Airvine University Video Series
Session 1 – Episode 4 (6:01 min.)
Some use cases: So a lot of conversation a lot of talk, I showed you how you can deploy this in a spur how you can deploy it in a ring but now let’s actually look at some some bids and some deployments that we’ve got out in the field today.
So if we look at this, this is a proposal that we did for a big box warehouse store that I’m not going to name and they had a quote on how they were going to do this with cables they wanted to extend some indoor small cell access points.l They needed to upgrade the coverage, higher capacity, small cell nodes, be they Wi-Fi or 5G, it was going to cost between $25 to $30,000 for the labor plus the cables.
The cables had to be strung along the ceiling. Scissor lifts were required, you could only do this during the night, and it was basically going to be estimated at 4 days per store to deploy this new cable.
When you look at the WaveTunnel, our solution was roughly half the price. There’s no cables to mount–you put up the new small cell access point and the WaveTunnel at the same time. No professional skills required. Bolt it into the ceiling and plug it in and deploy in a ring for resiliency. Estimated time for each store: one day.
So again the WaveTunnel solution is not just saving you money it’s saving you time.
Let’s look at another deployment. Here we have a hotel or an MDU and we’re showing you on the left a WaveTunnel deployment and on the right how you would do this with wires. The goal here was to connect 32 Wi-Fi access points across one floor one in each apartment, into a head-end. Five floors needed to be done, and work could only be done in the off-hours when tenants or guests were sleeping. You can guess that even that was not always going to be sufficient, because there is construction involved in laying cable and for those you will be closing off portions of the hallways for the cable. Four man-weeks, 4,800 feet of cable, conduit must be laid or it must be done above the ceiling. Optical components for the MDF to IDF fiber connection.
Vs. the WaveTunnel: one week, no IDF, no HVAC for the wiring closet, no professional skills, you’re saving over 128 man hours of labor, and again, you’re installing the access points in the WaveTunnel at the same time.
Let’s continue. This is a deployment that we did as a demonstration with a manufacturer based in Texas called All Quality and services. AQS is a contract manufacturer with sites in Texas, California, and China. AQS expands and assigns manufacturing space as they have new customers and what we did with AQS was we had them install a demo WaveTunnel network in an open portion of the floor just to show that no special skills were required. the AQS team installed four WaveTunnels in a ring under the supervision of Airvine since they had not even had training. They used simple molly bolts to bolt it to the ceiling near power sources, and within five hours that ring network was installed and operational.
You can see some of the 4K video here that they were using to feed it. There are also Wi-Fi access points on this network. And we encourage you if you find yourself in Texas, and would like to see this demo network contact us and we’d be happy to take you for a tour.
Are there others out there doing this too? One of the things that makes Airvine unique–and we do have patents on our technology–nobody else is doing this. Nobody else is doing this because they have not figured out out how to overcome those two significant obstacles that I mentioned about the antenna: the ability to be non-line-of-sight (NLOS) and the ability to steer 90 degrees around corners. No other solution, nobody’s even trying this. The closest that you can get to a WaveTunnel solution is a Wi-Fi mesh deployment. And as I mentioned in chapter one, Wi-Fi mesh has a well-known list of deficiencies.
A question that came to my mind as we all know what a big box warehouse is, and looks like, without naming names, and with just rough numbers, how many units does it take to cover one of those? In order of magnitude, how many units would it take to cover something like that. Well we we can go 100 meters between nodes–actually we could go further but we restrict it to 100 meters because we want to make sure we have gigabit-plus connectivity all the way throughout the network.
In this particular warehouse it was four nodes that were required. If you look at the diagram that I was showing each node is kind of in the middle of a section so you’re the the warehouse itself which is roughly 200 to 300 meters long. Where we run into challenges with the ranges is in the warehouses and the factories. There are factories that we are quoting right now that have indoor spaces as long as 500 meters–half a kilometer–it’s really going to be dependent upon the devices that they want to plug into the unit so it’s not so much the physical layout and the space that you’re trying to cover, that’s a piece of it, but it’s where do you want your access points? Where do you want your cameras? Where do you needyour equipment that needs connectivity, that needs that ethernet backbone? So you’re really going to be placing the WaveTunnel nodes based on the application and the uses and the devices you’re connecting, more than just the space itself.