TinyBridge Puts Canada's Race City Motorsports in the Fast Lane

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.

"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.