Fast turnaround
Tills, card machines, match-day hospitality rooms and several hundred guests online at once. Not enough time for a fibre build, so we did it another way.
The situation
Three weeks before the start of the new season, the owner of a public house and hotel near Anfield got in touch. The venue needed broadband, and it needed it for three different jobs at once.
The tills and card machines had to work, because a pub that cannot take payment on a match day is not trading. The rooms the venue lets to the football club for match-day hospitality needed connectivity the club could rely on. And several hundred patrons wanted to get online at the same time, on match days and during other events.
Three weeks is not a fibre build. A survey, a wayleave, any construction charge and an install slot would have carried them well past the first home game, and match days are not revenue you can defer to October.
What we did
Everything below happened inside the three weeks, and was tested before the first home game rather than during it.
The outcome
The venue went into the new season without a connectivity problem. Tills and card machines run on their own protected segment, the hospitality rooms have a connection the club can depend on, and a few hundred guests can be online at once without any of that traffic touching the payment systems.
The guest network turned into something more useful than a cost. Patrons who opt in at sign-in go onto a marketing list the venue owns, which is now a genuine channel for promoting events rather than a hope that people saw the chalkboard.
We were on site for the first few home games. That part was not in the quote. The only real test of a match-day network is a full building on a Saturday afternoon, and we would rather be standing in it than reading about it on Monday.
Questions
It is a fixed wireless connection. An antenna on your roof talks directly to a nearby base station, so nothing has to be dug in the ground. That makes it fast to install, which is exactly what you want when the deadline is three weeks away or when fibre is not available at the address. It needs a clear, unobstructed path to the base station, which is the first thing we check.
Yes, provided they are separated properly. VLANs put payment terminals on their own logical network, so guest devices cannot see them and a busy guest network cannot slow them down. Keeping payment equipment on its own segment away from public traffic is standard practice and is what the card schemes expect.
You can, and for a venue with events it is one of the most useful things the Wi-Fi does. It has to be opt-in. Under UK GDPR and PECR you need consent before sending marketing emails or texts, the sign-in page has to make clear what somebody is agreeing to, and every message needs a working unsubscribe. We build the portal that way, and the list belongs to you rather than to us.
PPSK, or private pre-shared key, means different groups get different Wi-Fi passwords on the same equipment. Hospitality rooms, staff and guests each have their own. If a key needs changing you change that one rather than resetting the password for the whole building on a Friday afternoon.
Where line of sight is available, days rather than months. Fibre is usually the better long-term answer, but it moves at the speed of surveys and civils. When the date is fixed, we will tell you which route actually fits the date.
Tell us the deadline and what has to work by then. We will tell you honestly whether it can be done, and how.
