Background

Fowey Harbour Commissioners had already been introduced to Grapevine through their use of Harbour Assist management software.  Impressed with the service and support from Grapevine for their mobile marine WiFi used on the harbour patrol boats, they came to us to see if we could improve their river WiFi offering for visiting yachts and ships.

Requirement

The existing WiFi provision was patchy, with poor download speeds in key locations.  To enhance the experience of visiting yachts, better WiFi was needed, however, budgets were tight.

Solution

Grapevine carried out a full river survey to create a post installation visual heat map detailing signal strength, interference, quality of the existing access points, along with WIFI channels that were in use in the harbour. 

We identified weak spots and came up with a proposal to improve performance by utilising existing infrastructure as backhaul, but redirecting these to alternative backhaul locations where high-speed internet connections were added to increase download speeds and improve resilience.

Grapevine’s hot spot service enables visiting boats and contractors to access free internet, whilst also providing a payment gateway for the holiday homes in the area.  Bandwidth was restricted for users that just wanted to browse the internet to check the weather and mail, whereas users with higher bandwidth requirements are given the option to purchase the premium service to stream TV etc.

Result

Fowey now has a robust, easy to use river WiFi solution, giving their visitors a better experience.  Their management team can report on usage, review transactions and carry out basic troubleshooting via their online portal, and they are backed up by our support team with 7-day support.