With the Pro Football Hall of Fame 2011 Enshrinement coming up next weekend, and the lockout over, I think it’s great timing to highlight what the Pro Football Hall of Fame is doing for students around the world.
How many times during your grade school years did you come face to face with one of your celebrity idols? Most of us probably can’t attest to more interaction with our famous role models than seeing their faces on posters or interviews on television. Thanks to telepresence, however, today’s students have a different story to tell.
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Tags: Art Shell, Buffalo Bills, canton ohio, Chris Hanburger, Dallas Cowboys, Dave Casper, Deion Sanders, Ed Sabol, education, football, Fred Biletnikoff, hof weekend, Howie Long, Jack Youngblood, John Madden, Les Richter, Lynn Swann, Marcus Allen, Marshall Faulk, Marv Levy, Miami Dolphins, Mike Haynes, Minnesota Vikings, NFL lockout, Nick Buoniconti, oakland raiders, pro football hall of fame, Richard Dent, Ron Yary, Shannon Sharpe, Ted Hendricks, TelePresence, Washington Redskins, Willie Brown
It’s been a most interesting week in my wireless corner of the universe. A number of very cool things happened, but I’d have to say that for me, the meeting of the week award goes to a wireless deployment site visit at Cowboy Stadium with an all access pass.
The scale and scope of that building is beyond hyperbole. There simply is no single word to describe the Cowboy Stadium. It turns out that $1.3 billion buys an awful lot of steel, glass, concrete, and electrical infrastructure. For the Super Bowl there next week, you’ll be spending approx $23K per seat near the 50 yard line at the lower level. A measly $3K each will get you one of the highest seats in the house- and believe me, they’re way, way up there. Think of watching a sporting event from the roof of a 20 story building a block away- literally.
It’s a structure that rivals anything I’m aware of that mankind has built in terms of scale. Math, engineering, tools, design knowledge, and maintenance resources seem almost infinite now. The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt pales in comparison as the Cowboy stadium has about 6X the square footage. Mind you, to the best of my knowledge, Jerry Jones wasn’t restricted to papyrus, hand calculations, and rudimentary tools, so the ancient Egyptians are still able to amaze us- 4,600 years later.
One thing I’m fairly certain of is that the Egyptians didn’t install wireless. A good thing too, because the complexity of installing over 900 access points would impress even the best of their engineers. It’s pretty daunting today; there are, on average, 40 AP’s for every 100 feet of walkway inside the perimeter of the Cowboy Stadium. Each technician verifying and fine tuning the design walked dozens of miles to ensure every AP would properly service the local clients. Just for kicks, I took an RF measurement at dead center on the playing field- it came in at around -70 dBm. This would rank as another one of those “that really shouldn’t work that well here” experiences I’ve had in nearly every deployment I’ve attended around the world.
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Tags: cowboys, football, superbowl, wifi, wireless
With the Pro Football Hall of Fame 2011 Enshrinement coming up next weekend, and the lockout over, I think it’s great timing to highlight what the Pro Football Hall of Fame is doing for students around the world.
