The Wi-Fi 6 network at BSB will enable applications like mobile boarding passes and cashless food and beverage transactions
Boingo Wireless has deployed a high-speed Wi-Fi 6 network throughout the Brasília International Airport (BSB), Brazil’s third busiest airport, with roughly 13 million passengers passing through per year. The network extends throughout the airport’s public spaces, terminals and across the tarmac.
Wi-Fi 6 has a maximum potential speeds of up to 40% higher compared to Wi-Fi 5 — a 6.1 Gbps increase — thanks to more efficient data encoding. And while this speed is more of a theoretical maximum, another feature called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access, or OFDMA, makes it possible for that 9.6 Gbps to be split up across a whole network of devices, resulting in more speed for each device on the network, making it ideal for congested environments like busy airports.
Wi-Fi 6 also has an improved version of multi-user or MU-MIMO that lets devices respond to the wireless access point at the same time that involves multiple antennas, which let the access point talk to multiple devices at once. With Wi-Fi 5, the access point could talk to devices at the same time, but those devices couldn’t respond at the same time.
The Wi-Fi 6 network at BSB is being for a variety of applications including mobile boarding passes, cashless food and beverage transactions, rideshare services and streaming apps.
“From mobile boarding passes to digital wayfinding to downloading a movie at the gate, Boingo Wi-Fi 6 powers countless connected devices at busy airports with greater capacity and speed,” said Boingo Chief Commercial Officer Michael Zeto. “Boingo’s next generation network at BSB enhances the passenger experience, while powering critical airport operations including on the tarmac where aircraft are parked, loaded, refueled, boarded and maintained.”
For added end-user convenience, Boingo’s converged Wi-Fi solutions are engineered with Passpoint technology, which streamlines Wi-Fi access and eliminates the need for users to find and authenticate a network each time they visit and enables carriers to seamlessly offload cellular traffic.
At the beginning of this year, Boingo deployed a similar converged network at Newark Liberty International Airport’s (EWR) new Terminal A, which opened on January 12 and spans 1 million square feet.
