- Mary Kay puts a New Face on Wireless. - Mary Kay is the world leader in direct-sales cosmetics, with revenue of more than $1.8 billion from wholesale transactions in 2004. - ON THE FRINGE. - Mary Kay headquarters is located on the border between two cellular coverage areas. - “We’re kind of on the fringes of Dallas, and we don’t have good, strong wireless coverage here,” said Brent Frerck, senior technical engineer at Mary Kay.. - subscribers because that company had installed a signal repeater system previously, but most Mary Kay employees were not Nextel subscribers, so it didn’t do them any good. - And if coverage within the building was a problem, it was non-existent in the facility’s 4-level underground parking garage, where the corporate photocopying facility was located.. - To remedy the problem, Mary Kay looked at several cellular carriers for its primary coverage contract.. - Naturally, better coverage was a top requirement on the list. - In the third quarter of 2005, Cingular installed a micro base station in the facility’s network operations center along with an Unison system.. - The system includes 4 Main Hubs, and then propagates wireless signals via fiber to 10 Expansion Hubs located on every other floor of offices, every other parking level, and in the lobby.. - IDEX, the contractor that installed the cabling, was a trusted contractor that Mary Kay’s IT staff had used for all of its networking needs, so Frerck had high confidence that they would be fast and non-disruptive, and. - IDEX was able to speed deployment by using existing fiber in the building risers to connect the hubs.. - Pervasive coverage means communications on the move. - For example, the vice president of human resources was expecting a call but needed to leave the office, and she was worried about getting coverage on her phone in the garage.. - Users found that calls were still dropping as they were in their cars on the ramps between levels in the parking garage, so a few more antennas were added to resolve the problem.. - Overall, however, the in-building system has made on-the-go communications possible, and has also given Mary Kay a back-up communications channel. - “We can still get a cellular signal and use data cards if necessary to get out to the Internet.” In addition, the pervasive cellular coverage allows Mary Kay’s IT technicians to move around and communicate anywhere in the building if the network goes down.. - In the future, Mary Kay plans to upgrade its cellular data service to HSDPA, so it can enjoy transfer speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps. - The active electronics in the in-building system will enable the upgrade without changes to system electronics or antenna placements. - In the mean time, coverage- related impediments to employee and IT staff productivity have been eliminated.
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