The IT team at Sonoma County Fairgrounds thought the venue needed a better Wi-Fi network to support its point-of-sale system (POS), and turned to Comcast. The Comcast team estimated the numbers of access points, Ethernet drops and fiber pulls that would be needed to get the performance the team wanted. It seemed cumbersome, so Comcast considered referring Sonoma County Fairgrounds to its MachineQ IoT group. But that group primarily builds LoRaWAN, which is well-suited for low power devices that communicate infrequently. For Sonoma County Fairground’s POS system, a private LTE network looked like the Goldilocks solution, so the project landed with Comcast’s strategic wireless solutions group.
“With private wireless, one radio provides a large area of coverage,” explained Scott Cohen, executive director, strategic wireless solutions, at Comcast Business. He said the Celona CBRS radio throughput was as strong in the fairgrounds parking lot (1,500 feet away from the radio) as it was near the rooftop where the team installed the radio.
“It performed beyond expectations,” he said. “We expected it to work well, but it worked phenomenally.”
Sonoma County Fairground hosts a variety of events, including horse races, golf and concerts. The venue uses the private network to support mobile devices used to sell concessions to visitors.
“They had a point-of-sale business problem,” said Cohen. “The macro cellular network was becoming overloaded. Now, visitors are having a better experience because their transactions go through faster.”
“We are very happy with the quality of service we’ve received and how quickly Comcast Business was able to install and deploy this private wireless network,” said Rebecca Bartling, CEO, Sonoma County Fairgrounds, in a press release. “This state-of-the-art network will bolster our back-of-house operations, as well as our relationships with the vendors, who are critical to ensuring the annual, two-week long Sonoma County Fair is a success.”
Faster transactions also save vendors money by cutting down on fraud. When a point-of-sale device cannot connect to the internet right away it may use a technique called store-and-forward, meaning it stores credit card information and forwards it later to the bank. If the bank declines the card, it is too late for the vendor to cancel the transaction.
Limited coverage
The Sonoma County Fairgrounds network uses CBRS spectrum under General Authorized Access, and Federated Wireless is the Spectrum Access System provider. Comcast and the Sonoma County Fairgrounds team decided to limit the channel sizes of their private network in order to minimize the potential for interference, Cohen said. They configured two 10 MHz channels and activated two 90-degree sectors, so the area behind the radio does not have coverage. Cohen said this configuration delivers sufficient bandwidth to meet the expected throughput of the use cases and number of devices on the network. “If we had used large channels, there would have been a higher risk of more of that spectrum getting commandeered by the SAS,” he explained.
All wiring for the network followed existing pathways, and the underlying wired backhaul is a Comcast circuit that is separate from the infrastructure that supports the fairground’s daily operations, Cohen said. A core network switch and firewall connect to the rooftop-mounted radio.
The network serves the use case for which it was built with a much smaller footprint than a Wi-Fi network would have required. Cohen estimated thousands of feet of cable and dozens of Wi-Fi APs would have been needed to achieve the same result.
Cohen said that although Comcast can’t discuss all its private wireless initiatives, Sonoma County Fairgrounds is not the only venue to turn to private LTE instead of Wi-Fi. “We are definitely seeing opportunities where Wi-Fi is not meeting the need,” he said. In addition to large public venues, hotels and resorts are looking at private wireless, he said.