Ruckus Wireless today announced that it has been selected to provide a Wi-Fi network (deployed by Hotel Internet Services) for the Queen Mary, which is permanently docked in Long Beach, California, as a hotel and convention center.

"Visitors are now coming on board with all kinds of wireless-enabled handheld devices and expect a Wi-Fi signal," says the Queen Mary's Edgar Stevens. "Having previously tested Wi-Fi aboard ship, we were unable to get it to work properly without having to deploy a huge number of APs. The Queen Mary is effectively a massive box built with metal walls and all sorts of nooks and crannies. This makes using any kind of wireless technology extremely challenging."

"We looked long and hard at Wi-Fi but found it would have required more than 90 APs from competitive vendors just to support the hotel and conference space," says Gary Patrick, president and CEO of Hotel Internet Services. "To be honest, given the high performance and ability of Ruckus Wireless products to overcome interference, and our previous experiences with Ruckus deployments, we expected them to test out well. When our testing showed we could set up the entire Wi-Fi network using one-third the number of APs, we were pleasantly surprised."

The deployment on the Queen Mary consists of 33 Ruckus ZoneFlex 2942 802.11g Smart Wi-Fi APs across three decks of the Queen Mary, providing complete coverage to all guest rooms, convention areas, meeting space, and other public areas.

More here from TMCnet ... and the press release is here.