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Tue, 4th Dec 2012
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Ruckus Wireless has received praise for their installation during The Hobbit launch in Wellington, providing high performance service on the cbdfree's biggest networking day.

With Wellington's free wi-fi network enjoying its busiest day since its launch last year, CityLink marketing manager Patrick Sharp was full of praise of the handling at Courtenay Place.

"Our initial experience with the Ruckus units that we installed in Courtenay Place during the Hobbit launch where in a nutshell - fantastic," he said.

Across the entire network CityLink served around 40,000 DHCP leases to 14,000 unique devices and 9,289 user sessions to 4,146 unique users on the day. The Ruckus units handled roughly a third of those, representing a much heavier load than usual with 9,926 DHCP leases and 2,774 user sessions.

"We peaked out at about 560 simultaneous users on the Ruckus APs, most in 2.4Ghz and most on the permanent access points," Sharp said.

"Not only was it our busiest ever day, it was disproportionately focused on the Ruckus APs and during a few hours, so the peak load was much higher than we’ve ever seen."

In total, CityLink had six Ruckus APs running, including the four permanent ZF7762 which deliver the cbdfree free Wi-Fi service, with one incorporating a mesh link (right over Peter Jackson’s head) to an external ZF7762-AC, which was also running cbdfree.

A sixth, AP a 7962, was also set up inside the Paramount theatre, offering another service for video camera uploads.

"I was at the Paramount theatre for the day and frequently tested both the internal and external service, and as a regular user of our service I think that it performed better that I have ever seen it, even under the heaviest load we have ever experienced," Sharp said.

"I am confident that the Ruckus network is the primary contributor to the performance improvement and just the fact that the network stayed up. We were very impressed."

The Ruckus equipment was supplied through New Zealand distributor Connector Systems.