Challenge

Viu, formerly Epicentric, is a wireless networking and interactive media company based in Caracas, Venezuela.

Viu partnered with Venezuela’s Ministry of Tourism to provide wireless Internet to the country’s International Tourism Fair, known as FiTCaR 2006.

To achieve the goal of blanketing FiTCaR with free Internet access, the Viu team needed a network solution that would cover an area of 70,000 square meters with minimal infrastructure, easy deployment, and reliable wide-area Internet coverage.

Solution

FiTCaR 2006 goes wireless with Meraki

Viu spent months researching network solutions for FiTCaR and was unable to find one that met their scale, reliability, and ease of deployment requirements. Then, just two weeks before the event, Viu found Meraki.

Easy Deployment

Viu was able to design, deploy, and test the FiTCaR network within three days. The network consisted of 5 outdoor and 10 indoor Meraki Minis, making 15 nodes total. One outdoor Mini acted as a gateway and the remaining 14 nodes functioned as both repeaters and access points. Once the Minis were positioned and plugged in, the network auto-configured and was up and running in a matter of minutes.

Wide-area Coverage

Viu was able to use a single wired Internet connection to provide coverage to their entire venue. A long distance link to the gateway Mini in an office building 800 meters away supplied the Meraki Mesh Network with its only Internet connection. The repeaters on the network then propagated the wireless signal across the entire location to provide blanket coverage.

Network Management with Meraki

Viu used Dashboard, Meraki’s hosted management product, to set network SSID, channel, and time zone. They also implemented bandwidth shaping to ensure a fair allocation of network resources, and enabled a network splash page to greet browsers. Because Dashboard is hosted, Viu didn’t need to set up network servers to collect all this information or change network settings. They could do so from any computer with an Internet connection.

Results

As the FiTCaR team had hoped, users were able to roam around the event, seamlessly changing access points with no loss in connectivity. As the Viu team had hoped, the network was easy to set up, easy to maintain, and provided reliable service. Over the six day event, 225 network users transferred 6.1 GB of data, which included web browsing, filesharing, streaming video and VoIP.