In mid October the new domestic and international airport terminal opened in Adelaide, boasting the first free wireless web access throughout an airport precinct in Australia.
Adelaide-based ISP Internode installed the wireless network, which provides free web access and basic email -- Hotmail or Gmail -- to all travellers, and full access to VPN mail client for Internode customers.
In the past financial year the old airport served 5.4 million passengers, and Adelaide Airport Ltd (AAL) expects passenger numbers to increase by 6 percent in the new terminal.
“We have a visitor/passenger ratio of 2:1 so about 15 million people use the terminal each year,” says AAL’s corporate affairs manager John McArdle.
The pitch
Integrator Internode had done a lot of work for the Airport Corporation over the years providing other telecommunications services.
So when plans for the new terminal were announced, Internode broached the wireless subject. “We had a conversation with Adelaide Airport Ltd,” says Internode’s strategic development manager John Lindsay. “We gave them a bit of a briefing about how it could work and the benefits. They had discussions with a number of organisations that do wireless internet and found our offer to build it all and give away the internet access free was strangely compelling,” he says.
Offering something for free is one thing, Lindsay says, but it counts for very little of you do not have a proven track record behind you.
Internode, in conjunction with Adelaide City Council and Mnet, established the wireless CityLan network in the Adelaide CBD back in 2002 for the World IT Congress.
“Because we have the successful CityLan network, we were able to establish that we were credible. If we were doing it from scratch and didn’t have anything successful to point to, it would have been much harder,” says Lindsay.
The process
Being a new building, Lindsay says the airport had excellent structure cabling so the wireless installation only took a few days and cost $37,000.
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| Internode's Lindsay: Internode had credibility in wireless space |
“There are seven wireless access points from Cisco -- the Cisco 877 -- which is actually a DSL modem and wireless access point,” Lindsay says.
“For speed of deployment, we put a small DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexor) in the comms room in the terminal building and we actually run it as a DSL site,” he says.
This approach is unique, enabling Internode to use the existing telephony cabling that was installed in the construction of the airport building, instead of using Ethernet cabling like you would for an office building, he says.
“That solved the problem where the longest runs are over 600 metres of cable,” he says.
While there is fibre available in the airport terminal, it would have meant putting in transceivers on the end of the fibre, incurring more costs.
“It was considerably cheaper to deploy a small DSLAM. This is something other integrators could do quite easily. There are a number of vendors that have DSLAMs that are designed to put into comms rooms or apartment buildings, Lindsay says.
Internode used a gateway product from Colubris Networks for the authentication and access control. “We bought the equipment from Integrity Data and the access points are all from Cisco,” he says.
Challenges
The airport terminal is about 850 metres long end-to-end, which poses challenges when running networking around it.
Lindsay says the well-designed structured cabling system had wiring closets all over the terminal linked with optical fibre and copper, which helped overcome that.
Internode also faced the challenge of installing equipment in a construction site environment, complete with hard hats, people working overhead, and occupational health and safety people breathing down their necks.
The stipulation to have Internode staff go through site induction and safe work-practice training could have significantly slowed things down. They got around that by working with a company that already met those requirements.
“One of the ways we were able to move more rapidly is that Computer Site Services were doing the structure cabling installation, and because we already had a working relationship with them over the years, we actually subcontracted some of the work to Computer Site,” Lindsay says.
With security paranoia rampant in airports, there were some places where wireless communications weren’t allowed.
“Wireless access is terminal-wide except for a couple of areas which Customs people particularly didn’t want it to work in,” Lindsay says.
John McArdle, Adelaide Airport’s corporate affairs manager, says from AAL’s point of view, the only stipulation was that any new systems were not to interfere with existing radio or security frequencies -- “nothing that adversely affected existing operational frequencies,” he says.
After installing and providing the wireless access at no cost throughout the terminal, one of the challenges for Internode was to find some way to make it worth their effort, but getting advertising space was harder than they thought.
“In an environment like an airport, every square metre of the floor, walls and ceiling is somehow accounted for and the revenue opportunity has already been maximised. So placing signage [for our ads] is actually a real challenge, because every available piece of space has been sold to an advertising agency,” he says.
Perhaps the most obvious benefit is happy customers who will hopefully find less to whinge about if they get free email and internet while waiting for flights.
Typically wireless networks operating for profit in public places charge an exhorbitant amount of money for your 15 minutes -- to the point where people just don’t bother.
"This is going to be fantastic," says frequent traveller and airport veteran Vincent Shultz. "When you go to airports I usually try to get one of Qantas’ free machines and you get to sit down at a sticky keyboard and find you’re locked out from all the things you really want to do," says Shultz, who is a consultant for Technical Business Solutions.
Providing free wireless access at the airport is a ‘really good marketing opportunity’ for Internode, which paid for the wireless installation out of its marketing budget.
Increasing the awareness of Internode as a brand is one benefit, and in future, there is potential to generate revenue from its airport presence. One way is providing services to the various businesses in the airport’s 3400 square metre retail precinct.
