San Francisco’s Moscone Center meeting and exhibition facility is quickly becoming a haven of high-tech wireless communications technology.
The 2 million square-foot facility, developed and owned by the City and County of San Francisco and privately managed by SMG, includes 700,000 square feet of exhibit space, 106 meeting rooms and 123,000 square feet of pre-function lobbies.
Wireless service, for both voice and data communication, is demanded by conference and meeting attendees and exhibitors that frequent the space-long targeted by the wireless industry as lucrative customers.
To meet that demand, the Moscone Center’s management company in 2001 hired InSite Wireless L.L.C., which provides solutions and advisory services to improve the quality of breadth of wireless communications services inside public venues, to improve wireless coverage throughout the building. At the time, that meant implementing PCS, cellular and paging connectivity to enable wireless communications throughout the mostly underground space, explained Chris Davis, vice president of InSite.
InSite was charged with designing, installing and maintaining an in-building distributed antenna system to enable in-building wireless communications. The company also took on marketing the facility to wireless service providers, including negotiating and managing service agreements.
InSite’s strategic partner, LGP Allgon, was brought into the project to design and install the common access distributed antenna system. The company supplied repeaters and coverage products, system design, project management, operation and maintenance. LGP Allgon also monitors the system.
The system is unique, explained Magnus Friberg, president of LGP Allgon, because it accommodates multiple wireless service providers and technologies and anticipates the addition of future technologies, like Wi-Fi.
The in-building network launched in June 2001, and is now being used by each of the major wireless carriers serving the San Francisco area.
More recently, Allgon has begun to overlay a Wi-Fi network on the existing in-building wireless network so users can access wireless data from within the building.
For this latest upgrade, InSite has hired Wi-Fi access provider Wayport to manage the Wi-Fi network, which will be available in the common areas and meeting rooms of the facility via LGP Allgon’s distributed antenna system.
The Wi-Fi network will allow conference attendees to access e-mail for common areas and meeting rooms. In addition, show sponsors could use the network as an advertising platform via a customizable hot-spot interface, Davis suggested.
Wi-Fi will not be immediately available in the exhibition hall, however, as exhibitors’ personal devices often make such a place a challenging Wi-Fi environment, explained Davis.
