Retail Park WiFi

The challenge

In the autumn of 2016 The Crown Estate approached us regarding a new retail and leisure park they were building in Rushden, Northamptonshire.

Owned by The Crown Estate, Rushden Lakes now boasts 230,000 sq ft of retail space alongside stunning lakes, set in more than 200 acres of an SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) reserve, operated in partnership with The Wildlife Trust BCN. The scheme is comprised of a shopping and leisure development as well as a visitors centre.

InkspotWiFi were required to build and install a three phased Wi-Fi network which would offer a seamless browsing experience across the park, regardless of where the user was.

 

Only a small area of phase 1 could be covered through hard-wired access points mounted on the visitors centre. This meant that we had to develop a network, which would provide connectivity as well as receiving a permanent power supply. We set our technical team the task of building the network and – after a few late nights – we had a working network combining both fixed line and 4G connectivity.

The hard-wire section of the network was based on the same design as the shopping centres with which we have worked previously. To cover the wider area, we built a number of small boxes, housing a mini set of the hardware and a 4G dongle which gave the signal required. Each of these boxes, with a pair of access points attached, were then mounted to a number of the posts containing the CCTV around the park and wired directly into the post using a fused spur.

What we’ve achieved

We have now been live across phase 1 since July 2017 and, as of July this year, we are fully live across phase 3 with a seamless network across the park with phase 2 due to open in early 2019!

Visitor numbers across the network

To date we have seen over 195,274 connections with a daily average of 802 and a split of 16,718 amount return to 37,441 amount of new registrations.

54,159
Registrations

New never seen before users

195,274
Connections

Total number of Logins

10,057
Opt-ins

Users subscribed to newsletter

16,718
Returning Users

Users that visited again