July 1, 2024
This blog post is part of a multi-part case study series on how we at Metro Wireless upgraded a marina WiFi network to help it provide a great internet experience for its members and staff. We now manage that outdoor WiFi network, and support the marina in monetizing its WiFi connectivity, allowing them to recuperate their investment.
We’ve broken this blog series into a few parts:
This article is about configuring and managing the back end stuff: setting up the network configuration and managing their network to ensure high reliability and a good end user experience.
Via co-management, both the marina client and the Metro Wireless technical support team will be able to easily change passwords, setup proactive outage alerts, view guest access, and update firmware.
The fastest way to get started on your new marina or other outdoor WiFi and wireless network is to email us at sales@metrowireless.com or call us at (888) 203-5826. It’s helpful if you also provide:
Our design and technical engineering team will assist you every step of the way, and we provide FREE remote surveys, which will give you a predictive picture of what your project will look like once completed, as well as a budgetary estimate to install and maintain your network.
Once the preliminary design is completed, we’ll schedule an on-site survey to finalize the network design. After our business clients accept the proposal and pay the deposit, we can order, provision, and install most WiFi networks within eight weeks.
Designs and consultations of commercial grade outdoor WiFi networks often focus too much on the SKUs and models of wireless equipment being deployed, but it’s our perspective at Metro Wireless that it’s equally important to prioritize how a wireless network gets configured and managed from a software perspective.
Modern WiFi management systems, typically managed via cloud-based controller software, offer sophisticated capabilities in managing and monitoring a WiFi and fixed-wireless backhaul system post-installation.
Since we often recommend and deploy Cambium wireless network equipment, here are some of the features included in its cloud-management platform, called cnMaestro, or cnMaestro X, its upgraded cousin. Other commercial and enterprise grade manufacturers like Cisco, Ruckus and Aruba have similar capabilities and feature sets:
This allows our clients and our team at Metro Wireless to be proactive in remediating issues, such as when power goes offline at a WiFi node. We typically advocate for setting up both our designated client contact superuser and our support team to receive outage alerts, as we co-manage the solution post install.
This allows for tracking any potential bandwidth hogs, or areas in the network where additional WiFi access points may be required. Over congestion on a network can lead to a poor user experience, so knowing where it may be helpful to add additional network capacity can be helpful.
This is a really cool feature! We can offer a solution, ePSK (Electronic Pre Shared Key) where individual ‘siloed networks’, deployed via individual Subnets and VLANs, can share a network SSID (simplifying network management and the user experience), but have individual usernames and passwords in order to retain security.
To be more clear, we can deploy a single network SSID (WiFi network name) across an entire network deployment (e.g., across an entire campground, RV park, or marina) and an end user would have a private username and password that they and their family could log into and have a private LAN network where only they could see their devices.
This can be applied for various use cases like family and friends sharing a private network so they can chromecast and Airplay to their TVs and speaker systems, or for siloing employee and staff networks from guest or member access.
Editor's note: if this is still unclear (as it’s a bit of a technical topic), please don’t hesitate to reach out to sales@metrowireless.com to get more information on how we can deploy this for your use case. It’s super cost effective, and adds a lot of value to the end user experience!
Monitoring the fixed-wireless backhaul network via the cloud-portal software makes troubleshooting and root-cause analysis easy. Our support teams review signal levels for the radios and antennas to ensure no issues arise.
Simply put, an authentication gateway is a more sophisticated firewall or router. The gateway will serve as a DHCP server for the client’s network, and act as a firewall between the Internet and your LAN, providing users with helpful features like:
Modern WiFi networks and management controllers open up opportunities for clients to charge their end users for WiFi and internet access, allowing them to recuperate their investment on any capital expenditures in deploying and maintaining a network.
Here are a few reasons why enabling a paid network model may make sense for your project:
Overall, while offering free Wi-Fi at the marina can be attractive to customers, charging for Wi-Fi can be a necessary or beneficial strategy to recover costs, ensure quality of service, provide fairness, offer customization, and generate revenue. When deciding to charge for Wi-Fi usage, plan to spend some extra time, as well as investment in the hotspot gateway, which allows you to do so.
As soon as we walked on-site during our professional site survey, we knew that our Lake St. Clair marina client didn’t have a well configured network that was being properly managed.
