RSS
|
|||||||||||||||
 Skiing Wireless: Vail Resorts, Trendy and Techie March 22, 1999 | |||||||||||||||
Using a 2-Mbps wireless LAN, Vail ski instructors with handheld Windows CE-based devices sign up students at the base of the mountain, while rental agents with pen-based devices meet skiers outdoors and scan their returned boots, skis and poles. If a Vail skier has a ski pass and credit card on file, he or she can bypass ticket lines and go straight to the lift where a ticket agent verifies and scans his or her card, charging the account if it's a credit-card sale. "These wireless applications are customer-driven," says Casey Parliament, a systems analyst for Vail Resorts, Vail, Colo., which encompasses 4,000 acres of ski resorts. Each pen-based device contains a Lucent Technologies 802.11 Ethernet card, which talks to a series of radio antennas stationed on buildings and other places around the resort. Layer 2 bridges link the wireless packet transmission to the 10BASE-T Ethernet LANs running in most of Vail's buildings. The actual back-end transactions usually occur at the SQL servers at Vail's data center in Avon, Colo., which is connected to the wireless LAN via a dedicated T1 line. The wireless applications mostly handle data collection or front-end database queries--as is the case when a Vail agent gathers credit-card information from a skier's card at the lift. Vail Resorts plans to augment some of its dedicated T1 land lines with the wireless LAN. "We are going to test a point-to-point link that ideally can run several miles at 2 Mbps," says Calvin Fidler, senior systems consultant for Peak Technologies, Englewood, Colo., which installed Vail's wireless network. On a fair-weather day the network can span about three-quarters of a mile; it loses about 30 percent of its coverage when it snows. But Vail is still way ahead of most ski-resort operations. "Vail is one of the first ski resorts to do 2.4-GHz wireless--most ski areas doing any radio frequency data collection are running either narrowband or 902 MHz," says Fidler. "With the older technology, you might be able to scan a lift ticket and determine that it's good, but you can't display complex results from a database lookup." A big challenge with wireless has been preserving the battery life of the handheld devices. The Windows CE-based Casio Cassiopeia devices for the ski school application don't have a power management feature as yet. "Having a radio card drawing that much power reduces battery life--we are getting approximately an hour and a half of use per device," says Parliament. A 2-Mbps wireless LAN just isn't fast enough to run all of Vail's point-of-sale applications. The resort is looking to future 10-Mbps wireless technology, which would open the wireless LAN to other applications as well, including those for its restaurant and food services. |
Here
Here
