United Radio is an organization that provides high-quality professional service to the electronics market place. With two locations along the east cost of the United States, they have a total of three divisions; Automotive Electronics, Communications, and Consumer Electronics. Their Corporate Headquarters is located in Syracuse, NY and part of their Automotive Electronics division is located in Peachtree, GA. The campus in Syracuse makes up four buildings. Both the Syracuse and Peachtree campuses rely on a wireless network that is critical to their Consumer Electronics division and Automotive Electronics division. Both divisions require this wireless infrastructure for testing purposes when repairing electronics, ranging from gaming systems, televisions, car stereo systems and much more.
Challenge
United Radio started to experience issues with their current Motorola wireless solution, mainly they were experiencing a lot of interference and dropped connectivity that was very hard to pin point and troubleshoot. This was now starting to affect productivity out on the repair and testing floors. Additionally, United Radio wanted to incorporate some redundancy into their network. They now had a business need for a more reliable and robust wireless network.
Solution
M.A. Polce Consulting implemented a Cisco Wireless solution that included a High Availability (HA) component. HA was desired because the wireless network is mission critical to run certain parts of the business, so it was important to design a solution that could minimize the risk of down time. The final design consisted of a Wireless LAN Controller in Syracuse with an HA controller. Additionally there was another Wireless LAN controller in Peachtree, so in the event that there was a hardware or link failure the sites wireless network would remain operational.. This solution provides full redundancy on their wireless network, which did not exist before.
The Wireless Access Points (WAP) that were chosen for this project are designed to work in environments, which contain large amounts of interference. The technology that is built into these particular WAP’s allows for any WAP to automatically adjust to frequent air quality changes in the environment to provide wireless clients a more reliable connection. This dynamic learning and adjusting of the radios and channels allows the wireless network to operate much more effectively.
Business Outcome
Because of the wireless infrastructure overhaul, United Radio now has a highly redundant wireless infrastructure that automatically adapts as needed to the dynamic environment of which United Radio operates in. The wireless network has resolved interference issues and increased the end users experience on the network that has yielded higher productivity rates. The new infrastructure has also reduced the workload of monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting the wireless network. Thus freeing up more time for the network administrators to focus on other critical tasks.
