Updated. Ruckus Wireless, which has built some of the largest outdoor carrier Wi-Fi networks in the world, is going public. On Friday, it filed documentation with the SEC for a $ 100 million initial public offering.
Ruckus has been a rather hot item of speculation ever since Ericsson scooped up Ruckus’s primary competitor BelAir Networks in February (a story GigaOM broke a month beforehand). Both Ruckus and BelAir have been building out massive outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots grids for wireless, wireline and cable operators around the world, and in many ways Ruckus has been more successful than BelAir. In Japan alone, Ruckus has deployed 100,000 hotspots alone for KDDI, which the operator uses to offload traffic from its cellular networks.
Ruckus also sells enterprise and indoor Wi-Fi gear and it has begun partnering with big vendors like Nokia Siemens Networks to incorporate its Wi-Fi technology into their future heterogeneous network architectures.
We reached out to VP of corporate marketing David Callisch, but he said he could give no comment on the IPO. In previous interviews, though, Callisch said that Ruckus was more interested in remaining a standalone company than be purchased by one of the big vendors. While an acquisition is still a possibility either pre-or post-IPO, Ruckus appears to be sticking to its word.
Update: Ruckus’s S-1 filing paints a picture of rapid growth. Annual revenues increased from $ 44 million in 2009 to $ 120 million in 2011, and in the first six months of 2012, Ruckus has already entered $ 94 million into its ledger. The company turned its first profit of $ 4.2 million in 2011, and in the first two quarters of 2012 its already recorded a net profit of $ 24 million. The new company would trade under the ticker RKUS.
