Sep 09, 2014

Authorities at Treadwell Bay Marina in Plattsburgh, New York, initially wanted to improve the level of service boaters received with the availability of Wi-Fi access. However, once they realized the great value that could be gleaned from a wireless infrastructure, they decided they could do much more than just allow tourists to use their laptops on their boats.

According to Public Safety IT, the marina, which sits on Lake Champlain, serves mostly boaters coming in from Montreal. When marina owners wanted to add Wi-Fi service, they ran into a number of challenges that caused them to seek solutions elsewhere. At first, owners contacted a local cable company to establish hotspots within the marina for connectivity. However, this system would require considerable construction to establish the network, and also came with a complete lack of IT support.

“We were behind the technology curve,” said Treadwell Bay Marina owner Gary Titherington. “We had no 3G service because it is a rural area.”

After realizing the substantial obstacles that would come with service from the cable company, Titherington and other stakeholders turned their focus to implementing a wireless infrastructure, and discovered Firetide Infrastructure Mesh. Besides being able to offer Wi-Fi service to marina-goers, a mesh wireless infrastructure would also enable owners to add video surveillance to increase the area’s security.

“We looked at it as an investment in management and inventory control,” Titherington noted.

Marina owners elected to utilize Firetide’s HotPort 6000 Wireless Mesh Network alongside the HotPoint 4500/4600 Wireless Access Points to provide Wi-Fi access and wireless backhaul. The system also allows network administrators to leverage a single management interface to monitor and maintain both the HotPort and HotPoint components.

A number of locations and organizations have similar Firetide mesh network structures in place for safety, which allows them not only to provide Wi-Fi access and monitor sites, but enables voice, data and video traffic as well. Firetide’s mesh networks ensure reliable, constant access to the system, and also provide scalability so that the infrastructure can grow to meet any group’s or authority’s needs.