Extreme Wi-Fi Makeover for ABC's Popular TV Show

ABC's wildly popular Extreme Home Makeover Show just got a makeover of their own - Wi-Fi style.

This is the show that, every week, surprises a family in desperate need of a new home and then proceeds to send the family on vacation while they build them an out-of-this-world domicile in seven days. 

It's simply remarkable. They build about two new homes a month around the United States.

One of the problems the show was having was maintaining reliable wireless Internet connectivity for everyone helping with the show. Everyone. With little time and so many different contractors, designers, production and staff who need to collaborate, print and do research online, Wi-Fi had truly become an essential element to actually getting the home built and the show produced.

Up to now the show used a collection of Cisco APs, routers and bridges, but found that range, reliability and performance were, in their words, "sucky."

The show typically needs to paint a Wi-Fi signal across a swath of three to four acres (and in some cases multiple city blocks) to support a myriad of users and applications. But dozens of monstrous RVs, trucks and machinery constantly moving in and out of the "hero home" had previously made it difficult for Wi-Fi signals to remain stable. Because everything is mobile, by definition, with things changing minute by minute, the Wi-Fi network needed to be resilient and adaptive.

"Our legacy Wi-Fi system just couldn't cope with interference and changes in the environment that obstruct Wi-Fi signals," said Greg Mueth, tech coordinator for ABC's Extreme Home Makeover Show.  "Without a good Wi-Fi signal we are literally dead in the water."

Extreme Home Makeover then decided they'd had enough and deployed four dual-band 802.11n ZoneFlex 7762s around their most recent philanthropic adventure.

One root AP connected to the Internet via a 25Mbps DSL circuit serviced three mesh APs over long range, non line of sight 5GHz connections while the 2.4GHz radio serviced some 150+ clients on site (the 5GHz radios can also serve clients concurrently). 

To Extreme Home Makeover's surprise, the Wi-Fi network was up and running in about one hour (compared to about a day with the previous solution) with most of the time spent installing the APs on 16 foot high poles. 

The four ZoneFlex 802.11n APs covered the entire 4 acre site. In classic fashion, the Extreme Home Makeover people had some fun with their old Wi-Fi system. Check out the videos below:  

Comments

[Too Bad]

Sounds like their original solution was never designed right. I love how people pitch new solutions as better, because one solution was designed, and the other wasn't.

I'd love to see 3 different solutions actually designed and a deployment scenario engineered for this, and see who then comes out on top.

[Ben]

The Ruckus Wireless solution is better, by design and implementation. Buy one and you'll see the difference. We just replaced a 3com solution with 1/2 the amount of AP's, and about twice the coverage because of a good product and good implementation.

[Isaac]

If this was a company with limited funding they would have looked for solutions for improving the current system. It looks like they had money to burn because they where destroying equipment that i cant afford. I so wish I was there to take if off their hands. It was hilarious though.