Denver airport goes fast and free on Wi-Fi

Denver International Airport is betting that travelers will like getting something
for free, and so far it looks like a good bet.

The airport, one of the busiest in the U.S., last month switched its public
Wi-Fi offering from paid to advertising-supported. Within a week, and with no
public notice of the change, Wi-Fi use grew tenfold, said Jim Winston, director
of telecommunications for the airport. He expects the network to get even busier.

DIA is a large-scale case study of free Wi-Fi in airports. About 50 million
passengers pass through the airport every year, with as many as 165,000 per
day during busy times of the year, airport spokesman Jeff Green said. Now that
Wi-Fi is free, there are 7,000 to 8,000 connections to the network per day,
according to Winston. To link all those free users with the Internet, the airport
at first bumped up its "backhaul" to 5M bps (bits per second) but
later found that wasn't enough. It now has a 10M bps connection just for the
Wi-Fi users.

The change was part of a complete revamping of the Wi-Fi service, which DIA
first offered in 2002. For the first five years, the airport owned its own network
but turned to AT&T to operate and maintain it in return for a concession
fee. AT&T charged users on a variety of models, including one that cost
US$7.95 per day. Now the airport has taken over the service and installed a
whole new network with the latest technology.

Denver may be the first airport in the U.S. to deploy a public Wi-Fi network
with IEEE 802.11n Draft 2.0 capability. The new technology, which the Wi-Fi
Alliance is certifying for interoperability because the final 11n standard has
been delayed, is designed for higher speed and longer range than previous versions.
DIA's network also supports earlier versions of Wi-Fi.

The airport turned to Meru Networks for its infrastructure, partly for ease
of management, Winston said. AT&T fixed and upgraded access points and bore
that cost itself. As the carrier left the picture, DIA knew it would have to
handle firmware upgrades and other changes to the approximately 60 access points
in the 53-square-mile airport.

Even moving to the free model, "we would still have to visit each one
of them," Winston said. Meru's management software lets administrators
modify each access point remotely, he said.

DIA also liked the company's "single-channel" architecture. It runs
all access points on the same Wi-Fi channel, treating interference as overlapping
signals and automatically connecting users to another nearby access point if
one gets overloaded. If that channel reaches its capacity limit, another one
can be used. The airport has already seen 25 clients using one access point.
Winston believes the system could handle as many as 45 at a time.

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