Obaba Fresh — San Jose

Obaba Fresh runs a high-volume food-distribution operation out of a San Jose warehouse where every order depends on wireless devices that can’t afford to lose signal — and the building is one of the hardest environments there is for Wi-Fi. Tall, narrow aisles are packed floor-to-ceiling with dense, liquid-heavy product that absorbs wireless signal, so each aisle behaves like a canyon that traps and blocks it.

The refrigerated cold rooms are harder still: built from metal-skinned insulated panels that seal each room off as its own dead zone, in a cold, condensing environment that ordinary office access points aren’t built to survive.

On top of the physics, three different classes of device all had to work at once — handheld barcode scanners, forklift-mounted tablets moving fast down the aisles, and staff phones — each needing to hand off cleanly from one access point to the next without a dropped scan or a frozen screen. And none of it could interrupt a live operation: product kept moving the entire time.

Wiztec engineered coverage for the building as it actually runs — loaded, not empty — and built it network-first. Enterprise UniFi routing and switching form the backbone, with access points placed down each aisle at rack height rather than high on the ceiling, so signal travels along the open aisle instead of fighting down through packed product.

Coverage was tuned for the devices that depend on it: 5 GHz as the primary band for speed and clean roaming, 2.4 GHz kept available for legacy scanners, and fast-roaming handoff configured so forklift tablets and scanners stay connected at speed instead of stalling between access points.

In the refrigerated rooms, each sealed cold room got its own IP-rated, outdoor-class access point built to run in cold, condensing air where a standard indoor unit would corrode and fail. Every access point reports into cloud monitoring, so Wiztec sees the network’s health remotely. The entire install was staged around the warehouse’s operation — no shutdown, no stranded aisles.

Coverage is now seamless across the whole facility — floor to ceiling, aisle to aisle, and inside every cold room. Scanners and forklift tablets hold their connection on the move, so orders get picked, scanned and shipped without the dead-zone drops that stall a food operation.

The cold rooms, previously impossible to cover reliably, are fully online with hardware rated for the environment. Staff phones work anywhere in the building, and Wiztec monitors the network remotely — most issues are spotted and corrected before they reach the floor. The facility gained reliable, enterprise-grade wireless coverage without a single day of downtime during the build.