For the second year, Cellular Specialties is overseeing the project management, design and deployment of wireless infrastructure in and around the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans where the Super bowl will be held.
The company provided similar DAS and Wi-Fi network services in Indianapolis last year for the big game, and is preparing the Superdome and surrounding hotels and convention centers for the one million fans expected to come to New Orleans for Sunday’s Super Bowl.
Cellular Specialties is managing the cellular and Wi-Fi services on the Superdome campus, league headquarters, local hotels, team practice facilities and media and fan event sites, while ensuring sufficient capacity in the area for public safety operations. The company also recently announced that it installed an LTE network at the New England Patriots’ Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Mass., for an unnamed national carrier. Cellular Specialties had also been involved with the installation of Wi-Fi and 3G networks in the stadium over the past few years.
Calif.-based Wi-Fi provider Ruckus Wireless has been increasing its foothold in the United Kingdom. The company announced this week that it was selected by Global Reach Technology to provide its ZoneFlex Smart Wi-Fi system for several high-profile projects in England.
Global Reach has deployed Ruckus’ carrier-grade Wi-Fi inside and outside for public hotspot infrastructure along 27 miles of the River Thames waterfront, and onboard river ferries to support the more than 30 million people who access the river each year. In addition to providing its own branded public Wi-Fi services along the Thames starting this quarter, Global Reach is also using its own high-capacity infrastructure for wholesale and international roaming across the 27 miles of coverage.
Global Reach is also using Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi as the underlying technology for city Wi-Fi services in Leeds and Bradford.
Ruckus was also recently selected by Marston’s PLC, one of the largest U.K. brewers and pub operators, to provide Wi-Fi service in its 2,000 locations.
Ruckus introduced two new Smart Wi-Fi technologies this week, focused on helping network administrators simplify network management and improve device performance as the number of wireless devices proliferate and include printers, projectors, file servers.
“Network services devices that have historically been accessible through wired Ethernet connections are now integrating Wi-Fi to provide greater deployment flexibility,” said Steve Martin, VP of engineering for Ruckus Wireless. “For these devices to be accessible by users on Wi-Fi networks, they must advertise themselves. These advertisements, often performed by multicast protocols such as Bonjour or UPnP, create unique challenges that administrators must struggle to solve.”
The first prototypes of base stations and consumer premise equipment based on the IEEE 802.22 operations in TV white spaces were recently announced by National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Hitachi Kokusai Electric and ISB. The prototypes are designed to with the intent to provide broadband wireless access to un-served and under-served regions around the world and provide reliable backup broadband communications in emergencies.
The United States, Canadian and Japanese governments have been working on opening up TV white spaces for re-use of unused television spectrum, particularly in areas where that spectrum in underutilized. The IEEE’s 802.22 working group published a standard to do so with a system that offers around 10-times the coverage of Wi-Fi. However, NICT, Hitachi and ISB noted that there is no TWVS system based on the standard that satisfies Federal Communications Commission spectrum requirements.
Austin, Tex.-based Buffalo Technology introduced two new enterprise-class wireless access points in its Airstation Pro line, designed for professional settings and business-class offerings.
