Although Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona is described by the GSMA as “the world’s premier mobile industry event”, many of the anticipated 75,000 attendees will be relying on WiFi rather than a cellular connection.
Fira de Barcelona, the organisation behind the city’s trade fairs, says it’s deployed 1,200 WiFi access points across the Fira Gran Via site, making this one of the world’s largest WiFi networks ever installed in an exhibition centre… and larger than many WiFi installations in international airports and sports stadia.
The Gran Via venue has a floor space of over 240,000 square metres, which is around 60 acres, and has been wired with 52 kilometres of internet cable plus 14 kilometres of fibre optics. Overall, there’ll be a total capacity of 10,000 Mbps (split equally between upload and download).
As a result, all the exhibition halls and associated exhibition areas will have WiFi coverage throughout.