Untethered Utopia

West Edmonton Mall turns Wi-Fi into a tourism dream come true.

Introduction WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Education | Financial services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Transportation | Hospitality | More WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | Convergence | E-commerce | Management | Security | Servers | Storage | WAN | Wireless Download complete list of winners John Gallant on being an All-Star

Offering tourists the largest entertainment and shopping complex in the world wasn't enough for West Edmonton Mall's tech-savvy executives.

Located in Edmonton, Alberta, a former fur-trading post in northwestern Canada, the übermall covers the equivalent of 48 city blocks and is billed as "the greatest indoor show on earth." Each year, 22 million visitors flock to the entertainment mecca's three hotels, eight amusement parks, 21 theaters, 110 restaurants and 800 shops. Boredom is definitely not an option. Fantasyland Hotel guests can choose from Roman, Polynesian and other themed rooms, and World Waterpark thrill seekers can scream down miles of slides that stretch like licorice in a candy factory. On Bourbon Street, it's Mardi Gras every day.

Despite such amenities, managers hankered to develop an unused bit of real estate: thousands of cubic feet of empty airspace. In 2002, they launched a plan to build a wireless network that could be accessed anywhere in the mall. With the help of Siemens Communications, their vision of a secure, end-to-end mobile network is well on its way to becoming reality. Over the past year, the partners have installed the first phase of an 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) that has turned West Edmonton Mall into the largest Wi-Fi-enabled entertainment and retail center on the planet. For its above-and-beyond Wi-Fi efforts, West Edmonton Mall earns the distinction of being named a 2005 Enterprise All-Star.

"What we are trying to do is build a community and allow people to connect in that community space," says Joseph Schuldhaus, the mall's vice president of IT.

Conceived as an opportunity to provide staff high-speed wireless Internet services and applications, the project quickly grew into a plan to gain a competitive edge in the mall's three commercial markets: entertainment, hospitality and retail. Motivating managers was the idea that technology has become a pivotal factor in where people decide to work and play.

"We now live in a world where the Internet is always on and always available," Schuldhaus says. "A new breed of location-based tools is emerging that provides connected people with knowledge of services, products and resources that are most convenient to their current location."

West Edmonton Mall’s All-Star project leader Joseph Schuldhaus

Managers wanted a network secure enough for the mall's 16,500 employees to remotely access it from home offices, parking lots and corporate branches. They also wanted to create different user-access policies and applications for multiple types of end users. They looked at several solutions over a three-year period before choosing Siemens' HiPath Wireless portfolio, a centrally deployable WLAN that can be installed over any data or VoIP network. The IT team was sold on HiPath's ability to support VoIP and other real-time applications without requiring users to re-authenticate and re-key as they move around, as well as its Layer 3 overlay architecture, designed for fast, secure roaming.