The warehouse environment creates serious challenges for traditional WLAN deployments. Though warehouses are typically open spaces that would seem suited to wireless signal propagation, their construction and layout can be problematic, with metal structures and corridors making coverage difficult to achieve. Other obstacles include a changing RF landscape due to the movement of goods and roaming and re-authentication issues that can impact productivity of a highly mobile workforce.

Read more on Extricom Wireless LAN for Logistics here…

The Halliwell Jones Stadium – home of ‘Warrington Wolves’ – chooses Extricom to Enhance their Fan Experience and Generate Revenue Growth.

Sporting venues often bring thousands or tens of thousands of people together to enjoy a single event. These days, passionate fans are expecting more than ever to enjoy a reliable and consistent mobility experience and to use their personal devices as they would anywhere else. At the same time, stadium and team owners are looking for ways to make money, to regain revenue from their initial investment.

 Whilst traditional wireless infrastructure providers have inherently struggled with performance issues within stadium constructions or have had to develop venue-specific additional technologies, the standard Extricom solution with its patented Channel Blanket™ architecture will simply deliver interference-free connectivity and much more, as The Halliwell Jones Stadium discovered.

This stadium is not only an iconic local sports venue but in recent years has been the hub for many community events and provides a model that other leading sports clubs throughout the world have studied. Following the stadium’s re-development, Andy Topham, Marketing and CRM Manager at the stadium was looking to deploy an effective wireless LAN solution in both the North Stand at 65m x 12m and the East Stand at 100m x 15m. The East Stand also houses the club’s health and education facilities and their banqueting and conference facilities.

“At the end of the current season we knew we were going to build a further new stand to complete the stadium set-up. We needed a wireless solution that was flexible, easily scalable and would remain unaffected by environmental changes. Extricom fitted the bill.”
Mr Andy Topham Marketing & CRM Manager Halliwell Jones Stadium

Read the full Halliwell Jones Case Study here…

Our engineers have now installed well over 100 Extricom networks and we also support many Extricom wireless networks not installed by us.

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The latest Extricom products were displayed through live demonstrations, videos and presentations and we were pleased to hear such positive feedback from visitors and potential clients to our stand. For schools considering a WLAN deployment, looking to upgrade their existing WLAN or wanting to introduce iPads or BYOD strategies in the coming year, a visit to BETT 2012 and time on the Solutions House / Extricom Stand C90 was time well spent.

If you would like to find out how we can help your school get in touch with our specialist education team – email contact@solutionshouse.ltd.uk or telephone 01928 515600.

Dedicated to showcasing the best in UK and international educational technology products, resources and best practice, BETT has enabled thousands of practitioners to enhance their knowledge of learning through technology. BETT attracts more than 600 educational suppliers and around 30,000 visitors. It brings together the global teaching and learning community for four days of innovations and inspirations.

Or at least it does when you are designing a workable wireless LAN for commercial, industrial and public service environments. The Extricom response is really, really big access points:

For example, try thinking about piping music into 20 rooms. Traditional managed wireless would set up an all-in-one stereo in each room and then use a complex system to coordinate them so they played the same tune at the same time. Extricom would have one stereo unit, with speakers cabled into each room. Simple!

The key-limiting factor for every wireless solution is the legally demarked bandwidths available to broadcast its signal. Within the 2.4 GHz band there are only three channels you can broadcast on where the signal does not interfere with the others. For example if this was radio stations, you could only fit three in before you would hear the stations talking over one another.

A wireless access point has a radio in it, and this radio broadcasts on one of the available channels, allowing devices to find, connect and network through it. If you want to put another access point next to it, the access point has to use a different channel so devices don’t get confused about where the signal is coming from. A bit like a contestant on a game show getting muddled with the audience all shouting different answers at the same time. This is the same case for the third access point, until you reach the fourth where you have to return to broadcast on the first channel you used (because you have run out of the three you have available). Therefore these access points cannot be sited next to one another. Managed wireless LANs have come about to coordinate this radio frequency issue and allow simpler management to the configuration of these devices.

Some managed solutions of this style go a step further and interfere with the IEEE standards, stripping off acknowledgments from packets to allow small clusters of access points to broadcast on the same channel. These are additional layers of processing that need to be coordinated by a controller located elsewhere within your LAN, the same LAN already carrying all your other network traffic.

Extricom decided to completely bypass all of these issues by just making their access points really big. A ball of coverage with a radius of up to 200 meters and an ability to accept over 2000 + simultaneous connections big, that’s how big we are talking. To achieve this they have found a way to distribute the radios/antenna at the end of Ethernet cable runs of up to 200 meters. An access point can support up to 32 distributed radio/antenna points creating a continuous blanket of coverage. A blanket of coverage with guarantees; a guarantee on the air rate of the wireless access and a guarantee of data transfer back to the network. Things that the other managed WLAN systems cannot guarantee because the placement of their access points and the physical LAN sit outside their control, so you see, size does really matter.

This big access point system also allows you to have up to 4 radios on each of the distributed radios/antenna points. So you can broadcast networks on all three of the 2.4GHz channels and the 5GHz channel at the same time, giving you 4 blanket wireless networks from one big access point, instead of the one network from traditional systems. This is because the available frequency in traditional systems is essentially eaten up or wasted as a management overhead.

