Wi-Fi has grown exponentially over the years as many from both the public and the enterprise sector have embrace the internet like never before. This union of business and global connectivity has led to businesses shifting their business models to the Internet. To see what the Internet has in store for the business sector, we’ve sat down with Ruckus to talk about the growth of Wi-Fi and its future in Malaysia, and most importantly, what Ruckus will do to aid this growth.

Ruckus: I’ll give a brief overview of Ruckus. So basically, Ruckus was formed back in June of 2004. Ruckus is a global supplier of advance wireless systems for the rapidly expanding mobile internet infrastructure market. We are a publicly listed company in the New York Stock Exchange, our headquarters is in Sunnyvale, California, which is where all the major brands are today as well. Our products includes Smart Wi-Fi Access Points, Controllers, and Wireless LAN Management. If you’re heavily involved in the technology side of business, you’ll be very familiar with them.

Ruckus: Yes, we deal with both enterprise and carrier service provider. So Ruckus is mainly credited with developing the industry’s first adaptive Wi-Fi technology for carriers. Ruckus is also one of the fastest growing technology companies at this region in the world, and today we work with over 48 thousand mobile carriers, broadband service providers and enterprises of all sizes across different industries in various countries. Carriers and corporations use our products to solve capacity, reliability and coverage challenges, caused by the increasing volume of traffic, devices and users accessing to the wireless network today. For Ruckus, we call this “the Smarter Wi-Fi Technology”.

Ruckus: “Smarter Wi-Fi” is a term that we use to describe carrier-class products and technology that Ruckus has developed. So “Smarter Wi-Fi” refers to a collection of patented technology that enables service providers and enterprises to benefit from advance levels of performance and integrated capabilities that are not possible with just the normal basic Wi-Fi of today. This “Smarter Wi-Fi technology” is at the heart of all Ruckus products and it is integrated within the Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi systems.

Ruckus: On a global scale, Wi-Fi continues to have a huge impact on consumers. Businesses, public venues and service providers of all types. This growth is registered on both carriers and enterprise sectors. With the smartphone revolution continuing to reshape the wireless landscape and more and more users all around the world utilise Wi-Fi to connect to their devices as well as to the Internet. Based on an industry report by Wireless Broadband Alliance, there is a growing confidence to invest in public Wi-Fi amongst the respondents as compared to the year of 2013. In addition to that, a recent research by ABI Research reveals that there is an increasing appetite for carrier Wi-F solutions across the world. This results to revenues growing to about US 8bn dollars by the year2019.

Ruckus: Yes, and the research also shows that Asia Pacific is the top region in terms of numbers of installed Wi-Fi hotspots, while Europe and the U.S. will continue to grow their networks through the use of community hotspots. Basically, in Malaysia, the smartphone revolution is driving the growth of Wi-Fi. A recent research conducted by Google,shows that Malaysia is among the few countries in ASEAN that has a high smartphone penetration rate. I’m sure you have seen this statistic before right?

Ruckus: The study also reveals that there are more smartphone users than desktop users today. Given these data is shared by research companies, to us, Malaysia continues to be a key growth driver for Ruckus.

Ruckus: We definitely are witnessing Wi-Fi coverage growing at a faster rate in recent years.According to the iPass Growth Map, Malaysia currently has over 34 thousand commercial hotspots nationwide. This represents approximately a 27% growth from 2013. To put this into perspective, Singapore has a growth rate of 10%, Indonesia is at 54%, and Thailand is at 37%. We are currently seeing the Malaysian Government kickstarting projects aimed at improving wireless coverage across the country as well. One specific example is the 1Malaysia Wireless Village, or Kampung Tanpa Wayar 1Malaysia project. This project provides wireless broadband access to small towns across Malaysia, and it is available to all users and the locals living within the wireless coverage area.

Ruckus: To that extent, I can’t answer you right now as I do not have the definite locations with me. What I can tell you is that this project will be implemented in the smaller states and the smaller towns as well.

Ruckus: It depends on which part of the Internet that’s going to be improved. When it comes to the speed of the internet, it depends on the telcos and broadband providers, so I can’t represent them. Based on my own personal opinion though, I think definitely, because in terms of technology, this is a technology that has been progressing over the years as well, and I think speed is one of the components that will improve over time.

Ruckus: I can’t say for sure, but I think it depends on the provider’s priority.

Ruckus: Okay, let me make a correction. Basically, when we talk about carrier enterprise, carrier is where we sell with telcos or through telcos. So enterprises comprise of education, government, and anything that isn’t telco related. So when you talk about it, education is definitely one sector that we have targeted.

Ruckus: In my perspective, as well as the perspective of the company, Wi-Fi will continue to evolve at a breakneck pace this year. From our perspective, there are a few trends that will shape the Wi-Fi landscape for 2015. One of the trends that we foresee happening is that 2015 will be the year of 802.11a/c. Now that the consumer market and handhelds with 11a/c technology has become common, enterprises, workplace organisations and schools are beginning to migrate to 11a/c. The other portion that we look into is the monetisation of WLAN. Monetising WLAN has traditionally meant charging for WLAN usage. Today, organisations have the options to add services like analytics, advertising and marketing as a form of monetisation. So these services can greatly benefit the organisation or business to better understand basic things such as WLAN trends, customer movement and demographics. Another thing is the never ending drive to cut cost in datacentres by reducing real estate, which in turn, continues to drive the demand for virtualisation. For wireless, virtualisation provides another level of resiliency that is tied to a datacentre’s high availability model. Virtualisation also opens the door for managed services.

Ruckus: For example, let’s say you as a System Integrator or Reseller, what they can do is they provide and offer their services to this organisation, but they own the equipment needed to do so.Organisations that require the infrastructure will pay them on a maybe daily, monthly, half yearly basis. It’s basically a paid service. Another area that we see when it comes to the growth of Wi-Fi is the Cloud. The Cloud will continue to provide the Value Added Resellers with the easy-to-deploy services to customers that prefer wireless as a service, which is also part of managed services. So small businesses will definitely be able to receive enterprise technology such as location based services, and secure guest access. Finally, Hotspot 2.0 is also something that we see growing in 2015. Hotspot 2.0 based technology will continue to be adopted by vertical markets that provide public Wi-Fi access such as hospitality and transportation, as well as general enterprises. With Hotspot 2.0,we would see more customers being able to seamlessly and securely roam the Wi-Fi networks.