The property had just gotten a 10-gig internet upgrade. Now the question was what to do with it.
So now I had 10 gigs and more bandwidth than I needed. Which meant I could finally tackle the thing everyone had been asking about for years: mobility.
Every quarter, someone brought a new piece of software to the table. “It only costs $1,000.” “It already works on mobile.” “It would be a game changer for efficiency.” And every time, they’d ask: what would it cost to put a mobile device in every employee’s hand?
The numbers always came back exciting. Real efficiency gains. Better collaboration. Better visibility. All the metrics C-suite likes. And every time, the IT guy said: we can’t.
“That’s the problem. Every time we have a suggestion, you say there’s something wrong.”
I turned the conversation. “You’re asking me about buying a BMW or a Ferrari. We don’t have a road yet.”
If you want 100% mobility, software that works in every corner of the property, 100% of the time,I need to build a road first. Then we can talk about cars.
The road
I wasn’t going to scratch a dirt path into the ground and hope for the best. If we were going to do this, it needed to be purpose-built infrastructure designed for expansion from day one. A concrete highway that would outlast me.
I wanted one outcome: the next time the business came back and said “this would be helpful, and it only costs. ” the IT answer would be “not a problem.”
So I started building the plan. Every square foot of the property. Inside and outside. Hundreds of thousands of square feet of interior coverage. Close to a million square feet of exterior. Customer densities in the thousands.
One adage I kept coming back to: you don’t build a fancy church just for Easter Sunday. But what if Easter Sunday is 5% of your entire annual revenue? Then you absolutely build a church for Easter Sunday.
The water bags
I was working with someone who had deep experience designing Wi-Fi for high-density environments. As we discussed the plan, she asked: “What about the water bags?”
I gave her a puzzled look. The water bags?
“Yeah. The people. Wi-Fi operates primarily at 2.4 gigahertz. People are made of water. Water is how microwaves work, at approximately 2.4 gigahertz. People absorb Wi-Fi. You need a lot more access points than you think.”
That sent me down a research rabbit hole. Who has really large Wi-Fi environments? Football stadiums. Basketball arenas. I started studying how they build coverage. You need dense clusters of access points. You need to focus the beams to specific areas so they don’t overlap, because Wi-Fi only has so many channels to work with. Put too many APs too close together and they interfere with each other. So you start building triangles of bandwidth, figuring out how many people fit in each triangle before you need another one.
After a few months of triangles, I had a plan. Every corner of the property covered. Vetted with industry experts. Every make, every model, cost breakdown, implementation schedule, and the business case for why our existing infrastructure was a ticking time bomb, couldn’t buy new parts, could barely find old ones, and the upgrade path was broken because new hardware wouldn’t work with old software.
I built two physical binders by hand. One for the CFO. One I kept on my desk.
The cost: a $1.4M capital expenditure proposal.
I was laughed out of the room.
The road that nobody wanted to pay for
I kept trying. “It’s the cost to build the road. Once you have the road, every car the business wants to drive on it becomes a simple decision. All the cars can drive on it.”
It didn’t land. Nobody could get past the number.
Some days I think it was the right idea at the wrong time. Some days I think I failed at selling it, that I didn’t frame the ROI correctly. It was my job to sell it, and I didn’t close.
That binder collected dust on my desk for about a year and a half before I left.
The punch line
About two years after I left, I heard that the plan was enacted almost exactly the way I’d prepared it. The only things that changed were the model numbers, because the hardware was 3 years old by then. The architecture, the coverage design, the implementation approach,all the same.
It was implemented with almost no changes, roughly 3.5 years after I wrote it.
Is this a comedy? Is it a tragedy? I’m not sure. But it’s real. It happened to me. And it’s my story.