The challenge:

The Eden Centre is located in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire with over 100 shops, including high-end and high-street fashion, as well as a host of dining and leisure experiences.  This is one of Savills’ PLC larger shopping centres so we were delighted when, back in 2015, they approached us to supply the public WiFi at the complex.

Quite a challenge lay ahead.  The centre has a number of walkways, both indoors and outdoors, with part of the complex located under a road, which presented its own restrictions!  We needed an indoor and an outdoor network but both needed to operate seamlessly, as one.  And so we set about designing a network that would cover all areas, wherever a user may be. As a large part of the centre ran under a road, this meant that we were somewhat restricted with the cable runs and, with the complex being so large, it was not possible to run all the cabling out from one central hub.  This meant installing two BT lines, one for indoors and one for outdoors. 

Despite the obstacles, we went live at the Eden Shopping Centre in June 2016.  In the first month alone we saw nearly 3000 registrations!  With the public WiFi now well established, we see over 22,000 connections every month with 4,112 returning and 3,574 new users!