WaveTunnels by the Sea – Providing a Quick, High-Capacity and Low-Cost Backbone Network for the Wi-Fi NOW Event
Introduction
The Wi-Fi NOW event, one of the industry’s leading events devoted to that technology, was recently held at a major hotel in the famous seaside resort town of Brighton, UK. Like all events and conferences a temporary Local Area Network is necessary to connect and backhaul WiFi and IoT applications.
Challenge
Hosting events represents a fair amount of work, and that is particularly true as organizers must deploy a temporary network to connect POS devices, provide ubiquitous Wi-Fi access and even at times cellular small cells.
The tried and true approach to providing this connectivity backbone is to lay Cat 5/6 Ethernet cable throughout the show floor area. Sometimes the cables are run along the baseboard of walls or sometimes strung up higher from the ceiling. This work takes a lot of time (and typically done at night to avoid disruption) and money, taking into account the costs of cable and labor, which also seem to go up every year.
For the Wi-Fi NOW event, the organizers were confronted with the usual Ethernet deployment issues, magnified by the need to do it quickly. The backbone network connecting all these devices needed to be multi-gigabit and low latency.
“The WaveTunnels were extremely easy to deploy and use, and once up and running no one knew or cared how we executed the backbone connectivity. They operated just like cable.”
~ Claus Hetting, CEO, Wi-Fi Now
Solution
Enter the WaveTunnel wireless backbone from Airvine: a point-to-point-to-point indoor wireless backbone network that can be daisy chained in any topology. This system is composed of Nodes that provide a high-speed backbone surpassing CAT5 performance. The WaveTunnel operates 60GHz, a frequency band that has plenty of bandwidth and virtually no interference, and its signals can pass through interior walls, a feat no other 60GHz system in the world can match. These features made the deployment of the wireless backbone for Wi-Fi NOW a breeze. For this specific deployment, a total of six tripods were used and each one held a WaveTunnel Node and a Wi-Fi 6 AP. This arrangement allowed the APs to be placed in locations that would provide the best coverage. WaveTunnel nodes also incorporate advanced beam steering technology, meaning no alignment was necessary – the installers merely had to plug in the WaveTunnel nodes and then configure them using a smartphone app to for automatic connections.
The diagram here shows the floor plan for the Wi-Fi NOW event and the placement of the six WaveTunnel nodes providing the wireless backbone. No other wireless technology exists that can do what the WaveTunnel system can do. The WaveTunnel’s narrow beams operating in 60GHz were able to connect through tight spaces or when needed bast through the walls. Performance was also boosted by interference-free operations, which resulted in no variance in capacity throughout the venue.
Results
The network was deployed and up and running in hours. Over the three days of the conference the system was available 24×7 and transported terabits of traffic. Claus Hetting, CEO of Wi-Fi NOW was pleased with how smoothly everything went.
“The WaveTunnels were extremely easy to deploy and use, and once up and running no one knew or cared how we executed the backbone connectivity,” said Mr. Hetting “They operated just like cable.”
When the show wrapped up on a Thursday, the WaveTunnel nodes were packed up and ready to be used again at the next event. WaveTunnel by Airvine – simple to deploy, simple to use and simply fast. The future of indoor backbones is here.