Good news for Cisco and Aruba Networks in British Airways terminal 5 fiasco

By Brad Reese on Fri, 03/28/08 - 9:25pm.

Fortunately, there was good news this week for Cisco and Aruba Networks in the British Airways $8.5 billion Heathrow Airport terminal 5 fiasco!

Both the wired equipment of Cisco and the wireless equipment of Aruba Networks have been exonerated of any culpability in the British Airways debacle.

The Culprits:

1.	0400 - Both passengers and staff have trouble locating car parks.
2.	0400 - Delayed opening of check-in results in long queues.
3.	0442 - First passengers arrive early but wait an hour for luggage.
4.	All Morning - Clogged conveyor leads to long wait for luggage.
5.	1630 - Baggage system failure; all check-in at T5 suspended.
6.	1700 - After long queues form at "fast bag drop" desk, British Airways suspends check-in of all luggage into hold.

The Terminal 5 wireless infrastructure extends to the apron around the terminal, and in total uses some 800 Aruba AP70 Access Points (APs), managed with six Aruba MMC-6000 Multi-Service Mobility Controllers located in two data centres serving Heathrow.

The APs run off Cisco access switches connecting back into a wired network provided by Cisco using Power over Ethernet and 100Mbit/s links.

The Cisco wired network uses a multi-protocol label switched (MPLS) core network running at 1Gbit/s over single mode optical fibre connecting both data centres.

Luckily for both Cisco and Aruba, it was human error and not their technology that spoiled the $8.5 billion British Airways Heathrow Terminal 5 opening!

http://www.BradReese.Com


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