Large facilities like stadiums and arenas really require wireless coverage. However, the sporadic and infrequent demands for coverage are normally the challenges for service providers (SPs). If sufficient capacity and coverage is not available when needed, SPs risk lost revenue and subscriber churn. However, if dedicated capacity is placed within such facilities, it frequently goes unutilized when events are not taking place. The result is underutilization of infrastruc­ture, lost revenue and decreased profitability for the SP. This was the scenario with Sardar Patel Stadium in Gujarat, where they wanted the Wi-Fi connection only during the cricket season, for the media coverage purposes and were looking for a viable solution.

Previous scenario
Previously, the stadium used the dial-up connection and journa­lists and photographers found it extremely difficult to file their reports and upload photographs. “A few people would come here and set-up their networks using their own equipments. It was also difficult to get good bandwidth because the stadium was located at a distance of 15km from the city and SPs found it very inconvenient to set-up entire infrastructure for one client,” informed C Sujit Singh,VP-Sales and Marketing, Microsense. The dial-up connec­tion hardly worked in the place and it took hours to send a photograph to the copy desk. The journalists started compla­ining about their issues to the administration. Microsense came as the rescuer for the issues faced by Sardar Patel stadium, as it was both a system integrator and small time SP.

Rollout
Keeping the connectivity and bandwidth issues in mind, Microsense decided to deploy Wi-Fi solution in the stadium. The stadium couldn't reject the offer because Microsense provided this in a service model, where they would be providing the Wi-Fi service only when required by the stadium during the cricket season. It deployed a Wi-Fi mesh over the stadium with multiple access points, keeping the mobility criteria in mind so that people with laptops and PDA's would also easily get connected without any hassles.

Solution offered
The university required high-speed Internet bandwidth at the ground. Thus they extracted the 2Mbps leased line Internet bandwidth from the nearby cell phone tower provided by the local Internet service provider (ISP)-U-Telecom. “We initially got the E1 line from the cell phone provider and then we converted it to T1 for Internet usage. We used point-to-point wireless bridge to establish the stable wireless link,” Singh informed.

Network architecture
According to Singh, designing the network structure was a critical phase during the deployment and his team managed the portion very well. “Our engineers were geared up with state-of-the-art tools that helped us design an efficient network. We strategically placed the access points, their power and channels for optimum channels. Our RF experts upgra­ded some wireless access points with higher gain antennas to get the better reach and seamless coverage,” he informed.

Since their network was running on DHCP, the media personnel no longer needed to punch in the IP address or change IP setting while moving through the ground. Microsense also offered the static IP feature to the ground staff if they wanted to move from DHCP to static for their couple of applications.

Challenges and achievements
There were multiple issues with regard to unwiring the 50-acre stadium for Microsense. The primary area was the remote area connectivity. Since the stadium is located 15km from the city, there was no ISP to lay its cable around the stadium. Thus getting the basic Internet bandwidth was an initial problem. Another hurdle was the authenticated wireless network is logins. Most of the vendors in the market provide their own software that requires one to download that on his/her computer and then every one have to use that tedious software or PPPOE settings in order to log on to the network.

Here Microsense did the authentication by itself for faster turnaround. “Thus whenever a user makes request through a web page, it goes to our authentication gateway and gets checked through the database; once that's done, the user would be allowed an access,” Singh claimed.

Thirdly, since the area was 50 acres, reporters and photo­graphers (media personals) were sitting all over the ground to get the best insights, and they needed high speed Internet connectivity to send their reports and photographs to their respective office. Thus a fast, uninterrupted and secure wireless coverage was needed to cover most of the stadium area for higher productivity. Microsense provided a bandwidth of 2Mbps at the ground. The key was to control it and allot it for right usage. They had a unique priority pooling system that kept the photographers on the streak. Since reporters needed lesser bandwidth than the photo­graphers, they were given the higher priority. Thus there were no bottleneck for the bandwidth for the users, and everyone was able to send their data in a record time

Phases and time
According to Singh, Microsense unwired the whole stadium within a day. It took a day for them to complete the survey and identify the requirements, two days for setting up the last mile connectivity and establish the link, and one day for the equipment deployment. “Overall, it took us four days to rollout the whole deployment in the stadium and the deployment happened in a single phase,” he quipped.

NR Sethuraman
sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in

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