Postmortem: Assessing the Wireless Network at Interop

Think your enterprise wireless environment is demanding? The wireless network for the recent Interop 2007 show in Las Vegas needed to serve 20,000 attendees across 1 million square feet. Vendor Xirrus provided the network--using 12 Wi-Fi arrays and delivering 9.7 Gbps of total Wi-Fi bandwidth to serve a maximum of 550 concurrent users with data, voice and video service.

According to Xirrus, the show's Wi-Fi network included 44 Polycom voice-over-Wi-Fi phones; 20 DiVitas mobile-to-mobile convergence phones; 18 video-surveillance cameras; and 820 access points or ad hoc connections connecting to the backbone wireless network.

"Providing Wi-Fi telephony for InteropNet was an exciting challenge considering the number of wireless LANs in operation, the huge coverage area and density of users," said Geri Mitchell-Brown, Polycom's director of technical business development, in a statement. "Together with Xirrus and in one of our most hostile wireless deployments to date, we were able to provide high-quality mobile voice on our SpectraLink 8000 Series Wireless Telephones."Xirrus has provided Wi-Fi for the past two Interop shows and will do so again at Interop New York 2007, the vendor said.