Powering Up
Gialloreto and his tiny team of technicians tested and installed the WLAN themselves last fall. A third-party wireless service would have cost the airport $100,000; the internal WLAN cost less than $23,000. About half of the 60 planned R2 access points are already installed on the 11-Mbps WLAN, and the rest should be in by summer.
Gialloreto's biggest initial worry was getting power inside the ceiling of the airport complex, which wasn't accessible in areas with concrete or drop ceilings. So the airport used the Enterasys access points' 5-volt power-over-Ethernet feature and centralized the power for the APs in a wiring closet.
"It's nice to have the power accessible in the wiring closet rather than having to take a ladder up to the ceiling to figure out a problem," Gialloreto says.
When Gialloreto and his team began testing the WLAN, they found that some RoamAbout 2 antennas were blasting the wireless signal way too strongly and widely. "We didn't want to broadcast it to the tenant stores--we just wanted a signal in the food courts," he says. So the airport stripped the antennas from the offending boxes.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
