Several months ago, I switched from DISH to ATT-Uverse because they have better features and offer a discount for subscribing both TV and DSL together. The service has been great, but I ran into some unexpected cabling problems. My house was originally wired for CATV. Several years ago, when I switched from Comcast to DISH, they told me that I had RG5 coaxial cables and DISH requires RG6. They put another set of coax cables in my home. During the ATT-Uverse installation, I wanted to put the 2Wire Gateway in my study, where I have 2 Desktop PCs and a Print Server. Converting all 3 of them to use WiFi will be rather expensive! ATT-Uverse has to put yet another set of coaxial cables to connect the Gateway from my study to the set-top boxes in my Family Room and 2 Bedrooms. So I ended up with 3 set of coax in my house, one spanning from the garage (Comcast), one spanning from the roof (DISH) and one spanning from my study (ATT-Uverse). Near each of my TV, I have 3 coax outlets! It is rather pathetic. It took the technician the whole day to install the coax. I also ended up taking the whole day off, instead of the 2 hours that I had originally planned. It was frustrating to waste a day of vacation to put more ugly wires and outlets into my house.

Recently, I have another problem. My mother-in-law has decided to move in with us, which is a big problem by itself. Naturally, she wants her own TV in her room. Of course, that is not the Bedroom that ATT-Uverse has wired. While the original ATT-Uverse installation was “free” except for my day of “vacation”, running a new coax from my study to her bedroom is going to cost me big bucks. A friend of mine told me about the Ruckus MediaFlex. Products. I got the MediaFlex NG and 3 Adapters. Ruckus told me that I simply have to unplug the coax cables and connect the NG to the 2Wire Gateway and each Adapter to the Set-top Boxes using Ethernet cables. No configuration changes. No software to mess with. Simply Plug and Play. How many times have I heard those words before!

Being an engineer by trade, I am of course skeptical. TV and Internet are mission critical in our household and no downtime will be tolerated by my wife and kids. I have engineering friends who work at 2Wire and at Ruckus. I set up lunch appointments with each of them in anticipation that I will need some help. Unfortunately, I could not get them into the same lunch, nor could I get them to volunteer to do the testing for me. I even sent an email to another friend who works at Motorola, which manufactures the set-top boxes. I turned off the WLAN on the 2Wire Gateway to avoid any radio interference with the MediaFlex. With all these preparations, I disconnected the coax and connected the MediaFlex equipment. After 10-15 seconds, the blinking green lights became solid and the video appeared on the screens of my 3 TV. It simply works!

It has been working flawlessly for the last couple of months. No pixel loss. No frame freezing. I even turned the WLAN on the 2Wire Gateway back on. Even though they are just a few feet apart, there is absolutely no interference. Amazing! I now have 2 WLANs with 2 different SDID in my home, and probably the best WiFi coverage in the neighborhood. Now my next home project is to get rid of the 3 sets of coax cable in my house.

Ruckus rocks!

Roger Cheung, San Jose