King's Cross - London
How do you deliver lightning-fast WiFi and public guest access to one of the busiest areas in the UK?
The location, the connections, the canal-side setting, the rich and varied heritage, an exciting cultural scene, a thriving business community, and a strong sense of local community. All these things come together at King’s Cross to make it unique, exciting and really quite special.
The 67 acre site has a rich history and a unique setting. What was an underused industrial wasteland is being transformed into a new part of the city with homes, shops, offices, galleries, bars, restaurants, schools and even a university. It’s a whole new piece of London with a brand new postcode, N1C.
After a thorough survey and review of the existing network setup, we set to designing a new solution that focussed on improving the reliability and coverage of the existing hardware, whilst consolidating and simplifying the entire solution. simply put we became the sole point of contact for all WiFi issues and having secured end to end control (from ISP through to Access Point) we could provide an improved level of service.
In addition to consolidating the multiple service providers into a single solution, we also engaged in a process of proactive testing and identified (and resolved) a multitude of legacy issues.
As part of our surveying we were able to identify some key areas which were under supported and rapidly deploy additional Ruckus ZoneFlex Access Points to greatly increase coverage in high usage areas. Due to the sensitive nature of the location we worked in partnership with the Estate to minimise disruption through out of hours physical installations.
With the infrastructure in place and new access points, switching gear and Firewall installed it was time to address the next issue…
Haptic’s capability to provide a complete end-to-end solution was a major attraction, this coupled with Mark’s (Haptic Project Manager) grasp of the complexities of the multi-stakeholder nature of the Estate were significant factors in our selection of them as our WiFi Partner. Since they have started work on the Estate I’ve been consistently impressed by the speed and efficiency with which they work and their willingness to go the extra mile to ensure a continued improvement in service quality.
"
For a busy metropolitan hub such as King’s Cross, it’s important to know as much about your visitors as possible so that you don’t miss any opportunities to engage with them or improve your services.
It’s also important for users to be able to easily access the network without an arduous signup process, and most importantly- not have to sign up again on repeat visits.
We teamed up with our partner Purple Intelligent Spaces to provide an authentication solution that is quick and easy for users to access the network. This gave the Estate a fully customisable visitor facing on-boarding portal through which visitors are able to login instantly via their social media accounts or via a very quick login screen.
A portal provided to King’s Cross then displays highly granular and usable information about visitor demographics. Data such as location within the complex, footfall and even country of origin are just a some of the data groups made available that management can then use for marketing and information as well as visitor density information that can be used for capacity planning.
This enables King’s Cross to properly reach out to their visitors whilst monitoring the performance of the estate and making ongoing improvements.
