The NEC has recently launched a £1m upgrade to its Wi-Fi facilities that provides visitors with free access to the internet in all areas of the venue. The upgrade has taken place following consultation with several trade bodies representing various sectors of the events industry, and will no doubt have a huge impact on the experience of organisers, exhibitors and visitors to the venue.
Wi-Fi access in event venues has been criticised in recent months, but the investment made by the NEC is a significant step in addressing the need for people to stay connected.
Having first made Wi-Fi available nearly seven years ago, the technology and infrastructure that replaced their initial pay-as-you-go hotspot access had become outdated, so in 2011 the venue operators launched a consultation process to identify the best ways forward.
Murray Dickson, Business Solutions Analyst at the NEC, spoke to Exhibition Industry News to firstly tell us why they made the decision
“Three years ago we expanded the Wi-Fi access from hot spots to all of the public areas. However, things have moved on quickly and when people can get free Wi-Fi in a local coffee shop, they expect to be able to come to a venue like the NEC and do the same. There was a need to address the access within the halls and to re-address the access in the public areas.
The consultation process also saw 7,500 visitors surveyed along with all of the exhibitor contacts held on their database. Following this, a set of business requirements were drawn up using the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) standards by which all public tenders must be written. Over 60 companies came forward with expressions of interest, before the list was gradually reduced down via a tender process. The preferred bidder, Galliford Try, was announced late last year.
Recovering Costs
To invest over £1m on a free to use service does raise questions relating to cost recovery through other channels, such as parking or hall fees for organisers. However, despite the huge cost of the upgrade, plus the ongoing maintenance, Murray says that they are not looking for a specific return of investment.
“It’s about making sure that our venue is fit for purpose and stays at the forefront of the event and exhibition industry”, said Murray. “Organisers were telling us that it was becoming more and more difficult to entice people out of their offices and in to shows. By giving them Wi-Fi that is free and accessible everywhere within the venue, we are giving them the means to continue going about their daily business whilst also being able to visit an event.”
The NEC views the investment as having reciprocal benefits through the shows and events that are held there. If customers can continue accessing the web freely and easily, their experience of visiting an event is heightened, making the event more productive. This has a positive effect on factors like exhibitor re-bookings, in turn helping the events themselves to develop and potentially expand within the venue.
Designing the System
It was decided at an early stage that each individual space within the venue would be looked at on its own in order to determine the requirements. Using the maximum capacity of each area, a connection ratio was applied to calculate how many people in any given space at any one time would be sending and receiving data. A design was then factored for each area, be it a hall, conference room or office. The finished upgrade allows for 22,000 concurrent users to be accessing the web at any one time.
“The system allows for many more than that to be connected to the Wi-Fi. However, in practice if you have 5,000 people in a hall, even if they are all connected to the system they won’t all be sending and receiving data at the same time.”
The system was designed to have no single point of failure, meaning that should an element go down, it is instantly transferred to a separate element. The radios transmitting the Wi-Fi signal were also crucial to the winning design, as Murray explained.
“The actual boxes were supplied and installed by Xirrus. One of the main reasons they were selected is that their system deploys several access points within a single array. This means that only a single hard-wired line is needed to connect it. Some of these arrays have eight radios within them, so it greatly reduced the amount of infrastructure that needed to be installed in order to hit the required specifications for the system.”
Each radio unit within an array can also be switched from 2.4ghz to 5ghz. For those non-technophobes, most smart phones up until recently use the 2.4ghz frequency. Brand new devices like the iPhone 5 and the most recent iPads now use the 5ghz frequency. The venue can monitor the amount of devices using each of these frequencies and over time will be able to switch more of the radios to the 5ghz range as visitors gradually upgrade their devices.
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