Spinning Security at 500 Feet
The Revolving Dining Room at the Skylon Tower overlooking Niagara Falls is a world famous attraction. With a 360 degree vantage point soaring 775 feet from the foot of the falls, there are few other places like it in the world — and this past February, they were tearing up the floorboards.
As part of a full overhaul of the facilities JMR was on site to give the restaurant’s Aloha Point Of Sale system a boost. The very location of the RDR presents a challenge. With a more than 500 foot span from the central computers at the bottom of the tower to the terminals at the top, fibre optic connections are necessary to bridge the gap. In the dining room stations are located on both the revolving floor and the stationary centre, making wireless connectivity for the system a must. Radio signals are blocked by the tower’s concrete core, so a series of access points strategically placed in the ceiling blanket the moving floor with signal.
Our focus this February was security, ensuring that those wireless connections both met and exceeded the new rules for credit card transactions set by the PCI Security Standards Council. To this goal WPA2-AES standard encryption was put into place. The new Revolving Dining Room has been open and wowing visitors all summer and the network has never been more secure.
