Providing reliable connectivity for a race car on the go is not easy, but the challenge will be even bigger when one wants to provide connectivity for an entire racetrack. All of the IoT devices deployed across the wide area, from the sensors used for car telemetry to the VoIP phones brought along by staff, need to be powered at the same time. What’s more, difficulties can add up when the setup needs to be moved from place to place occasionally.
That’s what Xtreme Xperience, a company who provides supercars and the experience of racing at famous racetracks across 35 cities in the US to auto racing fans, faced. Previously, the supercar driving experience provider relied on mobile hotspots dotted across the event area, but they found the connectivity unreliable and its coverage spotty.
To find a solution that can solve their connectivity issues, they approached Peplink partner, West Networks, for help.
Flexible Setup That Brings Hardcore Connectivity
Fully aware of all the needs on a racetrack, West Networks decided to deploy a Peplink HD4 IP67, two Mobility Antennas, three AP One Flexes and an 8-port SD-Switch.
The HD4 IP67 is an outdoor router designed for heavy-duty applications. The router has four embedded cellular modems and four redundant SIM slots. When it is connected to the SpeedFusion Cloud, a SpeedFusion tunnel will be formed, allowing the four regular network connections to be combined into one large bandwidth connection.
Meanwhile, the Mobility Antenna provides connectivity a further boost. This high-gain outdoor antenna can receive cellular signals with minimal loss, making the connection stronger and mitigates interference.
The AP One Flexes complete the wide area network solution. Equipped with Peplink’s signal boosting technology, this access point can eliminate dead spots and dropouts. In this case, as the racetracks were large, a total of three AP One Flexes were used to provide Wi-Fi across the entire racetrack with the high-speed connections delivered from the HD4 IP67 through an 8-port SD-Switch.
In order to make the setup easy for transportation, West Networks also used a weather-resistant SpeedFusion Case to perfectly contain and transport all of the devices.
High Speed Not Only on the Track
With the devices and technologies implemented, the supercar racing company can enjoy reliable connectivity while providing full-coverage Wi-Fi on the racetracks.
The quad-cellular HD4 IP67 router enabled the aggregation of four cellular connections with Bandwidth Bonding, Peplink’s patented cellular bonding technology. Thanks to the high bandwidth, activities conducted through IoT devices within the areas, such as telemetry from sensors on the race cars and communication via VoIP, are smoother than ever.
During the busy seasons of auto racing, Dynamic Weighted Bonding was used to monitor and reduce latency in voice communications and transmission of real-time data collected from sensors. This is achieved by reducing the packets going through a link which is not performing well and sending packets through the links with the lowest latency instead.
Full Wi-Fi coverage was also provided across the racetracks. The three AP One Flexes were installed high up in a 360 degree arrangement on an extendable metal pole, avoiding as many barriers as possible that might affect signal strength. Now, Xtreme Xperience can even receive a full 4 bars of signal from up to 1000 feet away from the unit!
Together with SpeedFusion Cloud, these devices allowed for the utilization of SpeedFusion technologies without additional cloud infrastructure or heavy data centers. Moreover, it only requires a minimal amount of time to set up.
Even when you want to power up all of the IoT devices instead of just providing network connectivity for one race car at a time, you can manage it with Peplink. Just bring the SpeedFusion Case along with you, and you can enjoy reliable connectivity for telemetry and VoIP on the racetracks.
Peplink makes IoT devices in auto racing always work.
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