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Unifying Wireless Across Remote Operations with
Smarter 802.11n Opens a Sea of Productivity
For Pacific Seafood, one of the nation’s most successful independently-owned seafood processing company supplying fresh fish to restaurants and stores across the U.S., wireless connectivity was hit or miss.
And with the average person in the U.S. consuming approximately 16.8 lbs of seafood a year, any glitch
in their production was not a welcome taste.
Depending on the time of day, Wi-Fi connections could be
strong and fast or weak or slow. The question was, why?
With only a handful of IT staff, mostly located in its Clackamas,
Oregon headquarters, to support a wide range of computer
and networking responsibilities, Pacific Seafood needed better
connectivity everywhere it operated. This included more than 30
processing plants, warehouses, distribution centers, fish farms,
and sales offices spanning from Alaska to Texas.
Founded in 1941, Pacific Seafood is a
leading seafood company, operating
state-of-the-art processing and distribution
facilities throughout the Western United
States. Pacific Seafood operates 30
remote sites and employs between 2,000
and 3,000 workers. Headquartered in
Clackamas, Oregon, Pacific Seafood is one
of the most successful vertically-integrated,
independently-owned seafood company in
North America.
REQUIREMENTS
Breakfast, Lunch, and Wi-Fi
Operating in three shifts over 24-hours at its corporate headquarters, workers on break would head for a bank of microwave
ovens, firing them up for lunches and snacks and in the process
saturate the 2.4GHz spectrum, rendering the existing Wi-Fi network useless. For sales people in the building conducting millions
of dollars in trades each day, this was simply unacceptable.
OVERVIEW
Pacific Seafood relies on Wi-Fi to
support its entire business from plant
processing to inventory management
across vast operations.
“We have a very diverse set of businesses, applications, users, and devices - all of which require robust
wireless to maintain operational efficiency,” said Nathan Wiegand, network technician at Pacific
Seafood. “We have created a Wi-Fi network over time with Teklogic, Cisco, Linksys, Proxim and Sonic
Wall gear. But the system just didn’t cut it. We needed to address indoor interference issues, outdoor
warehousing applications and long-range point-to-point and point-to-multipoint needs. And, we didn’t
want to deploy a bunch of disparate products from different vendors and then have to act as a systems
integrator to make it all work. With only 4 IT staff that just wasn’t an option.”
Wiegand noted that the biggest problem, early on, was at the Pacific Seafood headquarters where they
were seeing an increasing number of dropped connections, especially during certain times of the day.
“We had to figure it out and fix it,” said Weigand. “It was really interfering with users’ work.”
Adding to its Wi-Fi woes, poor coverage and unstable
connectivity throughout its warehouse and processing
plants, where workers on forklifts and pallet jacks track
inventory using Motorola and Symbol MC9060 and MC9090
LEFT
Frank Dulcich, president and CEO of Pacific Seafood, a leader
in the worldwide seafood industry, took a more strategic view
of Wi-Fi given the inherent mobility built into its business.
• Centrally- and remotely-managed wireless
system for 30+ remote sites
• Complete coverage, high-performance at
the lowest possible cost
• Extended signal range with the smallest
number of APs
• Simplified administration and deployment
• Stable connectivity
• Interference avoidance
• Ability to operate in extreme cold
• Seamless integration with existing backend
• Standard 802.3af PoE support
• Multiple SSIDs
• Simple guest networking
SOLUTION
• ZoneFlex 7962 dual-band indoor 802.11n
Smart Wi-Fi APs
• ZoneFlex 7762 dual-band outdoor 802.11n
Smart Wi-FI APs
• ZoneFlex 7731 point-to-point 802.11n
Smart Wi-Fi bridge
• ZoneDirector 1000 Smart WLAN controllers
BENEFITS
• 40% fewer APs, four-fold performance
increase
• Half the cost of Aruba/Cisco WLAN systems
• Eliminated coverage holes and
performance problems caused by
interference
• Entire enterprise-wide system managed
and monitored at a single point
• APs deployed with or without controller
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“We take seafood all
the way from the boat
to the throat and rely
on Wi-Fi throughout
the entire production
process.
With such a diverse
set of operations,
users, applications
and devices, wireless
reliability was nonnegotiable.
The Ruckus ZoneFlex
was the only system
we could find that
combined unique
RF layer advances
with ease of use and
flexible deployment
options at a fraction
of the cost of anything
else.”
Nathan Wiegand
Wi-Fi-enabled handheld barcode scanners slowed business down as well. Workers use these devices to access
the company’s inventory management system.
Extremely latency-sensitive, Pacific Seafood’s inventory
management system, HS4, is an essential application
used to track fish and other inventory housed in large
warehouses. Creating TELNET sessions between users
and this application, if the system experiences delays, sessions are disconnected causing users to wait and establish new connections. Reliable wireless connectivity to this
application wasn’t an option, it was a necessity. But given
the harsh environmental conditions, obstructions and
vast space, Pacific Seafood found it challenging to find a
stable Wi-Fi solution.
In several of its sites, Pacific Seafood had a number of
buildings located several blocks apart. At its Westport
site in southern Washington coast, for example, the company has a central plant with an office four blocks away
in one direction. In the opposite direction of the plant,
nearly a mile away, they have a loading dock where product is brought in.
