Deering Bay Marina, located in South Miami, draws many boat owners who stay for extended stays. The boat owners needed a solution for email and Internet access and the marina wanted to leverage that need for a new recurring revenue source. After talking to a handful of prospective solutions providers, the marina cooperative board was able to identify three key factors of importance to itself and its customers. There was cost, or more specifically, how quickly the project could pay for itself, and provide revenue thereafter. Security was of vital importance; boat owners depended on the Internet for sensitive financial transactions. Last but not least would be durability, no small consideration in hurricane prone Florida.
Wialan Technologies stepped up with a proposal that addressed all three issues. Whereas another solutions provider suggested almost thirty access points and a large amount of cabling, Wialan showed how they could provide a single access point to cover the entire marina. Wialan also provided a Virtual Private Network security solution that utilizes built-in Windows authentication protocols to ensure the highest level of privacy without requiring boat owners to install software from hard media. Finally, the Wialan solution was delivered in Wialan’s patented hermetically sealed access point for a wireless network (Patent number 7,209,353), which has been in place for over six years, surviving a hurricane without a single outage to date. That’s right. Not a single outage.