High speeds are a way of life at Calgary's Race City Motorsport Park. Unfortunately, however, the racing facility's computer network couldn't go the distance – literally.

The main office that houses most of the computers is located at one end of the 160 acre (0.6 square kilometer) facility, networked using a 100BaseT switch. The concessions office, racewear store and Race Day operations office are located adjacent to the race track, quite a distance from the main office. With a run of over 2,000 feet (610 meters) through a Cat. 3 cable owned by Race City, they could not connect the computers and achieve reasonable speed. "It was very frustrating to have good copper wire between locations but no way to have the computers use it," admits Art MacKenzie, President of Race City Motorsports. "And we don't have enough computer use to justify the cost of burying fiber optic cable or of installing a wireless network, each of which would cost over Can$15,000," he explains.

Increased Speed and Distance

"Our first concern was access to files on our server during Race Day operations and access for the concessions office," says MacKenzie. He discovered the TinyBridge through RADirect, RAD's North American online sales channel, and recognized that it was an affordable device that could handle the data rate and distance to expand the network outside the main office.

"We connected a pair of TinyBridge units across four wires of our copper cabling with 10/100 Mbps switches at each end. File transfer using the TinyBridge was more than twice the speed of a conventional 10BaseT hub and it seems to have no problem with the substantial distance. I am impressed that these easy-to-install pieces had performance at this level over more than a quarter mile (400 meters) of cable," affirms MacKenzie.

Fast Return on Investment

"We are in the process of acquiring more computers and changing some of our operational systems to use them on Race Days," says MacKenzie. "This will improve our efficiency and management information. With the low cost and ease of installation of the two TinyBridge units involved, they should pay for themselves quickly. Other solutions for our business were too expensive to justify the returns and too difficult on our cash flow," he concludes.

Download the PDF