Ruckus Wireless, a Sunnyvale, Calif., company whose MediaFlex router solution strengthens 802.11b/g signals for better in-home distribution of services such as IPTV and voice over Wi-Fi, said it recently has added 15 rural service providers to its previous customer base of six rural telcos.

Those new customers include: ETEX Telephone Cooperative in Texas; Daviess-Martin Rural Telephone Corporation, Richland Grant Telephone Cooperative and Ligonier Telephone Company in Indiana; Viola Home Telephone Company, McDonough Telephone Cooperative and New Windsor Telephone in Illinois; LaValle Telephone and Union Telephone Company in Wisconsin; Glandorf Telephone Company and Wabash Mutual Telephone in Ohio; Canby Telcom in Oregon, Hutchinson Telephone Company in Minnesota; Green Hills Telephone Company in Missouri; Matanuska Telephone Association in Arkansas; and Nex-Tech, Inc., in Kansas.

"We've worked hard to deliver a compelling IPTV service to the consumer's doorstep but we need to ensure that our subscribers' experience is the best it can possibly be," said Gene de Vore, IT manager at Canby Telcom, in a statement distributed by Ruckus Wireless. "We've found that the simplicity and flexibility of Wi-Fi is perfect for our customers but it must be reliable enough to support a production IPTV service. The Ruckus system was designed for this exact purpose."

The MediaFlex system allows telcos to avoid the cost and labor of improving in-home wiring to ensure quality of service for the multimedia services they increasingly are providing. The vendor said its system, which can be managed remotely by the service provider, can be installed in less than one hour, and can quickly be configured to support connections to additional devices.