Wednesday, 11 October 2006

Motorola Invests in WiFi Firm

The venture capital arms of Motorola Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG are investing in a startup Wi-Fi routers maker Ruckus Wireless Inc. The companies will be investing USD 16 million in the company increasing the total investment in the company to 30 million since its founding in June 2004.

The proceeds will be used to expand production and marketing for the company's MediaFlex wireless router, which seeks to address shortcomings in standard Wi-Fi equipment that make it hard to transmit live TV and radio.

Ruckus said that it has sold "tens of thousands" of MediaFlex routers since launching the product a year ago.

"We found Ruckus Wireless to be the only solution provider to have truly addressed the problem of moving multimedia around the home without new wiring," Petra Buchholz, fund manager for T-Online Venture Fund, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, said in a statement.

MediaFlex router is based on the current generation of Wi-Fi technologies but uses a multidirectional antenna to monitor different wireless paths for potential interference, switching to another route when static is detected. Ruckus considers that an advantage because most laptops in use today are already equipped to receive these signals, unlike 802.11n.