By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
It’s a new Wi-Fi megatrend: Yes please, we want Wi-Fi everywhere but we don’t want the equipment to be visible at all. Texas-based Ventev has taken on the challenge of designing the world’s most inconspicuous Wi-Fi antennas and enclosures to fit anything from floor tiles to trashcans.
Wi-Fi used to be all about coverage. Now it’s all about capacity, and that usually means that more access points need to be installed. Building owners and operators want great Wi-Fi services everywhere, but – at the same time – they don’t want Wi-Fi installations to be noticeable at all, explains Dennis Burrell, Product Innovation Technologist at Ventev.
Concealment and/or aesthetics
“There’s big value in either concealing Wi-Fi equipment altogether or making the installations so aesthetically pleasing to the eye that you don’t notice them,” says Dennis. “Solutions need to be designed for exactly that while not sacrificing on Wi-Fi performance,” he says.
And whether it’s theme parks, university lecture halls, or huge corporate campuses indoors and out, the Ventev team has done it. In one case, a major enterprise client didn’t want any APs hanging off the walls or ceilings at all. So the solution was to build Wi-Fi antennas into floor panels.
“Today, Wi-Fi installations are being brought into the building design process a lot earlier. We used to work mostly with IT departments and VAR partners. Today, we do a lot of early design work together with architects,” says Dennis Burrell.
Light fixtures: The key to concealed outdoor Wi-Fi
Even though most of Ventev’s work is still about indoor Wi-Fi, more and more hotels, malls, and corporate campuses expect Wi-Fi services to extend to outdoor areas as well.
There are often only two practical ways of doing that: Building Wi-Fi equipment into either lightpoles or bollards (bollards are essentially waist-high lightpoles). In one case, Ventev has designed an omni-directional antenna that fits neatly inside the glass light globe itself.
But building Wi-Fi into street furniture doesn’t stop there. Ventev is right now working on a design for equipping trashcans with Wi-Fi plus a new decorative enclosure for a Wi-Fi-capable bollard.
Ventev is fairly tight-lipped (for NDA-reasons) about exactly whom they’re working with. But let’s just say, among them are household-name brands across all parts of the US. And some of the installations reach into the thousands of APs, Dennis says.
/Claus.