CASE STUDY: Outdoor Wi-Fi, 1-Mile Urban Street Fair
SUMMARY: A New York tradition, the street fair extended one mile long and featured hundreds of sponsors ranging from food vendors, entertainment, clothing, jewelry and other goods. The solution provided 2.4Ghz wireless with an RSSI better than -60 dBm. Each city block is about 150 feet long and has about 16 vendors on each block.
THE CHALLENGE: Vendors needed to connect with Credit Card transaction terminals in order to receive more than just cash. A major event sponsor offered vendors a fantastic rate for use of the Credit Card transaction terminals that was too good to pass up. For these temrinals to work, they needed to be connected to a backbone network. The proposed solution was 2 high-powered directional Access Points mounted 15 feet above street level on each alternating corner so not to overlap with one another and still be able to handle capacity.
SOLUTION: The deployed network was a mix between TDMA-based Line of Sight wireless for a complete back haul integrated with distributed Wi-Fi on each street corner with a redundant uplink using a 100Mbps LTE connections. The event sponsor provided VPN connectivity to their secured network which the network-core connected to via LTE Internet connection. Uptime was 99.9997% overall where only 1 out of 30 transactions needed to be swiped twice.
Using alternating channel allocation per block as well as alternating SSID's per block (both to avoid poor connectivity and overlapping), Vendors were able to connect at the highest speed possible.
Considering the density of the area, nearby structural and radio interference, the solution was successful in every way.