Like traditional managed wireless, the Extricom access points can be managed across larger sites, or entirely geographically separate sites, providing full scalability. Also, for those with service continuity priorities, redundancy can be built in with Extricom’s cascade switch technology.

The very nature of the big access point system means that it is impossible to spoof access points into the network, and they are very simple to detect, as Extricom is simple looking for interference. If you try to intercept network traffic on the Extricom Ethernet, you would get a nasty surprise, as it is hardware solution not IP based network traffic.

If you were looking to enable your LAN as a WLAN, would you like to massively increase your number of network access points, or would you like to add a few robust, redundant, guaranteed, managed devices, with all the security hardware securely locked away in a cabinet?

The Intel Fizzbook Spin is a purpose-built netbook based on 1:1 Computing initiatives, which envisions every student having a laptop. The Fizzbook Spin was designed with the primary/ secondary education environment in mind, and is a simple, robust solution with built-in 802.11 b/g/n wireless connectivity.

The Fizzbook Spin enables young students to do research on the Internet, share their work with other students, upload their homework to their teacher, or even record a movie. Its screen can also be rotated and flipped over to become a touch-screen tablet.

How The Fizzbook Spin Transforms Education

Before netbooks, ensuring student access to online resources meant a significant infrastructure investment, either fixed desktops wired into a computer lab or a mobile cart loaded with laptops that moved from classroom to classroom, but could only support a limited number of students at one time. The Intel Fizzbook Spin changes the paradigm completely by allowing every student to leverage a suite of online education resources from their own laptop.

The factors that make the Intel Fizzbook Spin a compelling solution for primary/secondary education include:

• Tough and Cost-Effective: An ultra-compact, affordable, easy-to-carry laptop with durable, drop-proof construction, water-resistant keyboard, and a carrying handle, the Fizzbook Spin is well adapted to the rigors of institutional use. Specialized anti-theft software can be used to ensure that the Fizzbook Spin doesn’t wander off campus or get into the wrong hands.
• Flexibility: Allows classroom teachers to make presentations, guide student’s access to the Internet, deliver specific controlled content and interact individually with students and parents in giving tests or providing feedback.
• Teamwork: Facilitates collaboration with fellow students/teachers on campus, and throughout the community, facilitating the creation of group activities.
• Streamlined Administration: Enables classroom teachers to monitor attendance, prepare lessons, administer tests, control computer-induced distraction and provide feedback on students to management and parents.

The Fizzbook Spin in the Wireless Classroom

The Fizzbook Spin lacks many of the features of a sophisticated office professional’s notebook. There is limited local storage, no high performance, or multi-tasking capabilities. The Fizzbook Spin is primarily intended as a cloud device that accesses resources over a wireless network. It is not a standalone device.

The quality of the wireless network deployed to support the Fizzbook Spin is therefore crucial to its success. Not all wireless LAN (WLAN) systems are equal, and choosing the right network is essential. The whole idea of 1:1 Computing is effectively negated if every student has a laptop, but only a few are able to log in simultaneously; or once logged, on experience slow network speeds or frequent lost connections.

More and more, educational institutions are looking to an Extricom WLAN solution to make their wireless networking goals achievable.

Helping the Learning Solution Work: The Extricom Difference

It seems obvious that for wireless access to be effective in a classroom, 30 or 40 users should be able to log on at the same time and access the same online resources with reasonable performance. Traditional WLANs handle this scenario poorly, however, and can even become unstable when there are high levels of wireless traffic. This is because the system’s uncoordinated APs generate co-channel interference for each other, resulting in collisions and retransmissions, creating even more wireless traffic, leading to frustrating delays, and sometimes total system failure.

Extricom’s patented Channel Blanket architecture avoids these problems, delivering both coverage and capacity at full performance. The Wireless LAN is accessible anywhere on campus, remains stable under heavy load, and is available to every user who needs to access the system. Inside the Channel Blanket, all access points transmit on the same channel, and transmissions are centrally coordinated by the switch, rather than each individual AP. The resulting blankets of wireless coverage provide robust, resilient wireless connectivity.

An Extricom system allows APs to be placed without worrying about overlapping coverage from adjacent APs, and in densities that traditional wireless systems would not tolerate. Retransmissions are minimized, allowing the WLAN to function as efficiently as possible. This ultimately translates to the best possible throughput and performance for large numbers of users.

Extricom is the perfect choice for WLAN infrastructure that supports the Fizzbook Spin and other 1:1 Computing environments.

Features and Benefits

• Simpler Design and Maintenance: Extricom WLAN reduces the complexity of RF surveys and cell planning. All APs use the same channel in the Channel Blanket architecture, can be placed where needed for best coverage, and do not require configuration. The Extricom Wireless LAN Switch coordinates the connected APs to eliminate co-channel interference.
• Robust Connectivity: With every AP on the same channel, the Extricom switch receives multiple copies of each client transmission and uses only the best AP to transmit the reply, making the system highly resilient to RF interference.
• Multiplied Capacity: Extricom WLAN greatly enhances capacity by permitting frequency reuse at high AP densities and avoiding co-channel interference.
• Designed for 802.11n: Extricom switches and APs are 802.11n Draft 2 compliant, and the Extricom Channel Blanket Architecture is a perfect match for the unpredictable coverage patterns of 802.11n APs. This means the full power of