There are some projects just feel more profound, whilst the same level of pride, commitment and due diligence is given to all customer engagements, it is often those that span many weeks, months or even years that provide the greatest satisfaction. Not just on a personal level, but also professionally, knowing that by having input into key decisions taken during the lifecycle of a project, it had some genuine impact on the outcomes, and ultimately a positive end user experience, in my opinion, if you can remain completely transparent to those who interact with the network, you have succeeded.
Whilst this particular project was not fully disclosed by my current employer prior to joining the company, for sake of NDA’s that were already signed, it quickly became clear Day 1, the magnitude of the task that lay ahead. Ideal had won a bid to deliver a Converged Network System and customer facing wireless network for a new live music venue, being built in Manchester, UK, the largest of its kind in the country.
Multi-use and a capacity of 23,500 people, and i would warrant that this is going to be one of the largest single deployment of wireless access points into one premises, anywhere in the UK (Not confirmed!) especially for this type of use case.
Cue excitement, nervous anticipation and a considerably amount of coffee getting upto speed with all the documentation that had been brought to life my colleagues over the past two years since its inception.
Whilst i have had many years experience planning, designing and commissioning wireless networks, across many verticals, and often in very challenging environments, this was to be a new feather in the cap.
Was it a daunting prospect? That was not my immediate thought, whilst the physical environment is vast, it is still a physics problem, but on steroids. Challenge very much accepted!
As we start to move into the commissioning phase of this project over the next 12-18 months, i hope to be able to document some of the many aspects related to RF design for large public venues, the challenges related to managing QoE (Quality of experience) for very high-density wireless deployments, and the technical solutions that are formulated as a result.
Key areas of interest
- Very High Density (VHD) Solution Design
- Real time location based services (RTLS)
- Proximity services (BLE)
- System Dimensioning
- Scaling of anciliary services such as DDI
- The Visitor User Experience (UX)
- WBA/Cisco OpenRoaming
The first post in the series is one of the more mundane tasks, but an important step in the overall process to ensure that we meet with the requirements of the venue, but also ensure the best possible end user experience, whilst offering long term investment protection, for what is the key enabler, the wireless access points themselves.