SCIENCE

Xirrus announced their partnership with showNets, LLC for use of Xirrus high performance Wi-Fi Arrays during high-profile events throughout the United States. With over 30 years of experience in the Internet and networking solutions industry, showNets is the premier provider of High Density Wi-Fi and Internet solutions for Conventions, Trade Shows, and Marketing Events. In order to achieve the best user experience possible for their clients, showNets deploys Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays to provide more coverage, bandwidth, and throughput with fewer devices and lower infrastructure costs than legacy access point architectures.

The proliferation of Wi-Fi enabled smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and notebooks has created the need for a more robust and reliable wireless network capable of supplying enough bandwidth for thousands of simultaneous users, while also providing guests with ubiquitous coverage and seamless roaming throughout the venue. Giving users the freedom to connect when, where, and how they want doesn’t need to be difficult, time consuming or costly. The answer to density and performance is simple – add more radios to the air – just like you add more switch ports for wired users. The cellular phone industry solved this same problem years ago when they moved away from installing omni-directional radios to installing an array of directional radios per base station. We need to think and plan for WLAN capacity like we do the wired network – calculate how many client devices you’ll need to support and deploy the appropriate number of radios.

“One of the biggest challenges in our industry is conferences with large numbers of attendees in a confined space,” said Dave Bishop, Vice President and Chief Operations Officer at showNets, LLC. “Over the last 5 or 6 years we’ve seen an incredible uptick in the number of not only attendees, but also the number of wireless devices they each carry – they all have about 2 or 3 with them at all times. We’ve been working with Xirrus now for roughly two years, specifically in the high-density wireless arena and the Xirrus solution absolutely makes the impossible possible. It allows us to get the masses on at very high speeds with very high reliability.”

Dave continued by describing the customer service Xirrus provides, “I personally can’t say enough about the support and service that Xirrus gives me. It has been one of the best experiences for showNets, bar none. The thing that is cool is that Xirrus actually backs up what they say. If we need them on site we make one phone call and an army of them show up. The service, delivery, and support that Xirrus has provided us is the best I’ve ever seen in the industry in 30 years and we at showNets all really appreciate that and hope for a long and continuing relationship.”