The Challenges
- High rate of device dropouts
- Previous reviews by others had not resolved the issues
- Regular disruption to warehouse operations
- Change management constraints
- Physically difficult environment comprising of steel shelving and new automatic sorting systems
The Outcomes
- Onsite audit to understand areas of weakness
- Best path forward recommendations
- Pre and post change reporting to validate improvements
- Greatly enhanced performance and near-zero dropouts
A major international sporting brand was having challenges with a brand new, high capacity distribution hub in Sydney. Significant investment had been made in the technology, hardware and infrastructure to support their digitised operations across the 26,000 m2 facility.
All this investment was being undone with an unreliable Industrial Wi-Fi network that was suffering from dropouts and high packet loss.
The facility operator engaged several network companies to to resolve the issues, but without success.
All the ingredients
Logistics and distribution centres are notoriously difficult environments to deliver a wireless network in.
Steel pallet racking rises from floor to ceiling and the dynamic movement of boxes and pallets changes the terrain continuously. This hampers radio signals, so optimisation is key to overcome the terrain and deliver continuity of connection.
For this sporting goods brand, all the ingredients in their new distribution centre were there for a quality Wi-Fi network. There were adequate Wi-Fi access points and from a high quality global manufacturer. It just wasn’t coming together to just…work.
This is where Aqura’s specialist wireless radio engineers were able to bring it all together and overcome the issues being experienced.
Modern Wi-Fi is critical for business operations.
Finishing off the Cake
Aqura’s engineers undertook a detailed site RF study to understand where the issues were. This type of scanning utilises specialist software which analyses each Wi-Fi channel in use and how the signal propagates.
Through the RF study, the Aqura team was able to identify that the Wi-Fi network wasn’t configured properly which resulted in frequency clashes and improper allocation of channels to different devices.
Suggested changes were implemented and resulted in immediate, and profound changes to the performance of the network for the which the client was thrilled with.
Cherry on top
Whilst the customer is super happy with the outcome of the Wi-Fi optimisation, they’re really excited about the conversations they’re now having to build out their roadmap to 5G.
They weren’t aware of the opportunity that Private 5G presented and now working with Aqura to build a plan to grab the opportunity when their operations scale.
Chat with our team today to see how we can make your Private Wireless network really work for you.
