Running away to the circus no longer means running way from modern technology. Wireless mesh networks developer Firetide said Tuesday that its portable network solution is now being used by Ray Cammack Shows (RCS), a North American carnival midway company.
Carnivals put on by RCS get 9 million visitors annually. Maintaining the necessary business environment to serve all those people, while moving frequently from site to site, used to be a challenge. No longer. Now the company can use Firetide’s technology to set up a mobile, wireless environment wherever it goes that’s capable of supporting all business functions—including real-time e-ticketing, inventory management and time card tracking for more than 500 employees.
In 2006, RCS launched an initiative to operate more efficiently, and have a lighter environmental impact on the places it visits, by going completely “digital.” The company also hoped that the initiative would help it combat ticket fraud and optimize inventory/personnel management.
In order to achieve these lofty goals, RCS needed a secure, rapidly-deployable wireless infrastructure capable of operating in any environment the company’s IT team might face. Only Firetide offered the necessary technology.
“Without Firetide's reliable, high-performance wireless backbone, it would have been impossible to migrate the entire IT infrastructure to wireless and achieve our business goals,” said Bil Lowry, director of IT and marketing technologies at RCS, in a statement.
At the company’s largest event this year, the Orange County Fair, the Firetide system performed “exceptionally well,” Lowry said. Next year, the company now plans to add IP video surveillance to the system.
RCS defines itself as a “self-contained, mobile entertainment company.” It hauls with it all the equipment needed to assemble and disassemble an entire midway—equipment hauled by a fleet of more than 80 trucks. The company’s infrastructure now includes 46 Firetide nodes, 35 access points, and more than 300 handheld cordless scanners and POS terminals.
The scanners are used to conduct ticket redemptions, time card logs and inventory checks from each booth. This information is beamed wirelessly in real time to an operations center.
“By deploying a complete wireless infrastructure with the Firetide backbone, RCS is revolutionizing the centuries old carnival entertainment business to provide customers with enhanced service and increased security,” said Bo Larsson, Firetide’s CEO, in a statement.
Lowry said the entire Firetide network can be deployed in 12 hours and disassembled in two hours. The technology works in extremely varied climates, including the heat of Phoenix and the humidity of Houston. Further, because it uses 5 GHz spectrum, interference from WiFi devices (which operate at 2.5 GHz) is minimized.
Pretty cool stuff.
