Building Zones installs first ever global 801.11ac Wi-Fi network at Eversheds

Why wireless networking specialist Building Zones won the best networking project category at the 2014 UK IT Awards

Wireless networking specialist Building Zones won the award for best networking project at the 2014 UK IT Awards, impressing the judges with its engaging story of a small firm of punching well above its weight.

Large, medium or small? This is one of the many questions that businesses have to ask themselves when assessing potential partners for an IT programme. Large suppliers offer scale, reach and a wider range of expertise, while smaller firms can provide more niche skills and often offer more flexibility.

International law firm Eversheds LLP employs 3,000 people in 21 offices across Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. The task of upgrading its Wi-Fi networks across all these properties would seem to be tailor made for a large supplier with global reach, especially since Eversheds wanted the networks to go live simultaneously across all these premises and to be rolled out within a challenging four-month timescale. However, the firm decided to buck conventional wisdom, and chose tiny London-based wireless specialist Building Zones, with its team of nine specialists, ahead of the major international systems integrator Computacenter, which has a headcount of thousands.

25 times faster

Promoting a professional and competent aura counts for a lot in the business services sector, which explains why law firms spend so much on office buildings and other public-facing facilities. This attention to detail needs to extend to the office wireless network too, both because clients expect reliable connectivity when they visit and because lawyers are spending an increasing amount of time working on mobile devices. So a fast reliable Wi-Fi network is a must. However, the Wi-Fi at Eversheds was a blemish on the firm's otherwise smooth public face.

"As a global law firm, we operate in a fast paced, ever-changing environment," said David Ball, head of IT at Eversheds.

"Our people and the people we want to attract expect instant access, virtual working, collaborative space and increased flexibility. With our existing archaic system, we were at risk of falling behind. Our wireless network was at best fragmented. Where we had wireless it was slow and unreliable with frequent and lengthy connection dropouts."

Clearly the Wi-Fi network needed upgrading, but Ball had ambitions to leapfrog Eversheds' competitors in terms of the technology deployed.

"It wasn't enough to just keep up with the sector; we wanted to lead it. Our vision is to be the global law firm that sets the standard so we set out an objective to create one of the highest performing wireless networks in the world," he said.

Specifically, Eversheds wanted to take advantage of the new wireless standard 802.11ac, which replaced 802.11n earlier this year offering a 1.3 Gigabit wireless speed.

As a new standard, there were few suppliers with the relevant experience in deploying 802.11ac networks. After a lengthy tender process the choice came down to two: Computacenter with a Cisco solution and Business Zones with Meru Networks.

Ball explained his reasoning for choosing the latter. First, Building Zones offered a compelling technical solution to Eversheds' requirements in the shape of wireless vendor Meru's virtual cell technology, which the firm says is more effective and efficient than alternatives.

It was not just about the technology, however. The law firm was also impressed by the quality of the response to the original request for information (RFI), which Ball described as "well-articulated, exceptionally professional and more extensive and polished than anything else we saw", and also by the personal commitment that Building Zones' CEO Jason Green (pictured, centre) gave to the success of the project.

"We knew that delivering this across 21 locations worldwide would require innovation, agility and perhaps most importantly, a willingness to go that little further, and we eventually threw down the gauntlet to Building Zones," Ball said.

Having won the contract, Building Zones kicked off by running a series of workshops with the Eversheds technical team and soon identified two imperatives for the law firm. The first was to enable Eversheds staff to take advantage of mobile technology to work from anywhere by providing better communication and collaboration capabilities, and the second was to develop a future-proof wireless solution that would be capable of keeping pace with on-going changes at the business.

The next step was to design a solution and test it in Eversheds' Birmingham premises.

"Once we had our solution design, we didn't simply roll it out and hope for the best," said Green. "We ran a proof of concept at Eversheds' Birmingham office over a period of 3 months. The response from employees was unanimous. It surpassed everyone's expectations and immediately transformed the way they worked."

This transformation was bought about not only by the improved coverage and reliability but by the sheer speed of the new network, which was 25 times faster than the one it replaced. This, Green says, is down to the effectiveness of Meru's virtual cell technology .

"Ours is the only solution able to deliver uncompromised full speed wireless coverage without using unstable DFS channels. Other wireless vendors have to run 802.11ac at 40 Mhz, which leads to a 50 percent reduction in speed," he said, adding that Meru's access points are also the most energy efficient on the market.

Next came the rollout to the other 20 sites in Europe and Asia. One aspect that particularly impressed the judging panel was the fact that Business Zones performed site surveys at every one of the sites, across five time zones, and yet the rollout was completed within a mere four months.

"We took floor plans of every floor of every office and put these through our desktop site survey tool to produce wireless heat maps," Green explained.

"Doing this ensured that we specified the correct number of access points for both coverage and capacity. We then visited every site to sanity check our desktop site survey, making adjustments where necessary."

To meet the punishing timeline without causing any disruption to Eversheds' workforce, Building Zones had to pull out all the stops.

"The team worked overtime to ensure that every access point was deployed out of hours. Our logistics team had to ensure that we had all the country-specific regulatory documentation to ensure speedy delivery to all international office. Throughout the entire process, we held weekly project meetings to update Eversheds on progress and gave open access to our project plan via our portal," Green explained.

At the end of the project, which was completed with zero down-time on time and on budget in May, the Wi-Fi networks at all of the offices had been upgraded to 802.11ac.

"We're not afraid to take risks and try something new. But with this project, we took a bold step and did something that has never been done before. We replaced Eversheds' entire wireless network with a new wireless 802.11ac network delivering Gigabit wireless connectivity to every one of its 21 offices worldwide - from France to the Far East. It was an ambitious project and represents the first ever global rollout of an 802.11ac Wi-Fi network."

Cost recouped

Eversheds is currently running three networks simultaneously over the new Wi-Fi network, including one designed for BYOD and providing web access, a network for corporate laptops and applications which is enabling true mobile working by supporting Microsoft Lync, and a web-only guest network.

It has already changed the way staff work. In August the third floor of the London office was turned over to hot-desking and break out areas, reducing the demand for dedicated office space and reducing administrative and financial overheads for the law firm. In fact, Ball said, the project has probably already recouped its £350,000 costs.

"Eversheds is in the process of moving to a more agile working model and it is important that we have the best wireless network," said Ball.