|
Mobile & Wireless
WFI Goes Shopping With ClearMesh
Wireless Optics Fit the Bill for Retail Center Deployment
by Jim Barthold
A combination of fussy storeowners and the need for
guaranteed reliability has led Wireless Facilities Inc. (WFI), a
large independent RF and wireless engineering company, to
deploy ClearMesh Networks’ wireless mesh networking gear in
a San Diego shopping center.
WFI integrates and manages wireless networks throughout
the U.S., including in shopping areas like the San Diego
Westfield UTC shopping center, a spread out, campus-like
complex of high-end retail establishments and a skating rink
that is more like a business campus than a shopping mall.
The ritzy nature of the mall made wireless connectivity a
default winner.
“Westfield is the highest branded shopping center chain in
the United States and perhaps even in the world. Aesthetics
are very important to them, so we can’t run overhead cables,”
explained Desmond Wheatley, president of WFI’s enterprise
services division.
Of course WFI can’t trench the connecting fiber either.
“A lot of people talk about bringing fiber everywhere, but the
reality is two things always get in the way: the cost of lateral
expansion” moving fiber from outside the mall into the
shopping district, which would have been around $30,000 to
$40,000 and “You’d be digging it and trenching it, which is a
significant process,” said Hitendra (Sonny) Soni, senior vice
president of sales and customer services at ClearMesh.
The only real option is wireless and the least expensive way
to do that is to use unlicensed spectrum. That, too, is rife with
problems, since the mall is outside and unlicensed spectrum
is an easy target for interference from other sources.
“We have 700 RF engineers on staff and it’s their job to
figure out the best way to minimize interference,” said
Wheatley.
The best way turned out to be ClearMesh, which doesn’t use
conventional RF frequencies to transport data throughout its
wireless mesh but rather optics.
“It’s unlicensed, but it’s not using radio waves, it’s using light
waves. It’s highly directional point-to-point infrastructure and
there is zero opportunity for interference caused by other
people’s networks,” Wheatley said.
For the range of applications that WFI offers – Wi-Fi hotspot
connectivity for mall visitors; high-speed data connectivity for
center stores, including credit card transaction authorizations;
voice services for remote kiosk locations; closed circuit
television (CCTV) surveillance of stores, kiosks and parking
areas; access control and alarming; and building automation
services such as environmental controls – reliability and data
throughput are equally important.
“If you think of one of those ClearMesh links, it’s basically
now operating as a freeway down which a whole variety of
different types of data traffic are running,” said
Wheatley. “The network doesn’t care whether it’s video or
voice or Internet or whatever else.”
The ClearMesh meshes feed data to and among the retail
customers and in part of the overall hotspot. They’re then
linked back to a Cisco Airnet system that aggregates traffic
from seven wireless points of presence (POPs) to a Cisco
switch
“My product’s job is to connect all of these seven POPs
together to each other and provide a very high bandwidth,
very low latency capacity network. I form a backbone and
underneath are Cisco switches and underneath that are CCTV
video cameras and Wi-Fi access points,” said Soni.
Altogether, it gives shopkeepers a secure mission-critical data
network that allows WFI to guarantee service reliability to
demanding customers, said Wheatley.
“The link reliability anywhere in the network, not just the
ClearMesh links -- we have fiber in there, switches, wireless
access points – every one of those links must be tested by
our engineering team…because there is no tolerance in this
day and age for losing a voice or life safety or security link,”
Wheatley concluded.
|
