Ruckus Wireless, a US-based global Wi-Fi technology company, Friday announced the opening of a new R&D centre in Bangalore, India.
By tapping into a pool of highly skilled engineering talent in India, Ruckus’s new R&D centre in Bangalore will significantly boost the company’s capabilities to develop new technologies to serve the mobile Internet infrastructure market worldwide.
The new Bangalore operations will be the company’s first development centre in India, joining the company’s four other R&D centres in Taiwan (Taipei), China (Shenzhen), Israel (TelAviv), and California (Sunnyvale).
“The Mobile Internet is driving fundamental change within the telecom industry,” said Selina Lo, President and CEO of Ruckus Wireless. “Integrating Wi-Fi into cellular networks has become the most popular and cost-effective way to relieve capacity pressures being felt by providers around the world from a deluge of data traffic the likes of which we have never seen before,” Lo added.
According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, there are currently 884.37 million mobile subscribers in India. Many of them are currently using, or planning to migrate to, mobile Internet devices – smartphones, tablets, and wireless-only devices, thereby causing tremendous data traffic loading to the cellular network.
Lo noted that service providers and enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region are projected to spend up to $1 billion on Wi-Fi networking equipment by 2015.
“India nests the world’s largest pool of engineering talent, and at the same time the country has been aggressively rolling out Wi-Fi infrastructure. Opening a development centre in India further accelerates the growth we are experiencing today from this Mobile Internet phenomenon,” Lo concluded.
The opening of Ruckus Bangalore development centre reinforces its commitment to India – Asia’s hottest telecom market, the company says. It also provides the company a compelling edge to accelerate the development of core technologies to integrate Wi-Fi into mobile operators’ mobile data core networks. Ruckus is currently conducting trials of its advanced Wi-Fi systems with a number of telecom operators in India.
The company stated that its new 23,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility will house over 100 employees. Ruckus currently employs 50 people in its Bangalore development centre and plans to expand this workforce by more than 50% by the end of this year. The new facility will accommodate state of the art design and testing capabilities for the development of Wi-Fi to mobile data packet core internetworking solutions, including simulation and scalability test capabilities that support hundreds of thousands of concurrent subscriber call flows.
Since starting its operation in India in 2008, Ruckus Wi-Fi has been adopted by service providers, higher education institutions, luxury hotels, and state-of-the-art hospitals. Key customers of the company in India include: Delhi University, Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Seven Hills Hospitals, Lovely Professional University, NIIT University, Oberoi Hotels, Leona Resorts, Crowne Plaza New Delhi, JW Marriott Mumbai.
