The home of ISE 2021, the Fira de Barcelona’s Gran Via venue has invested in Wi-Fi 6 technology to provide its visitors with W-Fi roaming. The deployment has been carried out by Cisco, technological partner of the site. The full install will be finished this summer, during periods when the halls are not being used.
The benefits of this new technology include 40% faster connections, higher data transfer rates and greater energy efficiency that will reduce the battery consumption of every connected device.
Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) is a new wireless standard featuring four times higher data transfer rates in high density locations, 75% lower latency, better coverage and optimised device battery usage. In addition, with the deployment of dual-antenna Access Points (APs) Fira’s network will be ideal for very high-density events such as the international shows and conferences hosted by the trade fair institution.
The deployment of Wi-Fi 6 has already been carried out in three of the eight halls of the venue with 9100 series Access Points from Cisco, Fira de Barcelona’s technological partner for connectivity. Once the implementation is completed, the venue’s network will be able to connect 128,000 users simultaneously. Cisco also provides new Cisco Catalyst switches and controllers as well as Cisco DNA Center and Cisco DNA Spaces software technologies to enable innovative network management and analytics.
Another benefit of deploying a Wi-Fi 6 network will be the effective recovery of the 2.4 GHz frequency. This will allow a greater number of connections to be managed in a more efficient way than the previous Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) which only operated in the 5 GHz band whereas Wi-Fi 6 operates in both bands.
The arrival and deployment of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G will be simultaneous. Many experts agree that these are complementary technologies for wireless telecommunications and while 5G will dominate outdoor connectivity, Wi-Fi 6 will excel, above all in indoor environments. Wth Wi-Fi 6 speeds, 100 users are able to simultaneously stream a 2-hour movie in HD, all using the same access point. In addition, as is also the case with 5G, the reduction in latency, the delay between sending and receiving a data packet, is significant and Wi-Fi 6 registers latencies of 1 ms with maximum of 50 ms in high density situations where Wi-Fi 5 would record latencies of 400 ms thus achieving decreases of up to 80%.`