Example of a Crosslinked Building
Igeneon is a bio-pharmaceutical company that specializes in cancer-immunotherapy. In the course of its successful expansion, the company has moved to a new office building in 2003. avalaris was there too and helped developing the new IT-infrastructure.
As a basic principle, in this infrastructure every employee should be freely flexible with his/her laptop, because their own data and applications are important e.g. while meetings. The Igeneon IT-officers were already experienced in WLAN access points and notebooks. But the implementation of a complete network for a 3-level-office-building requires a competent and professional partner. Igeneon chose Avalaris.
The office building gages 1370 mē and has first been connected classically with central switches over copper and fibreglas cables. Also machines with increased bandwidth demand (e.g. network printers) were wired.
Eleven strategically distributed access points have been established for the employees and their offices. Due to an accurate measuring and calculation of the base stations radio-propagation/dispersion, just a marginal fine-tuning has been necessary after the first installation in order to cover the whole building with all its neuralgic nooks and corners.
For over a year now, Igeneon has been applying its WLAN-network in its offices including laboratories. They are completely positive about this solution and want to push further application and utilization. The basic infrastructure already supports the 802.11a and 802.11g standards and it is now considered to provide the clients with this faster solution, too. Additionally, they want to replace the proprietary data security-solution that is provided by the hardware producer by a standards-compliant solution, as the data gain explosiveness – not least because of the company's success. .
Technical Details
Orinoco/Proxim AP-2000 devices were used as access points. In a classical frequency sharing plan 3 overlap-free channels in the 2.4 GHz band were selected and the access points so adjusted, that not even in the border areas signal interferences occurred. For the transfer to 802.11g only appropriate AP-kits need to be installed on the AP-2000, and the clients need to be equipped with WLAN cards suited for 802.11g. Since 802.11g's range in the field is not as wide as 802.11b's, possibly one or two further APs have to be placed per floor to secure transmission to all rooms.
Furthermore, active monitoring is provided by avalaris' WLAN-MRTG-system. This system records and analyzes signal quality and transmission bandwidth and provides the results graphically.
Security Solution
The radiation radii are calculated insofar as it is impossible to get a useful signal outside the building. This step minimizes the threat of attacks from war drivers, who don't have to be feared anymore. Apart from that, the building is situated on restricted industry terrain that can only be entered after an identity check. All the common WLAN- and network-technical security precautions have been taken and anticipate non-authorized log on.
Read more in "Flächendeckend WLAN" – a press article about the WLAN application at Ingeneon`s. (in german)
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