Family-owned resort and RV park chooses Extreme cloud technology for ease of deployment, network management


Johannesburg, 09 Jul 2020
Pete Nel, Business Development Executive for Extreme Networking technology at Duxbury Networking
Pete Nel, Business Development Executive for Extreme Networking technology at Duxbury Networking

A family-owned and operated casino and recreation vehicle (RV) park realised that having a controller at the centre of their WLAN represented a significant risk in terms of having a single point of failure. In addition, as 802.11 technology advanced, their controller-based system limited the access points they could deploy. Unlike Extreme’s cloud-managed technology, their controller became their bottleneck for moving forward with WiFi technology.

“As throughput and capacity technology continued to march on, they weren’t able to take advantage of it. One of the key requirements of a WLAN solution for the casino is reliability. With the deployment at the casino, unreliable WiFi has a direct correlation to revenue. When guests are playing games at the casino and have an issue with a machine, they can press a button that signals a mobile worker to step in to resolve. The mobile workers use iPod touches to receive notifications,” said Pete Nel, Business Development Executive for Extreme Networking technology at Duxbury Networking.

“The longer that guests cannot enjoy the gaming machines, the longer the facility goes without a revenue opportunity. On top of the gaming machines, the various tables use Surface Pros to manage the games and guest experience. These are also connected to the WLAN. Simply put, whatever solution that the facility deployed was critical to their long-term business growth. With their previous system, they felt locked out of newer technology along with having consistent roaming issues with client devices,” he added.

Reasons for the family-owned business selecting the Extreme cloud solutions include:

  • Reliability: Network uptime directly correlates to revenue, so downtime is not an option.
  • Cost savings: The total solution was much less expensive than other solutions on the market.
  • ExtremeCloud IQ: (Previously known as Aerohive Hive Manager) Management system, independent of a WLAN controller, delivers scalability.

The casino started out with one demo access point from Extreme. They were impressed with the architecture that Extreme was based on as they were not bound to a controller, but could still keep device management onsite.

After choosing Extreme as their next enterprise wireless solution, the casino owners deployed Extreme at their RV park. Leveraging Extreme’s outdoor AP1130s, they are able to provide guest access to their visitors. “If they want to view a live shot of the RV park where Extreme’s APs are in action, they can do that on a local weather Web site. They are using four outdoor APs to provide coverage for a 100-space RV park,” said Nel.

After a successful deployment in the RV park, they began to deploy Extreme AP230s in their hotel and bed and breakfast locations. The bed and breakfast locations are hours away, so Extreme’s plug and play solution was timely for the team. They relied on the ability to install onsite, and then monitor and troubleshoot remotely.

All of their properties are connected via fibre optics, and they have a site-to-site VPN between them. As they continued with the Extreme deployment, the hotel and its conference area became the latest beneficiary of Extreme’s cloud-managed WiFi. Along with guest access for hotel visitors, the conference centre offered access for onsite meetings from local businesses. They also have a concert venue for music attractions. In total, 22 Extreme access points cover the hotel rooms, and an additional six cover the conference centre and concert hall. They will frequently bring up new SSIDs for concert vendors and musical guests.

To round out the initial deployment, the extremely difficult casino was next. There are 1 700 slot machines and 1 400 client devices on the network at any given time. This location required an extremely robust and reliable solution.

“Extreme’s technology was on showcase in this location. Leveraging Extreme’s software-defined radios to have a dual 5GHz solution, they were able to solve capacity planning while minimising RF interference. With assistance from Extreme’s support staff, they are able to fine-tune their radio proles to better optimise them for their environment. While some networks might require 40MHz or 80MHz channels, Extreme’s support staff recommended a move to 20MHz channels in order to provide more capacity. This has freed up more channel width, but still provides more than enough throughput,” Nel pointed out.

“While guest access is provided, it’s not mission critical. The mission-critical aspect of the network is allowing the various gaming machines to communicate to support staff. When a machine is out of commission, they are losing revenue. The IT staff loved that with Extreme’s solution, their traffic is not funnelled through a centralised controller and that all authentication happens locally on each access point. Because each access point has a Layer 2-7 firewall built in, the WiFi can operate gaming tables, casino management software, and credit card transactions while keeping all the data separate,” said Nel.

For more information, contact Duxbury Networking, +27 (0) 11 351 9800, info@duxnet.co.za, www.duxbury.co.za.

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