I ran into an interesting story about a Minnesota mall in Broadband Communities this month. Broadband communities features stories on community’s deployment and use of broadband, but previously known as Broadband Properties, they also feature articles that have a real estate lean to them – such as info on serving large multi-dwelling locations and malls.

It’s interesting to see what this Twin Cities’ based mall did to upgrade to make it easier to serve lots of people accessing their wireless network – but even more interesting to me is the following statement…

Because of poor cellular coverage in the area, Mart visitors depend on the building Wi-Fi for access.

The mall is apparently located in Minnetonka. Not only is Minnetonka fairly central, it’s a pretty upscale suburb. Minnetonka has an interesting broadband background. Google named Minnetonka the top city in Minnesota for online businesses yet there have been local efforts (granted not for a while) to bring fiber to the area, which would indicate to me that locally folks have wanted to see better service. Again, the offhand remark on poor cell coverage is interesting.

Here’s more info on their mall upgrade – it might be a good solution for festivals, fairs or even resorts or conference centers around the state that run into similar problems…

Mart executives engaged Minneapolis IT specialist Line Syte Inc. to upgrade the wireless network and address the congestion and interference problems. They wanted a system that would support the Mart for years to come – and they wanted the project done within a limited budget.

Craig Moench, the president of Line Syte, knew he had to replace the existing Wi-Fi not just with a bigger system but also with a better one – enterprise-grade Wi-Fi that allowed sophisticated management and reporting, load balancing, flexible configuration and more wireless channels. After reviewing several solutions, the Line Syte team selected a wireless solution from ZyXEL.

The system includes ZyXEL’s NXC5200 WLAN controller system and its NWA5123 dual-band, dual-radio, 11n access points (APs). The APs were connected to the controller via ZyXEL’s gigabit PoE Ethernet switches. The NXC5200 WLAN controller is capable of managing up to 240 APs and has extensive management and monitoring capabilities, along with auto channel selection, distributed traffic forwarding and WPA/WPA2-Enterprise authentication to simplify deployment, boost throughput and secure the network.

Along with the new Wi-Fi system, Line Syte installed dual Internet connections for higher throughput, reliability and backup options. The ZyXEL Unified Threat

Management Gateway balances the loads over the two Internet connections.