Why China's CCTV building needed a WiFi retrofit

In the Forbes series BrandVoice, Chinese information and communications technology firm Huawei shares how the CCTV headquarters, designed by the firm of starchitect Rem Koolhaas (OMA), needed a year-long retrofit to allow better WiFi transmission.

CCTV wanted to provide free WiFi throughout its five-million-sf facility to its approximately 10,000 employees, but the building’s predominantly glass material and unconventional floor plan, nicknamed by Chinese netizens as “big pants,” created many blind spots for wireless Internet.

“Particularly in elevators and high-density areas such as studios and newsrooms, WiFi signal transmission was marginal,” writes Lisa R. Melsted, Forbes’ Huawei contributor.

Huawei was tapped to design a system so that every employee, anywhere in the building, can access Internet wirelessly. The firm's solution was to divide the building into different zones and design separate network plans for each.

Forbes has the full story.

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