The new Time Warner Center high-rise near Manhattan's Central Park is a showplace property for residents and businesses. It was also an opportunity to design wireless communications from the ground up, rather than retrofit an existing structure by placing access points in carefully determined locations to ensure appropriate coverage without interference, all while dealing with physical challenges such as routing cables to each access point.

Rather than use the traditional access-point approach, the Time Warner Center used InnerWireless's multifrequency antennas, which are embedded throughout the building's ceilings. Instead of being a series of access points cabled together, the InnerWireless approach uses one large antenna grid, so signals radiate and are received at all points of the cable, rather than just at discrete access points. Each antenna grid connects to an access point to handle the network functions, such as access control, signal management, and handoff to the rest of the network.

Shaped like an H and embedded in the ceilings, the antenna for each floor connects to one access point for that floor, rather than having multiple antennas daisy-chained on each floor. (The antenna shape will vary based on the building's design.) For example, in the Mandarin Oriental hotel that occupies about 20% of the Time Warner Center, there are just 26 access points to manage compared to the 300 or so that would have been required with the traditional approach, says Dave Heckaman, who leads IT for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. To add capacity, "you just add more access points to the network closet" — using different channels, of course — Heckaman says. The concept is similar to a wired network, where the router is in a network closet and the cable carries the signal to the users' devices throughout the floor.

At the Time Warner Center, the wireless infrastructure supports several communications systems, some wireless and some wired: 802.11b wireless, cellular networks, paging networks, closed-circuit TV (for security staff), building control systems, and two-way Fire Dept. communications. By using multifrequency antennas, the InnerWireless infrastructure can support all these systems with one common antenna grid. The center has about 2.5 million square feet, with 11 nodes to cover various sections of the building. (Each section encompasses 500,000 to 750,000 square feet and connects to other nodes via intertrunk connections.)