"This should ultimately translate into more sales of our internet and communications services," says Lindsay.
For those needing full access to their corporate email and office functionality, Internode will soon offer immediate, online signup.
Lindsay says customers may punch in a credit card number, "or perhaps do something nifty with their mobile phone", but right now it’s all about free, basic web and email access.
Lindsay says Internode could build exactly the same sort of wireless service anywhere in Australia or globally, and is also in negotiations with various food outlets and café chains throughout Australia. "The concept of using a DSLAM rather than a LAN switch to build a network like this is really an interesting concept.
"Think of shopping centres and food courts where there’s probably not a lot of fi bre running through them, so the use of the existing telephone cable to run the services via DSL is a way of saving a lot of money and achieving a much more rapid time to market," he says.
Wireless at St Vincent’s Hospital
St Vincent’s Private Hospital in Sydney is using a wireless instrument tracking system to record how surgical instruments are cleaned and sterilised, and which instrument is used on what patient in an operating theatre.
"Before the present instrument tracking system, we had a DOS program," says Vincent Cox, nursing unit manager of sterilising services and patient care technology at St Vincent’s.
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| Wireless device used to track how surgical instruments are cleaned and sterilised |
It was a manual barcode system called STS -- sterilising tracking system. Aside from the fact it was not going to be supported beyond the year 2000, it was limited in its ability to track the journey of the instrument from cleaning, sterilising, use on a patient in surgery and back to cleaning.
"It has since been upgraded to a more Windows-based program and is [now] called MAQS -- management and quality sterilisation," Cox says.
MAQS has more in-built quality measures and the handheld device can provide prompts to users about the specific cleaning and assembly instructions relevant to a particular surgical instrument.
"You can track everything that’s happened to the set of instruments in the whole sterilisation process," says Chris Wilson, managing director of Precision Medical, the software provider behind MAQS. "Who packed it, who put it in the steriliser and who took it out, and whether it was okay when it came out.
"You can find it if it’s between store locations sitting on a shelf somewhere, and it is also time-and-date stamped so you can see who had it last. You can also scan it to a patient ID, so you can track which patient it was used on and when."
There’s usually one wireless handheld device (from Symbol) for each operating theatre and a few in the sterilising department. It allows staff to be mobile, and once instruments are scanned, data is received or transmitted wirelessly. The handheld device only has to be put back in the cradle to recharge.
Some of the functionality in MAQS was originally designed to meet the requirements of the Department of Health’s AS4187 standard, which is a "sterilising and processing of instruments standard", says Wilson.
"This requires a sterilising department to keep a record of what they put in a steriliser batch or load. So if the sterilising process fails, you know exactly what was in the load and can find the instruments before they get used," he says.
"NSW Health wanted a lot of KPIs [key performance indicators] for the sterilising department in terms of productivity, machine failure, and how many sterilisers were used, for example. It used to take people a few days to write up manual reports," he says.
Now using MAQS, they can just knock out those reports in an hour, producing whatever information the Department requires, he says.
One of the biggest challenges initially, says Cox, was the time it took to set up the initial data entry for the system.
"Every instrument had to be entered on the system, and it took someone about nine months, working three to four days a week to do it."
Once it was set up, there were negligible staff training issues, he says. "It’s a very easy system to use. In half an hour they pick it up," he says.
In any integration of new systems into the existing ones there’s bound to be teething problems, and in this case the new system worked fine until they wanted a second hospital to come on board.
"We’ve had some challenges because of the microwave link between two hospitals. The database is in one hospital and there’s a microwave link to another hospital," Wilson says.
Benefits at St Vincent’s
Patient safety is one obvious benefit of the MAQS system. If you have not scanned a surgical instrument at a certain point in the sterilising process, the handheld device will alert you that there’s a problem, and you can track where the breakdown occurred, Cox says.
The labels on each instrument or bundle of instruments have a barcode. Each time an instrument is processed, it is given a unique identifier, a unique code, says Wilson. If it is a popular instrument, it could be processed a few times a day, but each time it goes through the sterile process, it gets a different ID, and that is matched to the patient’s ID.
These kinds of safety measures are useful in the litigious medical realm. As Wilson says, "If you can’t show what you’ve done, you have no defence".
Whenever required, MAQS can generate reports for management that show the sterilising department’s productivity, what they’ve charged other departments for sterile supplies, and even sterilising done for GPs’ surgeries outside the hospital.
While there are still a lot of steps in the sterilising process where instruments are scanned, MAQS has helped speed up the process a little, Cox says.
"We’ve gone from a manual system -- where someone had to manually write on every label for every instrument -- to just scanning a barcode," he says. That has to help when some instrument trays contain up to 50 different instruments.
As useful as the wireless instrument tracking system is, Cox says there will always be upgrades and improvements. He would like to see scanning technology imbedded in the sterilisers in future, requiring less staff involvement.
He says it is a shame so many hospitals baulk at adopting wireless instrument tracking systems. "The investment scares them off. Most hospitals don’t see it as a worthwhile investment until there’s been a problem or incident," he says.
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