As part of our design and consultation process, we reviewed the client’s needs for a modern Managed WiFi network, and in addition to upgrading the structured cabling infrastructure and wireless network hardware, we designed an enhanced network monitoring solution:
Modern WiFi networks are typically managed by a cloud based portal software, and Cambium’s cnMaestro X offers this for all of their network hardware, including:
Our Network Engineers have full access into the Marina’s wireless network to help remotely troubleshoot any issues and perform root cause analysis. We can enable and disable user access, along with setting passwords for guest access.
If needed, we can also dispatch a field technician in a truck to perform any on-site troubleshooting, maintenance, or repairs.
We fully manage their monetization portal on their behalf, with them receiving the deposits for any money made on their WiFi network.
Co-managed means we’re giving the client’s team and outsourced IT team full admin permissions and access to manage their network, so they have the right but not the responsibility to manage their own network.
This option is a gimme for all the potential guests who visit the marina or harbor and don’t want to pay for any sort of premium / fast WiFi experience.
This tier is good for limited needs like checking an email or sending a message. We limited the speeds to 5Mbps downloads, and 5Mbps uploads. Obviously an unlimited number of devices can connect to this network, and we’ve built the network to withstand thousands of concurrent users.
This option is for boating members and guests who want a ‘fast lane on the highway experience’ that's suitable for video streaming, video conferencing, and the work-from-boat lifestyle.
Initially, we’ve capped the per-device speeds to 15Mbps downloads and 15Mbps uploads, but assuming no large network congestion, we may bump up these speed caps. We also set this tier to limit the number of devices that can access each paid transaction.
Finally, the paid tier had various duration options, like 24 hours, a long weekend, monthly, or seasonal usage, all with different pricing increments reflective of the duration.
The marina has a Paypal account setup to receive all the credit card funds collected from this tier.
Since a subsection of the marina is owned by HOA members who participated in the investment to upgrade the property-wide WiFi network, the marina wanted to honor the HOA by providing them the faster 15Mbps download and upload speed tier.
They have their network setup with individual member-level usernames and passwords, delivered by a technology called ePSK, or Electronic Pre-Shared Key. This provides a private, secure, siloed off network (i.e., VLAN, subnet) so that they won’t run into issues streaming to each other’s TVs or speaker systems via Apple Airplay or Chromecast.
As we discussed in our wireless hardware design and deployment article for this project, we predicted that some additional WiFi access points would need to be added after the initial installation, in order to provide blanket WiFi coverage to the entire property.
We didn’t want the client to overspend initially, so we opted to not include the additional WiFi access points and backhaul radios in our initial scope.
Sure enough, three additional WiFi access points were needed to boost coverage, and our cloud-based management controller made it easy to add the additional network hardware to our network management system.
Once the underlying structured cabling infrastructure was remediated, along with upgrading the outdoor WiFi access points and wireless point-to-point backhaul network, it was time to configure and set up the cloud-network management system for ongoing co-management.
This part of the project required well less than three weeks to and comprised about one third of the total project cost; mostly from a labor perspective, but also licensing costs for the cloud-based controller software.
This enabled the marina to have a rock solid network management experience, complete with enterprise grade features like outage alerts, speed caps/thresholds by device, and outdoor wifi monetization via paid access tiers. It is 100% cloud-based and offers the highest level of security and redundancy.
Now that the new wireless network is integrated, our team at Metro Wireless will manage any troubleshooting and monitoring for the WiFi, including any changes and technical support required.
We offer a 24/7/265 US-first NOC support team based in Detroit.
Our Managed WiFi deployments could also be deployed in other outdoor applications, such as RV parks and campgrounds, as well campuses, conferences, and academic settings.
To learn more about our Managed WiFi offering, check out our managed WiFi solutions page here. Of course, Metro Wireless deploys a lot of indoor (e.g., office, warehouse) type focused solutions, in addition to outdoor WiFi networks.
We run a robust, yet streamlined and fast process to consult, design, deploy, and manage outdoor WiFi networks like this Marina’s.
In order to start the process, send an email to sales@metrowireless.com with:
Our design and technical engineering team will assist you every step of the way, and we provide FREE remote surveys, which will give you a predictive picture of what your project will look like once completed, as well as a budgetary estimate to install and maintain your network.
Once the preliminary design is completed, we’ll schedule an on-site survey to finalize the network design. After our business clients accept the proposal and pay the deposit, we can order, provision, and install most WiFi networks within eight weeks.
Tyler Hoffman
