This blog was written by Brett Shore – Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise Product Marketing at Cisco.

You might have seen my last post and all the great things we (Cisco) had going on at MWC Barcelona. In case you didn’t, here’s the link.

For those not familiar with MWC Barcelona, it’s the world’s largest wireless show held at one of Europe’s largest venues, the Fira de Barcelona Gran Via Venue in Spain.

As mentioned in my previous post, the MWC Barcelona network is built on Cisco wired and wireless solutions. It utilizes the AI/ML engine in Cisco DNA Center to optimize connectivity, power consumption, and data throughput. In addition, Cisco DNA Spaces is used for location analytics and environmental data as part of the show’s health and safety plan. Lastly, WBA OpenRoaming helped guests and vendors seamlessly and securely connect to the wireless network, automatically authenticating them through a number of identity providers.

Now this is all great but let’s look at some of the numbers and outcomes:

  • Scale and scope
    • MWC Barcelona saw 61,000+ attendees this year! Live events are back in full force!
  • The Cisco Catalyst Wi-Fi, switching, and WAN network provided connectivity across the show
    • 100K+ OpenRoaming authentications, 38K peak per day
    • 80% of OpenRoaming identities were from service providers. The remaining 20% came from other identities including Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel devices which natively authenticate to OpenRoaming networks
    • Cisco DNA Spaces provided location and environmental data that was used as part of the show’s health and safety program. With this year’s success, Fira will start exploring next-generation applications such as location-based services and push notification from the event as well as vendors
    • Cisco Wi-Fi 6E at the booth, provided gigabit connectivity (up and down) for users. Demonstrated using Samsung Galaxy devices
    • Cisco Catalyst 9000 POE switches provided gigabit data speeds and 90 watts of power per port to thousands of networked devices.
  • Next Generation connectivity
    • AI Enhanced RRM completely eliminated co-channel interference, 100%. Even on 2.4 GHz channels.
    • RF 3D Heat Maps enabled IT to uniquely visualize Wi-Fi gaps and proactively address them to provide consistent experiences
    • Device analytics provided connection details from various devices to support troubleshooting and provide better experiences.
    • Umbrella Security protected the network and endpoints from potential threats
  • Demo’s in the Cisco NOC
    • Cisco Catalyst and Meraki Access Point demo with ConvergeX Ultra-wide Band location tracking using Samsung Galaxy phones and ConvergeX tags can track up to 1000 devices simultaneously
    • SLA-based Wi-Fi with Intel showcased the ability to drive a new breed of low-latency applications for industrial, healthcare, and manufacturing use cases

Additional Resources: