China's Shanghai Railway Deploys Smart Wi-Fi from Ruckus Wireless

Delivering seamless Wi-Fi driven connectivity to its customers, Shanghai (China) Railway Bureau has selected and deployed Ruckus Wireless Smart Wi-Fi products and technology across eight railway stations throughout Shanghai, the largest Chinese city and largest city (by population) in the world.

Over 110,000 registered users of the Railway’s new i-station information system are now leveraging this new Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi infrastructure to obtain up-to-date, real-time arriving and departing train schedules of Shanghai railway stations, and other useful Shanghai Railway information.

The eight stations total a coverage area of 400,000 square meters, including Shanghai station, Shanghai South station, Shanghai Hongqiao station, Hangzhou station, Hangzhou East station, Nanjing station, Nanjing South station, and Hefei station. The Bureau’s i-station system is part of the emerging global trend to create Smart cities using state-of-the-art communications technology that improves municipal operations and services to enhance the way of life for visitors and city residents.

Shanghai Railway Bureau’s new, free, public Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi network consists of over 600 Ruckus ZoneFlex™ indoor access points (APs), each of which can easily handle up to 500 concurrent users, while delivering pervasive, reliable and high-performance wireless connectivity in these kinds of high-density environments, including the station waiting halls, commercial zones and outdoor squares.

The APs are centrally managed via Ruckus ZoneDirector™ Smart Wireless LAN (WLAN) controllers. Shanghai Railway Bureau chose Ruckus Wireless Smart Wi-Fi technology over products from other vendors because of the company’s patented technology that delivers reliable, consistent signal coverage and avoids RF interference.

The Shanghai Railway Bureau, founded in 1949, is a regional railway bureau affiliated with the Ministry of Railways of the People’s Republic of China, and owns and operates the longest railway lines in China. The Bureau is in charge of nearly 11,000 kilometers of railways throughout China, overseeing 503 stations, and manages the railways along with a total of 17 stations in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Anhui and Zhejiang Provinces, including over 1,500 kilometers of inter-city railways.

i-station and more Powered by Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi

Thousands of passengers travel daily through the Bureau’s Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Hefei stations. During peak times, over 15,000 travelers gather in the railway stations’ waiting halls, occupying from ten to 60,000 square meters. The new Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi network infrastructure now helps to ensure these passengers, increasingly armed with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, have a better Wi-Fi user experience.

As part of the Shanghai Railway Bureau’s Smart city-oriented project, the Shanghai station, Shanghai South station and Shanghai Hongqiao station all use Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi with the railway’s new i-station system. The i-station system delivers real-time messages like train schedules, real-time updates including delay notifications and actual arrival and departure times, plus lost and found information, travel tips, and the ability for passengers to submit comments/feedback. Railway passengers simply log on to and register on the system from any of these stations via the Railway’s Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi network. According to recent statistics, the i-station system enjoys 11,000 visits daily.

“With i-station and Ruckus, we’re delivering a great package of user-friendly travel services,” said Wang Bo, system architect of the Beijing Jianfei Science Company, who deployed the Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi network for the Shanghai Railway Bureau. “We really needed the kind of reliable, high-performance wireless network infrastructure that Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi provides, not only to provide passengers with convenient Internet access station-wide, it also empowers them to travel more confidently, since they can now more easily keep up-to-date on changing train status using their mobile devices from anywhere in the station.”

Statistics from the Shanghai Railway Bureau show that all eight stations deliver up to 100 Mbps download speeds, with anywhere from 4,000 to 9,000 passengers accessing the network in the stations at any given time. Wang Bo concludes, “Passengers have quickly embraced i-station, empowered with the Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi network infrastructure, which, combined, has met their and the Railway’s demands for reliable, Wi-Fi access to provide real-time information that improves everyone’s travel experience.”