Two of London's large exhibition centrers, Earls Court and Olympia have had their indoor Wi-Fi coverage upgraded by Ruckus Wireless.

With more than 2.2 million visitors every year, Earls Court and Olympia are the first large-scale public venues in the UK to move to higher speed, dual-band (2.4 and 5 GHz) 802.11n Wi-fi technology capable of supporting speeds of up to 600 Mbps.

Now operational in both venues, the Ruckus ZoneFlex Wi-Fi system was installed to address reliability, performance and scalability problems of its legacy Wi-Fi system from Aruba Networks, as well as the need to provide mobile data offload from increasingly congested cellular networks.

In comparative speed testing of both systems during a live exhibition, EC&O found the Aruba WLAN to deliver 0.2 Mbps of uplink and downlink performance, compared to 16 Mbps of uplink and downlink throughput using the Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi system.

"Providing world-class Wi-Fi within a large public venue is one of the most difficult things to do and a well-known problem that everyone has experienced," said Graham Gee, IT Director for EC&O Venues, which owns the exhibition centres. "Wi-Fi used to be all about providing pervasive wireless signals everywhere. Now it's all about capacity and reliability. Our existing system just wasn't able to cope with the volume of devices within our venues or adequately deal with wireless ambiguities such as RF interference. Obviously this becomes a major problem when exhibitors and delegates are paying for connectivity."