“We believe this is one of the most sophisticated deployments of Wi-Fi within any large-scale public exhibition center in the world, and one that will become the standard for many others, allowing Wi-Fi to deliver new levels of business value,” said Onofrio Pecorella, director of Public Sector Sales for FASTWEB’s Enterprise Business Unit.
“Not only did FASTWEB deploy this infrastructure in record time, but we layered value-added Wi-Fi location services over the network to enable a new class of proximity marketing that allows the network to generate real revenue for the Fiera Milano and its customers.”
According to FASTWEB, Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi was selected for the project due to its unique carrier-grade technology designed to deliver greater coverage, consistent performance, stronger signal strength, and the ability to adapt to constantly changing environmental conditions that negatively impact radio frequency (RF) transmissions by causing spotty coverage, dropped connections and erratic Wi-Fi performance.
“Our goal was to build a carrier-class Wi-Fi utility upon which we could begin offering value-added services that enable monetization opportunities. That’s exactly what we’ve accomplished,” concluded Pecorella.
FASTWEB and the Fiera Milano have established a model that provides for the companies to offer location-based analytics to Fiera customers using the Ruckus SPoT location-based service (LBS).
Purchased as a cloud-based service or a virtualized software instance that operates on standard enterprise-class servers, Ruckus SPoT location-based service combines unique advantages, including options for both public and private cloud-based services, and a choice of location metrics with either SPoT Point (drop-pin) or SPoT Presence (proximity). Enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) can also use SPoT APIs to incorporate location data into their own applications. A robust ecosystem of partners provides additional leverage of SPoT for applications in retail, transportation, entertainment and other vertical markets.
“The Wi-Fi infrastructure that FASTWEB has deployed has far exceeded our expectations with respect to the stability, coverage and performance our customers are experiencing,” said Ernesto Bonfanti, Chief Information Officer at the Fiera Milano. “As one of the world’s largest and most popular exhibition centers, we wanted to deliver more than just a typical Wi-Fi service. Our Wi-Fi network is now a revenue generation tool that allows us to begin offering proximity-marketing opportunities to our customers who want to leverage today’s mobile Internet applications and tools. FASTWEB and Ruckus have allowed us to capture this opportunity.”
ABOUT FASTWEB
Thanks to its 2.07 million customers, FASTWEB is one of the main telecommunications providers in Italy. The Company offers a wide range of integrated Internet and voice services, both fixed and mobile, to families and small businesses. FASTWEB offers advanced telecommunications and ICT services, such as housing, cloud computing, security and unified communications to the business segment, public administration, large enterprises, SMEs, professionals, universities and research centers. Since its foundation in 1999, the Company has focused on innovation and network development in order to offer maximum service quality to its broadband customers. FASTWEB has developed a 37,500 km fibre optic network in Italy and reaches approximately 50% of the Italian population with its network. At present, FASTWEB passes about 5.5 million homes and businesses with its ultra broadband network at speeds of up to 100 megabit per second with fibre-to-the-home or fibre-to-the-cabinet technology. FASTWEB has announced a new network expansion plan which will be completed at the end of 2016 and which will cover about 7.5 million homes and businesses or 30% of Italian population. Since September 2007, FASTWEB has been part of the Swisscom Group. www.company.fastweb.it
Ruckus, Ruckus Wireless, SPoT, ZoneDirector, and ZoneFlex are trademarks of Ruckus Wireless, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other product or company names may be trademarks of their respective owners.