Continuing on with this mini series on Wi-Fi at airports, here’s a couple of shots from O’Hare (ORD). ORD seems to be in the middle of either an evaluation/bake-off or a transition between vendors because I saw a healthy amount of Aruba and Cisco in the terminal (I don’t remember which terminal this was in).
Aruba at ORD
This looks like an Aruba AP-228 which, if I’ve identified this correctly, does make some sense because I spotted this unit in the jet bridge getting onto the plane and if you’ve ever walked on/off a plane somewhere in Canada in the dead of winter, you KNOW those things do not have very good temperature control. The marketing literature says this guy is nicely suited for indoor locations that have little/no temperature control such as warehouses and stadiums.
On the Cisco side we’ve got 3702i APs (left-most arrow).
Cisco at ORD
Those saucer-looking thingies were antennas for the distributed antenna system (DAS). One was labeled AT&T and the other wasn’t readable.
It’s interesting that both the Aruba and Cisco APs appear to be the same generation (802.11ac Wave 1) which gives some credibility to the idea of an ongoing evaluation or bake-off between the vendors.
