Stone Barns Institute Center for Food and Agriculture : Campus Wireless

Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, NY, a Rockefeller family farm built in the early 1930's, has evolved today into the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. This non-profit farm's goal is to demonstrate, teach and promote sustainable, community-based food production.

In addition to the on-site technical support Control Group provides the center, a major necessity at Stone Barns was a wireless network with the ability to cover their several square mile campus. The goal was to allow employees and visitors throughout the ground public access to the Internet.

One challenge to implementing this lay in creating a standardized, easy to manage setup that ensured the public did not have access to any of Stone Barns confidential resources. Our wireless configuration served to restrict campus guest traffic to its own VLAN, where the guest and public network are able to securely coexist.

In providing coverage, strategic access points where chosen to blanket the sites' diverse terrain. The stone barns themselves, comprised of sometimes two-foot thick walls, were a major obstruction preventing an off-the-shelf full solution. To overcome this obstacle, several access points were deployed creating one large meshed cell using both omni directional and focused directional antennas maximizing the potential power signal. Another notable obstacle involved bringing connectivity to the greenhouse over 400-feet of downgrade sloping terrain.

One interesting practical application of our large 'hotspots' is the everyday use to the farmers who monitor soil-moisture conditions and approaching storms in their fields by simply logging on. Functionality such as this is the true value of a wireless implementation.