By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
The UK’s Mycomms has turned temporary, high-performance Wi-Fi connectivity – probably the hardest discipline in IT networking – into part fine art, part exceptional operational flexibility, speed, and resilience. MyComms’ key partner in delivering cutting-edge Wi-Fi services to upwards of 400 events including tens of thousands of guests per year across the UK is Zyxel Networks, says Managing Director and founder, Nick Boby.Â
Snooker championships, motorsport, music festivals, tennis tournaments, golf – you name it. MyComms has turned the hardest discipline in networking into the mainstay of a growing business serving hundreds of events with temporary Wi-Fi every year. For event deployments and services not to become mission impossible they require a great deal of skill as well as dependable equipment, MyComms says.
“Nearly no matter what event we’re serving, we have at the most a few days to get the networks up and running and they have to be both high performance and reliable. Often thousands of people will depend on event Wi-Fi for doing their jobs and for entertainment. Quite often the client doesn’t know a lot about what they are requesting so we have to do a lot of thinking on our feet to make up for it. It is a complex new challenge pretty much every time but also a huge satisfaction when things click into place and the network just works,” says Managing Director and founder, Nick Boby.
Remarkably, Nick Boby – who founded the company in 2015 – runs the company with only a handful of employees. This is possible in part due to a pool of specialised skills but also as the result of making the right equipment decisions. Zyxel Networks is not MyComms’ only Wi-Fi equipment vendor but the one Nick Boby prefers after years of experience in the field. The initial switch to Zyxel Network’s APs was a huge success, he says.
“Part of our attraction to Zyxel has to do with reasonable prices and license fees – but we were also amazed at the performance improvement. One of the things we noticed – for example – is that Zyxel AP capacity does not degrade when using encryption and several SSIDs. This is business critical for us because we may not always know the exact number of devices that the network is expected to support, for example at the media and hospitality pavilion at a major international motor racing event, such as the one that recently took place at Silverstone,” Nick Boby says.
He swears by Zyxel Networks also because Zyxel’s Nebula Cloud management offers a range of features making event Wi-Fi quick to deploy and not least easy to debug. “One big benefit is that it is very easy to move network assets to another location, meaning the next event, for example. We can do this in Nebula by reprofiling the APs and other network nodes remotely, pretty much with the click of a button. This saves a lot of time. Nebula also gives us excellent visibility and a quick way to find faults. All of this adds up to the right features when you’ve got very little time to set up the next network,” he says.
MyComms will in some cases use Zyxel 5G routers to backhaul event traffic but has also started deploying a lot of Starlink backhaul either as backup systems and even – in many cases – as to carry the bulk of the traffic. This happens in the many locations where 5G coverage is poor or insufficient. “In general, none of our events would really function without excellent Wi-Fi connectivity. Mobile 5G networks can’t carry enough traffic or the coverage is simply not good enough. Thankfully, Wi-Fi does an excellent job when deployed and configured correctly,” Nick Boby says.
/Claus.
