Overview

With annual passenger traffic of over 57 million, the Istanbul Ataturk Airport is the 15^th busiest airport in the world.   The Istanbul Ataturk Airport hit an all-time high on July 2015 with 1,389 airplanes taking off and landing at the airport.

To cope with the increasing traffic and to ensure the smooth operation of this transportation hub, the official airport ground services provider of Istanbul Ataturk Airport — Turkish Ground Services (“TGS”) decided to build a wireless network for the apron areas, connecting all the ground services applications such as data transmission, mobile surveillance, VoIP, luggage tracking etc.  TGS had appointed Net Iletisim Teknoloji, the leading distributor & system integrator in the region to design and build the wireless network for them.

In such a challenging environment, Net Iletisim Teknoloji had to select the right solution for the wireless network in the apron areas. Net Iletisim Teknoloji had shortlisted Alvarion, InfiNet and Altai to provide the trial test.  Altai won the trial and was selected to provide its’ Super WiFi solution for TGS due to the outstanding performance of the Altai A8-Ein to provide WiFi coverage over long distances.

The Challenge

•  Large area coverage with a total area of over 550,000 sq. m.
• Limited number of lampposts for installation
• Serious blockage by aircraft
• Support a large number of simultaneous users

The Solution

Forty A8-Ein were mounted on poles and lampposts in the apron areas for access coverage.  The coverage areas of these A8-Ein are overlapped with each other to provide redundancy and a seamless roaming experience to the users.  Utilizing the patented smart antenna technology, Altai’s A8-Ein are able to extend the distance and strength of signals to deliver higher data rates to a large number of concurrent user connections.

Some A2 were also installed on top of the ground services vehicles to connect with cameras for mobile surveillance.  The access controller is used for dynamic VLAN assignment as well as AP management.

The Result

The wireless broadband network covers 100% of the required areas with redundancy.  Users have no problem connecting with their handheld devices.  The test data showed an average -65dBm signal strength all the times so that the ground support staff can always be connected to provide ground services in the apron areas.