Wireless convenience at your favorite retail shopping mall 

Background 

Raffles City is strategically located at the heart of the city at the site of the former Raffles Institution. It has been considered by many as a landmark development in the downtown area and in 1980, and was officially opened and aptly named after Singapore's founder, Sir Stamford Raffles. Raffles city can be considered a virtual city itself with a wide variety of food, retail, service and entertainment outlets. Its multi-use function ensures that, like a real city, the complex is throbbing with life, round the clock.  

The Challenge 

As the functions and outlets in Raffles City expanded and became more diverse, there was an impending need to connect all areas and levels as a single entity. A backend point-of-sale system was required to obtain data from the various stores. Implementing such a system would require the deployment of a communication network spanning the entire building. However, extensive cabling and exposed Ethernet points would be both costly and unsightly, and would be detrimental to the image of a modern and clean Raffles City.

The Solution

With increased mobility and connectivity in our environment, wireless technologies are no longer just for the tech-savvy. Wireless connectivity is an elegant, stable and cost efficient solution to seamlessly connecting the virtual city. Wireless connectivity provides a wide coverage area for even hard to reach places.

In order to create the wireless network, the project implementers chose COMPEX’s range of wireless products. The Compex Wireless-AG NetPassage18 is a flexible WPA-secured Internet gateway with integrated 4-port switch, supporting both Web administration and remote SNMP management. Compex NetPassage18 access points were deployed in various strategic locations around the building to create a wireless network infrastructure. Point-of-sales systems were then connected to the wireless network through another Compex product – NetPassage16. The NetPassage 16 allowed point-of-sales systems to communicate with backend servers through the wireless network. 

Point-of-sales (POS) systems in stores were successfully connected wirelessly for fast transfer of data to the backend server for data-processing. The time taken to deploy the wireless network was significantly less than the time required to deploy a wired network infrastructure, which would have included laying LAN cables and punching Ethernet ports in walls and mounting.

Compex wireless products provided the complete and ideal solution for the Raffles City backbone wireless network. The NetPassage18s provided complete wireless coverage for the entire building. High data security was ensured by certified Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). Compex products also provided the project implementers with several benefits, namely customizability, cost savings, easy maintenance and strong support from Compex.

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