The prestigious 5-star hotel Palace of the Golden Horses has chosen Altai’s Super WiFi as their wireless solution. Together with Alta’s solution partner Mykris Asia Sdn. Bhd., the entire hotel is fully covered with excellent Wifi signal strength – including lobby, pool, various restaurants, conference and ball rooms, and each and every of its 480 rooms and suites. Altai equipment installed includes the A3, A2 and C1, allowing quick and cost effective coverage of the sprawling hotel complex.

Challenges of this hotel includes various terrain and building styles. The hotel is built to resemble a Mogul palace with equally sprawling grounds. It was no mean feat to be able to cover the entire hotel, let alone complete the entire installation in two weeks, with concealed installation so that no one could detect where the WiFi signal is coming from. Traditional installation required multiple AP’s on each floor, while Altai’s solution is able to completely eliminate the need to interrupt hotel operations and guest comfort by installing the WiFi equipment outdoors.

Palace of the Golden Horses, tagged as Asia’s most extraordinary hotel, is a world-class award winning luxury hotel located within MINES Resort City and is just 20 minutes away from the city centre and 35 minute drive from Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Altai is going to showcase its advance wireless technologies and the latest Super WiFi products in these tradeshows, please come and visit us!

The bandwidth control function is now available in the A8 latest software release.  The implementation is not simply by applying a traffic limit, it is based on traffic shaping such that the total sent/received traffic can be maximized.

The key highlights of this new feature include:

• 2 modes of bandwidth control: By throughput or By Airtime.
• Allow the bandwidth control of uplink/downlink traffic
• Bandwidth control per SSID/client basis
• The bandwidth control is enforced upfront at the edge (wireless interface)

We sometimes have customers complain about an A8 site having sub-par performance. When we investigate these situations we usually discover that the lower than expected performance is caused by basic site installation mistakes that could be avoided easily.

Site selection is the single most important criteria in determining an A8 site’s performance. The main factor that affects the “quality” of a site is location desirability:

• Height of the antennae should be no more than 50m, except in dense urban environment with many high rises
• Height of antennae should have a 10 – 15m clearance over the surrounding buildings, trees, and obstacles

Thus, in urban or sub urban deployments where the average house is 10 – 15m in height, the A8 antennae should be installed at a height of 20 – 30m. The A8 can typically be installed on a pole or a tower. A pole is easier and cheaper to install, but since it is usually 3 – 5m in length, it may not offer enough clearance over the surrounding buildings. A tower, on the other hand, is more expensive and takes more effort to install, but it could go higher and therefore be able to offer enough clearance over the surrounding buildings.

Keep in mind that if a site is poor, this will limit the maximum available coverage. For physical constraints, they can be worked around by increasing the antennae height, or moving the base station to another location on the roof. On the other hand, RF constraints are not as easy to circumvent - in a heavily interfered environment with many in-band noise sources, even with sophisticated noise mitigation that the A8 employs, the maximum coverage area will be smaller and the maximum available throughput reduced. Therefore, we always advise our customers to perform RF site surveys before selecting a site. One simply method is to use an A8 and one antennae. Mount them on a tripod and do channel scanning in different directions. Based on the channel scanning results (noise floor for every channel), decide whether the site is suitable or not. You have to think twice if the noise level of the site is -80dBm or higher.

While the A8 comes with four antennae this does not mean that the antennae have to be installed in four different directions to give 360 degree coverage. It is, for example, not effective to have one of the antennae pointing towards a jungle where nobody is living there. Therefore, before site installation, use Google Map to mark the site, and pinpoint the whereabouts of the potential subscribers within the target cell. Once that is done, adjust the bearing of the four antennae to optimize coverage for those potential customers. This is something that will only take you 30 minutes to complete, but could potentially save you many headaches later on. Keep in mind that one of the biggest advantages of A8 is its flexibility; for example, you can have two antennae pointing in the same direction, one with smaller downtilt and one with bigger downtilt to optimize close range and long range coverage in the same direction. The intelligence of the A8 will always pick the optimal antenna beam to use on both the uplink and downlink for each associated client.

Now that you have the antennae pointing in the directions of the potential subscribers, it is time to calculate the downtilt angle of each antenna. The most important factors are:

• Antenna height
• A8 antenna horizontal / vertical beam-width
• Distance from potential subscribers

Downtilt angle is simply the arc tangent of antenna height divided by distance.


Next time, we will talk about how to perform site optimization. Till then!

With the launch of 802.11n standards in the Altai A2 WiFi AP/bridge, high definition video surveillance is made possible. The brand new dual 2x2 MIMO radio design of the A2 allows a maximum throughput of 100 Mbps for video surveillance application. This is equivalent to supporting up to 100 VGA (640 x 480) cameras, or 77 D1 (720 x 576) links in the analogue world or 16 1.3 Mega (1280 x 1024) IP cameras using the latest surveillance standards all operating at 4 fps MJPG-M, by a single pair of A2’s!



The advantage of moving towards a mega pixel video camera is that it provides more pixels per foot. Each Mega camera can cover a wider areas using a wide angle lens without compromising on the resolution. Fewer cameras and hence less installation and maintenance is required without scarifying security, this is particular significant for outdoor coverage.

Other typical deployment scenarios are illustrated below:

The benefits of the Altai 802.11n video surveillance solution include:

• High throughput– support up to 100 Mbps throughput over 2 km
• Cost saving– each pair of A2 supports up to 100 x VGA (640 x 480) cameras or 16 x 1.3 Mega (1280 x 1024) cameras operating at 4 fps and with MJPG-M compression.
• Easy deployment– no lengthy cabling work and renovation is required
• Less cameras are required– as each Mega pixel camera contain 4 times the pixel information as a VGA camera, a 1 Mega pixel camera with a wide angle lens can replace 4 VGA camera with zoom lens. Therefore fewer installation sites are required
• Robust– strong interference mitigation means robust performance in urban areas
• Long backhaul range– supports up to 12 km with 4 Mbps throughput

Altai 802.11n video surveillance solutions are designed for both city-wide and private campus applications including transportation, toll system, car park management, education, government, banking and finance, industrial automation, retail, construction, manufacturing, casino, integrated resort, prison and public security. One of the deployment senarios for a private campus using a daisy chain structure is shown below.