BroaMan solution for Caesars Forum
- Details
Locally based design and engineering specialists, National Technology Associates (NTA) have a long track record working with the Caesars Entertainment family, including LINQ promenade, the High Roller, and many restaurants and venues. Thus, they were again contracted, and as their project manager Shane Snell recognized the building was way too big to run traditional SDI cabling, he instead turned to a BroaMan fibre solution.
The Conference Centre itself measures a massive 550,000sq.ft including more than 300,000sq.ft of flexible meeting space with the two largest pillarless ballrooms in the world at 110,000sq.ft each.
Snell explained that the original design had “tons of SDI cabling” running to a total of nine IDF distribution frames. “With 400 floor boxes going to nine comms rooms, none of them connected, there was no way to tie them all together and certainly not by using coax point-to-point cabling.
“We needed a way to tie these isolated comms closets together—without a bunch of loose gear, adapters, boxes, or anything that could be less than reliable. It also needed to be easy to use by Encore Productions, the in-house productions team who live in the world of event production where flexibility, speed and ease are key.”
A BroaMan 40 x 40 Route66 video router sits at the hub of the fibre network design, with 32 3G-SDI I/Os freely routed to eight Repeat48 WDM in different locations throughout the facility. These provide electrical to optical, optical to electrical conversion and feature 24 video channels combined over build-in CWDM module, transportable over two duplex fibres.
There are also eight local fibre I/Os on the Route66, which a Repeat48 interface in the hub room converts to SDI. An external WDM frame, connected to the Route66 multiplexes 32 x 32 channels in the central location, combining together the desired video channels and sends the Muxed streams down a singlemode duplex fiber connection to each remote Repeat48 WDM. Between each of the Repeat48 WDMs and the Route66 there are also two generic fiber tunnels that can be used to tunnel an optical data.
Summing up the installation, and the success of the BroaMan deployment, Snell reflected, “Most of the other SDI over Fibre solutions had felt like a glob of pieces and parts. On the other hand the BroaMan set-up was nice in that it felt like a built-to-fit solution.”
The rest of the AV integration utilises Creston IPTV distribution, while NTA also installed a 35ft x 50ft corner hi-res LED wall, with 2mm pixel pitch - the largest of its kind in the country.
