As Australia’s largest railway station, Central Station is also the country’s busiest transportation hub, serving more than 180,000 travelers every day. To accommodate such a high volume of traffic, the NSW government turned to Asia Pacific IT solution specialistsMcLaren Technologies and Virtual Graffiti Australia to collaborate on a public infrastructure project that would improve Internet access. Virtual Graffiti provided a Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi network while the McLaren solution included its Fluide Web portal and the Nomadix AG 5800 gateway.

“The BYOD phenomenon has created a growing demand for high-quality Internet connectivity from train stations to airports to hotels, or anywhere where there is a high-volume of visitors,” said Fred Reeder, chief commercial and operating officer of Nomadix. “In addition to the Internet access itself, these venues also need the ability to manage the bandwidth to ensure an optimum connection and a fair share for each user. With its full range of bandwidth management tools and ultra high-performance, the AG 5800 was an ideal fit for the Central Station deployment.”

Designed for medium to large-sized venues, the AG 5800 supports up to 4,000 simultaneous devices without any required change of hardware or software design. Unlike server based solutions, the AG 5800 is based on the VxWorks real-time, multi-tasking operating system and is architected to run faster using less processing power. Built upon Intel’s high-performance processors and communication technology, the AG 5800 sports built-in flash memory and contains the proven Nomadix Service Engine (NSE) Core Software to keep Internet traffic flowing.

In the Central Station installation, the AG 5800 was tightly integrated with McLaren’s Fluide portal through the XML interface. Although McLaren used a cloud-based management system, they were in need of an on-premise control device to create a safer, better-quality environment for visitors to access the Internet.

“We see tremendous growth in public Internet access, with venues utilizing smart phone applications to achieve better customer service,” said Matthew White, CEO of McLaren Technologies. “With its reliability and powerful capabilities, the AG 5800 was an important piece in the Central Station project, and helped us achieve the goal of quality, free Wi-Fi service, which ultimately leads to improved user satisfaction.”

Added Reeder, “The Sydney Central Station is just one example in a growing list of high-traffic public areas around the globe that are turning to Wi-Fi for wireless broadband access to offload data traffic from increasingly overburdened 3G cellular networks. As this trend continues, Nomadix will help answer the call with our range of gateway solutions.”