Hailed (by its owners) as one of New Zealand's premier events and exhibition centres, ASB Showgrounds has more than 18,000m2 of exhibition space.

This space has played host to the likes of Top Gear Live, Armageddon, Big Boys Toys, The Auckland Home Show, The Royal Easter Show, Fine Food New Zealand and NZ's Largest Stock Clearance Sale.

Before D-Link’s upgrade, exhibitors and visitors had to rely on public wireless and fixed line communications services. Exhibitors and customers also had to sit through slow 3G EFTPOS transactions.

"At busy times, exhibitors with EFTPOS facilities would have to wait 10-15 seconds to get a response which caused long queues of people waiting to pay," said John Robertson, Marketing Manager for ASB Showgrounds. "On quiet days it would be fine, then all of sudden you would get 20,000 visitors which leads to overloaded networks. At a recent show, we had a wireless 3G network shut down completely for that reason."

In addition to solving problems with public wireless, ASB Showgrounds also wanted to raise the level of future communications with options for high-speed wireless access and voice over IP.

"As a promotion, we gave an EFTPOS terminal to the one-man business that sells baked potatoes," added Robertson. That man now sells more potatoes then ever before.

D-Link says it got the gig because of its local presence, reliability, support and service levels – all at “a reasonable price point”.

For those wanting more on the tech behind the upgrade: "At the core of the network a DWS-3024 Managed Unified Wired/Wireless Switch has been installed which is connected to eight DES-1228P WebSmart Switches with PoE via multimode fibre-optic cables to create a high-speed Ethernet backbone. Forty DWL-8500AP Unified Wireless Access Points are connected to the WebSmart Switches via Power over Ethernet providing wireless coverage throughout the ASB Showgrounds site."