Mumbai Airport Gets Wi-Fi Makeover

Posted by- Neelam Mathews

July 11, 2011

YOU Broadband has selected and deployed Ruckus ZoneFlex 802.11n system as a managed Wi-Fi service offering within Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA).

Forecasts for India project that mobile-only data users will increase from 3.8 million in 2011 to over 308 million by 2015, according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Report on Global Mobile Data. “We must follow the habits of our customers who are now on the move with multiple wireless devices in their hands. The only way to do that is to combine reliable wireless access with very high quality fixed line assets. Our partnership with Ruckus is essential to enabling this strategy,” said EVS Chakravarthy, Managing Director and CEO of YOU Broadband.

YOU Broadband is initially offering free multimegabit Wi-Fi services to passengers that transit the airport every year. CSIA operates five terminals over an operational area of 1,450 acres (5.9 km2) – handling over 29.1 million passengers and 670,235 tons of cargo in 2010. 

“What we have done at CSIA is simply a harbinger of things to come,” said Chakravarthy. “Changing market conditions, driven by an explosion of data traffic from wireless-only devices, present a new paradigm for fixed-line service providers and huge opportunities to offer new services and increase ARPU.”

YOU Broadband is leveraging Wi-Fi within CSIA to offer mobile gaming, free Internet access and ultimately video on demand services to airport visitors. YOU Broadband plans to partner with device makers and content providers to offer value-added content services over Wi-Fi.

The vast Wi-Fi network will also be available to support airport operation applications as well as airport vendors requiring network connectivity. Since launching the service in April, YOU Broadband has seen a big spike in wireless usage to nearly 3,000 connections per day with 50% of users staying online for 30 minutes or more.

After extensive evaluation of leading wireless equipment and technology, YOU Broadband selected Ruckus Wireless due to its inherent support for carrier-class services. Unlike traditional enterprise Wi-Fi systems, Ruckus integrates patented technology including adaptive antenna arrays, sophisticated quality of service capabilities and smart meshing techniques to enable a licensed-like wireless experience over the unlicensed band – but at a fraction of the cost and at much higher speeds, says a statement.

“We’ve simply been astounded by the Wi-Fi performance to date,” said Chakravarthy. “It’s common for users to experience connection speeds of up to 3 Mbps. But more important, the system was extremely simple to deploy with a robust feature set that has proven to be highly scalable and easy to remotely manage from a carrier perspective.”

The Ruckus ZoneFlex system has now become the wireless standard for a number of airports around the world including: Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Budget Terminal in Singapore and Larnaca airport in Cyprus.