Isn’t the weather in the UK nice now? It’s not raining. It’s been a while since it has. We can see the sun and it’s amazing!

Welcome to our sixth WiFi Ninjas Podcast episode 🙂

It’s our second interview and we start to love it, as our interviewees do all the hard work when we can just sit, listen to them and sip our earl grey. Jokes aside, we do hope that you guys like listening to the experts in their areas of expertise as much as we do.

Ash is the geekiest WiFi Solutions Architect that we know and spending several years of his career working on projects followed by a few years of being an SA makes Ash a dinosaur in the field. He’s got the looks, great voice and bags full of experience 🙂

Today we have discussed a stadium WiFi design, where Ash has covered quite a few of unique topics, that would hopefully help us all designing wireless for such massive venues.

Here is what we have discussed:

• Wireless Physical Design
  • Where to mount APs and antennas?
  • As close to the users: overhead > under seat > patches through concrete? > hand rails
  • Antennas types?
  • 2.4 vs 5GHz? Is 2.4 still needed there?

• Wireless Configuration
  • High Density Optimisations
  • Reserved channels to ensure capacity for non-fans?
    • House keeping, media staff, staff comms, VIPs
  • Rate limiting approach
    • Per client, per SSID, none?
  • Roaming approach
    • Is it a real concern?

• Apps
  • Apps used by clients
    • Replays, current score, stats etc
    • Social media
    • Order food?
  • Apps used by owners
    • Comms with security and stewards
    • Digital ticketing
    • Queue monitoring
    • Managing building infra

• Project Lifecycle
  • Project Management of this thing
  • Predictive, pre-deployment and post deployment surveys etc.
  • Liasing with contractors and 3rd parties
  • Additional Testing?

• LAN & WAN
  • Internet pipe
  • LAN structure
  • Throughput concerns
  • Cabling

• Security
  • Onboarding
  • Auth
  • What infra used?
  • Encryption
  • Content filtering
  • Additional security features

• Challenges
  • APs placement / antennas mounting
  • Maintain small cell sizes
  • Bottlenecks
  • Anything else?

• Tips

• Lessons learned
  • Things you did right
  • Things you had to spent tons of time fixing

• Real world usage during games
  • 30-40% uptake?
  • More in media areas?
  • Bandwidth utilisation?
  • Per AP utilisation?

Thanks for listening and please don’t hesitate to leave a comment, feedback, subscribe or follow us on social media 🙂

Cheeeeeers!