I thought this was an awesome blog that Brian Chee posted about Xirrus. Funny thing was I posted something about Xirrus yesterday for being the Wi-Fi provider at Interop. I would like to share what Brian blogged about:
Back in the day, a network engineer commented that “…we sure had to run a lot of wire for wireless…” The gist being that we needed to put in a whole heck of a lot of wireless access points to support the loads found at a technology trade show. Now this is NOT to say that the InteropNET venue is by any means “normal”, because it isn’t. From the NOC we can typically see hundreds of access points with people stomping all over each other with their AP’s cranked up to full volume in a feeble attempt to drown out their neighbor. We also have one heck of a lot of territory to cover since our guests will find a quiet spot just about everywhere in the convention center. So our challenges for wireless are: (1) the need for LOTS of coverage, and (2) the need for intelligent coverage so that we don’t add to the “shouting match” between the hundreds of access points in the exhibit hall.
Our partners at Xirrus are back with their flying saucer WiFi arrays, hovering over the exhibit hall, and on tripods throughout the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. However, these flying saucers actually have up to sixteen radios in each saucer, with sectional antennas and patented signal guides to more intelligently direct the signal to where it’s needed instead of just blasting in a 360 degree circle. The end result for the InteropNET is a whole lot less wire run to support wireless and instead of a hundred or so access points, we’re talking about a dozen now.
These “sector” antennas are mounted along the rim of the saucer, each one covering a piece of the “pie” so to speak. With each radio being individually controllable, the Xirrus folks can “shape” the radio energy to better cover odd shaped areas. One of their favorite examples are schools and how they tend to have a high density of users in long narrow buildings.
These anonymous “heat maps” are actual measurements from various Xirrus customer schools….the funny thing is that warehouses also have heat maps that look like these but for a different reason. Your typical warehouse has long rows of metal shelves with stuff on them and the signal from traditional access points will bounce around like billiard balls causing all kinds of multipath interference. The Xirrus solution of shaping the RF energy patterns, greatly reduces multipathing allowing more throughput with less energy.
To get a better glimpse of the technology and Xirrus’ role in the InteropNET, I shot a little video of John Merrill at hotstage where he shows off the guts of an array.
Hip Technology 