Georgia World Congress Center Deploys Meru 802.11ac Wi-Fi Solution
Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC) has deployed Meru 802.11ac Wi-Fi to support high densities of mobile devices used by event exhibitors and attendees in its 3.9 million square-foot facility. Learn more at http://www.merunetworks.com
Jim Jenkins: The George Will Conference Center is one of the largest convention centers in the country, and there's over 1.3 million square feet of exhibit space. Right now we have a show in-house that's called IST which is one of the largest education shows in the country. They have close to 20,000 attendees that are coming into Atlanta this week. And with that, most people that are attending have one, or two, or three devices that they would like to connect, and keep connected while they're here at the show.
Jason Harris: When events are selecting a venue, particularly the larger technical conferences. Wireless is going to play a prominent role. They've got sessions called BYOD rooms, "Bring Your Own Device." The interactive nature is such that they're not looking for disconnectivity between sessions or when they're sitting around catching up with work or Facebook. This is integral to what's happening within the session itself.
Jim Jenkins: We installed the Meru system that was able to handle every user that has come in here. And we've seen over 12,000 simultaneous users on the network and we've also seen 24,000 unique users that have connected over the last two days. We ended up choosing the Meru AP832 and it's an AC product which is a new protocol 802.11AC.
Jason Harris: This manages two four. This manages five gigahertz and away. With the airtime fairness that we can put a lot of people on the system and not have it come to a crawl. That's essential for these planners. That's essential for these venues to be able to do that successfully. You could walk into a sea of people, happily connect, happily bridge in, and get your allotted bandwidth. It's impressive. It's not the kind of thing we've been able to do before.
Jim Jenkins: The EzRF manager has been very helpful. We have to run a router report for the show management and for the groups that come in here. They want to see data on how many users were there, how much bandwidth is used, how many unique devices. And the EzRF manager allows us to run most any report that you can imagine. A lot of times they want to have a sponsor that is sponsoring the wireless. And with that we have to have a sponsor page, and with the identity manager we can do that and create any type of page that they would like. Which is really helpful, and the customer feels like they get their money's worth out of it.
Jason Harris: The comments have been very good, the event organizers have been extremely impressed. They've never been able to bridge this many clients on their wireless segment before. Our peak simultaneous usage has set a record here.
Jim Jenkins: The Meru system that we have in place now, it's actually is handling the traffic with airtime fairness much better than we've seen with any other product that we've tried or experienced here. And with Meru we feel that we have the best product out there. Right now they are extremely happy. They have almost doubled the number of users that they had connected this year from what they had last year. So they couldn't be more pleased with the way the system is functioning right now. I suppose it's been a win-win for all of us, I think for Meru, IST, and the Conference center, for the way the network has performed so far.
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