The organisation has been running for over 115 years providing high quality locations for caravans and motorhomes across the UK with superb facilities and a high approval rating from its members.
Their main sites are maintained to a high quality providing many on sites services to the holiday makers including Wi-Fi across the campus sites.
The Customer Challenge
The existing Wi-Fi had been slow and lacked coverage of the site, it was charged as a premium service without delivering the customer experience and the consequence was that it generated many complaints to the club. Due to the rural locations of many of the sites, the mobile signal is often variable at best and hence frustrated families unable to get online. The challenge for the club was how to provide a high-quality service but keep within the commercial budgets within the organisation.
Technical Challenge and Solution
The properties are campus style in rural locations and consist of a number of pitches with a central clubhouse / administrative centre. They often have many deciduous trees around the site which leaf in spring and change the radio transmission characteristics. The technical solution was adapted for each site but primarily consisted of hub locations using radio towers with LigoWave bridges in point to multipoint mode operating at 5GHz. Typically, the main hub site would be at the administration centre with mobile towers around the site. The Access Points’s would then be connected to power and meshed into the network. The Cisco 1562 Access Point was then optimised for best overall performance. A key design criterion was providing the optimum coverage with the minimum number of access points in order to stay within the commercial limitations of the project.
Keeping the wireless bridges line of sight clear of tree foliage especially during the spring and summer was a particular challenge.
Fibre broadband was upgraded to a number of the sites allowing higher bandwidth speeds to be utilised to improve end user experience of internet. ITI installed all the centralised routers and switches within a cabinet in the main administrative centres and connected all the bridges and access points throughout the site.
Project Delivery
The project was delivered over eight months typically out of high season to avoid disruption to holidaymakers. All sites were surveyed prior to installation, key consideration were the health and safety aspects of working at height on towers installing the bridges. Risk assessments had to be made during the surveys to ensure successful delivery of the installations. The alignment and stability of the aerials were crucial to providing a long-term solution requiring the minimum of maintenance over the operational years of the service. Post installation surveys of the coverage were carried out with coverage mapping along with pictures of trees that had to be regularly cutback to maintain the connectivity on site.
Outcome and Feedback
The project was successfully delivered on time and within budget which was a key objective for the customer.
By changing the infrastructure to the latest technology and configuring it correctly gave a massive increase in the usability of the service by the the end users. Feedback was positive from end customers and the club itself having been a source of negative feedback and holding back their Trustpilot rating for a number of years. Site health checks have continued were directed by the service provider and/or the club to ensure that the service is enhanced and operating at optimum levels for the investment made.
