Christian Conference Trust

The challenge

As one of the UK’s leading conference centre providers, The Christian Conference Trust (CCT) operates three large property portfolios nationwide, spanning over 130 acres.

They operate over 60 meeting and function rooms with various capacities, offering bespoke delegate packages to meet the requirements of their significant client base.

To support their conference facilities, CCT also offer accommodation across their sites, with over 500 guest bedrooms spanning their property portfolio. Usage of these facilities is high, with over 100,000 guest nights provided in the last year alone.

CCT contacted us as guest feedback had identified that their WiFi needed an upgrade. They were experiencing poor performance in guest areas, particularly in the conference rooms where user density was highest, and they needed their WiFi to work harder to provide a better experience for guests. They wanted faster speeds and more redundancy built into the network, which offers back-up in the event of component failure and therefore offers more reliability.

With high footfall on a daily basis, CCT were also interested in a WiFi captive portal, which gathers the information of delegates who are accessing the network. This provides useful information which could feed into CCT’s CRM system, providing compliant data for future marketing activity.

Our solution

Our team carried out a bespoke survey, and identified that CCT were already using Ruckus Access Points. This suggested that although they had invested in industry leading hardware, it wasn’t being utilised to its full potential and required a redesign.

We installed new Ruckus Access Points in the areas of the building where coverage and speeds were low, and we redistributed their existing access points to other areas of the building, to utilise their existing WiFi infrastructure. We installed a Ruckus cloud-based controller too, which provided centralised management, visibility and self-healing.

To specifically address CCT’s issue with WiFi speed and to build resilience into their network, we upgraded their old load-balanced connectivity to 200Mbps on 1Gbps ethernet-leased lines, with a failover circuit. A Cisco router and robust firewalls were installed at all three sites to provide secure inter-site connectivity for and advanced routing of traffic.

The result

We also deployed a bespoke captive portal for CCT. This was custom-developed to meet their data capture and brand requirements, and linked via API to their CRM system for automated data storage for use in future marketing activity.