To reduce recurring monthly broadband costs to all of
these buildings, Pacific Seafood was interested in highspeed 802.11n point-to-point/multipoint bridges to
extend broadband connectivity to these sites.
Pacific Seafood also needed extended coverage and
more stable wireless connectivity to support dozens of
computer “robot” units used to support the company’s
in-house automated production
control (APC) tracking system. Pacific
Seafood’s APC
tracks fish from
dock to delivery
with an integrated
labeling and fish
ticket function. The system isolates product and quickly
provides Pacific Seafood specific information such as:
on what boat the product arrived, where/when it was
unloaded, when the product went into production, and
where the product was shipped.
Used on the loading docs, these four-wheeled, stainless
framed carts are surrounded by a waterproofed box.
Designed to operate in moist environments, each unit
houses a PC, touch-screen display, barcode scanner, and
printer used in the inventory tracking process.
Specific Needs, Flexible Solutions
While the company wanted more consistent Wi-Fi performance everywhere, the IT team needed Wi-Fi to be simple to deploy and easy to remotely manage. A tall order
for a dispersed company that also needs a wireless system that has centralized management, support for a large
number of concurrent users in a specific area, extended
signal range and interference mitigation. In addition,
Pacific Seafood wanted the flexibility to deploy APs in
standalone mode at select sites with local controllers
Network Technician
Pacific Seafood
RIGHT
Results from an RF spectrum analysis show
that the 2.4 GHz band was effectively
saturated and unusable when workers fired
up a bank of microwave ovens throughout
the day. Dual-band 802.11n APs with
interference mitigation and band steering
solved this problem.
100% saturation of 2.4GHz
RF spectrum, across all
802.11
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“When we installed
the 802.11n pointto-point/multipoint
bridges we saw an
astounding increase,
nearly 10x, and
throughput to the
point where users
were coming to
us saying ‘what
happened?’
Today, these longrange point-to-point
connections scream,
performing and
behaving just like a
wired network but
without recurring
monthly DSL or
fixed-line costs.”
Nathan Wiegand
Network Technician
Pacific Seafood
managing APs at other sites. Forcing all traffic through a
single controller simply would not be cost-effective.
“The wireless alternatives from Cisco, Aruba, and others
could deliver coverage if you deployed a lot of APs, but
were costly and complex to manage,” said Wiegand.
“Even then, if we had gone with their proposals, they
didn’t address some of the fundamental physical layer
problems that were disrupting our Wi-Fi network.”
Less is More
After evaluating alternatives, Pacific Seafood standardized on the Ruckus ZoneFlex dual-band 802.11n system
for both its indoor and outdoor applications.
At its headquarters, Pacific Seafood deployed 40% fewer
Ruckus APs than competitive suppliers suggested, and
are realizing better coverage and more stable client connections. “Our warehouse staff has reported much better
and stronger signal coverage, even with a fewer number
of access points,” said Wiegand.
Pacific Seafood has deployed the ZoneFlex dual-band
802.11n APs in its corporate offices and uses the integrated adaptive antenna technology and band steering
to avoid interference.
In its warehouse operations, Pacific Seafood has also
deployed the outdoor dual-band 802.11n ZoneFlex
7762. This device integrates a heater so it can be used
in extreme cold conditions such as in Pacific Seafood’s
freezers.
For long-range Wi-Fi extension, the ZoneFlex 7731
802.11n point-to-point/multipoint system is being used.
“The point-to-point and multipoint bridges have been
exceptional as far as throughput and ease of setup were
concerned,” said Wiegand. “With our Proxim bridges we
were seeing 5 to 10 Mbps. But with the ZoneFlex bridges
we’ve seen an order of magnitude increase - they are literally as fast as a wire over nearly half a mile.”
Enter Ruckus Wireless
Each Ruckus ZoneFlex AP integrates a patented smart
antenna array that focuses and directs Wi-Fi signals only
where needed, continually steering signals around obstacles and interference that degrade performance.
In addition, the product’s band-steering capabilities
direct clients to less congested RF channels. “The combination of these features solves both the interference and
high capacity problems we were seeing,” said Wiegand.
“The real beauty of this is that it all happens automatically.
We don’t have to worry about it or get involved.”
IT administrators have the option to specify which APs
broadcast which SSID to support the warehouse, office
computers and guest services, with different parameters
assigned for each virtual WLAN.
Today, the IT staff uses the Ruckus FlexMaster
system to perform wireless diagnostics at
remote sites, gather stats, configure ZoneFlex
APs and tap into ZoneDirector controllers. With
a reliable wireless infrastructure now in place,
they are exploring the possibility of using
Wi-Fi to support voice or IP video cameras to
troubleshoot plant problems in real-time.
RIGHT
Pacific Seafood
operators 30 remote
processing and
distribution sites across
the Pacific Northwest
spanning from Alaska to
Texas.
“The combination of 802.11n and dynamic
beamforming eliminates flaky coverage and
reliability issues that have plagued Wi-Fi in the
past. Ruckus Wireless is opening the door to
an entirely new world of applications that, until
now, just haven’t been possible,” said Wiegand.
Ruckus Wireless, Inc.
880 West Maude Avenue, Suite 101, Sunnyvale, CA 94085 USA
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