Company Overview
For eleven years, Brittany Park Care has been located in the heart of downtown Woodinville, Washington, offering 205 luxurious apartment homes in a fun and active retirement community. The 220,000 square foot facility provides “Five Star Fun” for senior living and is a subsidiary of Leisure Care, which operates retirement communities across the U.S. and Canada.
Background
The Brittany Park Assisted and Independent community needed a fully nomadic Wi-Fi solution for their BlueStep software, a dynamic, web-based technology that allows for full integration between the pharmacy, the community, the residents, and other care providers. The desired end result was a complete wireless paperless system accessible inside every apartment via small hand-held devices and laptops.
The Challenge
The main challenge for providing the fully nomadic Wi-Fi solution for Brittany Park was providing full coverage in all 205 apartments, reducing the overall hardware installation and management costs without compromising full-feature support and product reliability.
Brittany Park searched for the most cost effective and reliable Wi-Fi solution to achieve a full wireless, paperless system using their new web-based software. They began by requesting bids on hardware and installation costs to cover their entire 220,000 square foot 205 room facility. The bids on the Wi-Fi network ranged from using 29 to 130 Cisco access points. The price points for installing and managing these networks were unacceptable for Brittany Park. Implementing a hardwired solution was equally cost prohibitive because of wiring costs.
The Solution
Brittany Park chose a Bountiful® Wi-Fi integration specialist to perform their installation after receiving a competitive bid. Bountiful® Wi-Fi’s BWRG1000 and BWAP1000 offer the most powerful 802.11 Wi-Fi signals allowed under FCC regulations at nearly 1 Watt compared to the competition’s 100mW. The additional signal strength enabled Brittany Park to reduce its hardware and install costs significantly by reducing the number of access points to 14 Bountiful® Wi-Fi BWAPG1000s. By reducing the number of access points Bountiful® Wi-Fi minimizes the competition on the three non-overlapping channels in 802.11 thus increasing stability and reliability. Bountiful® Wi-Fi’s products are patented and currently outperform 802.11n products in both coverage and reliability. Because of Bountiful® Wi-Fi’s superior range and “huge ears,” even the weakest clients enjoy abundant and constant speeds. The integration specialist took advantage of the free offsite integration application team at Bountiful® Wi-Fi to determine the number of access points and other accessories needed for the install.
Implementation
The Bountiful® Wi-Fi integration specialist performed an initial site survey to determine where the access points should be located. Three access points were placed in the ceilings on the bottom floor, seven were placed on the middle floor and three more access points were located on the top floor. Because of HIPAA regulations, they could not run power supplies in the ceiling where the access points were installed. Instead, they relied on the fully compliant 802.3af PoE support built into the BWAPG1000. The plenum-rated mountable housing allowed the integrator to mount the Bountiful® Wi-Fi devices and comply with fire hazard regulations. Bountiful® Wi-Fi's setup wizard walked the integrator through the install in an easy three step process. The Bountiful® Wi-Fi devices come with the highest forms of security, 802.1x (radius), WPA, WPAPSK and WPA2-Enterprise. Other features offered for flexibility on the BWAPG1000 access points and BWRG1000 wireless routers include: Quad SSID, Remote Administration, VLAN support, WDS bridge and repeater, MAC address filtering, Port Forwarding and much more.
The integrator used an eight port switch with four PoE ports to supply power to the Bountiful® Wi-Fi BWAPG1000 access points. To increase the overall coverage of each access point they purchased high gain 7dBi BWANT7 Bountiful® Wi-Fi antennas. Brittany Park plans on adding a Bountiful® Wi-Fi WLAN access controller to centrally manage the 14 Bountiful® Wi-Fi BWAPG1000 access points.
Results
The end result for the Brittany Park implementation of Bountiful® Wi-Fi products to achieve their fully integrated nomadic Wi-Fi solution was successful in reducing the overall hardware and installation costs per facility. The reduction of hardware pieces has made ongoing management minimal on the new network and has created a stable and reliable environment for the 802.11 devices. Every apartment is fully covered with seamless roaming capabilities and high throughput speeds.
The Bountiful® Wi-Fi PoE support reduced the need for additional power supply cabling costs and its plenum-rated housing ensures Brittany Park's compliance with federal and state fire laws for mountable 802.11 access points in their facilities. Brittany Park successfully established a complete wireless paperless system accessible inside every apartment at a low cost and high reliability they needed with Bountiful® Wi-Fi products.
Feedback About The Install
“Before we came across the Bountiful® Wi-Fi solution, there was no way to make the wireless integration of our product cost effective for our customers. Their technical support and pre-sales support was unlike anything we have seen in this industry. Implementing the units went as smoothly as one could hope for.”
- Jeremiah Johnson, 4care Pharmacy
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