Enjoy Shopping and Reliable Wi-Fi at Portal de la Marina

Portal de la Marina is a prominent shopping center in the Marina Alta region of Alicante. As a universe of fun and shopping, Portal de la Marina carries leading brands in fashion, services, home items, restaurants, as well as a giant Hypermarket. With its Mediterranean character, custom-tailored to the needs of the area, the complex has been designed to capture the magical, mysterious effect of city streets of southeastern Spain. Aiming to be the perfect leisure paradise for all customers, a reliable and secure Wi-Fi infrastructure must be in place to keep the guest experience at top-notch level.

The complexity of the project lies in several aspects. First, the visual impact had to be almost nonexistent. Second, the installation and implementation had to be fast and in non-business hours. Last but not least, provide the highest ratio of coverage and bandwidth to overcome all architectural barriers. Due to the vast scale of the property (90,000 m2) and the main catchment area of close to 216,000 people, the primary issues faced by the shopping center were to provide sustained Wi-Fi coverage and being able to manage access points (APs) and user access. The Portal de la Marina team set out to find a new Wi-Fi solution by evaluating a number of suppliers available on the market and selected 4ipnet as their offering of choice, supported by 4ipnet’s local distributor WifiSafe.

The chosen solution included 4ipnet’s WHG711 wireless LAN controller, EAP767 and OWL630 concurrent dual-band access points, and SW2008 unified access switches. Advanced AP management features on the WHG711, such as automatic AP discovery and provisioning, bulk AP configuration, and real-time status notifications, simplified the deployment process. Once the APs went online, users could seamlessly roam between different APs without losing connectivity. Load balancing also prevented individual APs from being overly congested. With these functions, the Wi-Fi network was able to service thousands of simultaneous concurrent users, and the risk of potential downtime was reduced.

Despite all the challenges, the project had been successfully done on time. According to the IT team from Portal de la Marina, they were amazed by the Customized Captive Portal feature providing them with information to be able to generate statistics and carry out better marketing campaigns in this Big Data world. Besides, with OWL630 outdoor access point, now customers can enjoy seamless Wi-Fi from the parking lot all the way through the mall.

Portal de la Marina demonstrates a perfect example of how a shopping center can successfully deploy a large-scale Wi-Fi network using 4ipnet’s solution. With high performance APs, comprehensive user and AP management features, the shopping center reaffirms its commitment to providing advanced services and experience to their customers.

Portal de la Marina Shopping Center Case Study from 4ipnet