The Gatsby Club

The Gatsby Club

The Gatsby Club, London, is a spacious and sleek facility which provides an exclusive entertainment option at The Championships, Wimbledon. Visitors can relax in the stunning restaurant from the moment they arrive and receive first-class service and treatment throughout their visit. Guests enjoy a meal prepared from the menu devised by world-class chef Albert Roux OBE, who leads a team which includes his son Michel Roux Jr. and granddaughter Emily Roux. Throughout their visit, guests can soak up the glorious sunshine in a relaxing garden area, sample luxury food and cocktails and enjoy the music of the live in-house band.

The purpose-built facility was erected directly opposite the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club, (AELTC) and caters for up to a thousand individual visitors per day. When considering the vast number of visitors, the busy tennis schedule during The Championships, and the varying Internet needs and requirements of the guests during their time in the venue, the facilities are in constant use, with occasional peak usage at key times of day. In addition, this was the very first time that guests were able to check-in to the event via an e-ticketing system, which was dependent on a reliable network.

As part of the overall first-class experience, it was deemed essential that guests were able to connect to the internet reliably in all areas of The Gatsby Club throughout their visit. A number of guests are business individuals that require access to their emails and office systems. In addition to this, social media, general web browsing, and online messaging are all regular occurrences, so a reliable and constant access to the internet is necessary.

Key Requirements

There was an expected audience of around 300 attendees at any time requiring access to the internet, moving around the premises and using the internet in different ways, placing different demands on the connection. The Gatsby Club required a solution with hardware that was not only discrete but also capable of managing a large number of users through multiple LAN connections for both staff and guests. With such a demand on the connection in a glamorous venue it was necessary to avoid excess cabling throughout the premises to mitigate against hazards and eyesores.

“At any one time there could be in excess of 300 individuals throughout the facility wanting access to the Wi-Fi, so the challenge was to provide coverage in all areas whilst ensuring that the network can handle peak usage.”

Vicky Vine, Wimbledon Event Manager

With this in mind, Keith Prowse, who manages The Gatsby Club, contacted MAC Systems. MAC’s Voice & Data Solutions are a telecoms provider specialising in sporting events where temporary structures, demanding users and extremes of usage are a commonplace, to a propose a solution.

“In scoping a solution for such a high-profile event proven reliability and quality are of paramount importance. We had no hesitation in selecting DrayTek as our partners to provide a complete DrayTek Wi-Fi solution, their products are excellent, and we knew we’d get all the technical support we needed to implement a solution within a tight timescale.”

Paul Burns, MAC Project Director

“I dropped in during day one of The Championships, to see how things were progressing and as you can see, no stress. I witnessed a successful and professional deployment, emphasising that we had made the right partner choice in DrayTek. I look forward to many more years of working together with the DrayTek team.”

Audrey Denyer, MAC Managing Director

The Solution

For guest Wi-Fi MAC installed ten DrayTek VigorAP 910C Access Points, positioning them in key locations throughout the club to ensure every visitor, wherever they were, had a strong Wi-Fi signal. The VigorAP 910C is discretely designed in a ‘smoke alarm’ style and can be mounted on a roof, ceiling or wall for flexible application.

Using DrayTek’s mobility feature, users can connect to an access point in one part of the structure, such as the main entrance, and then move freely around the entire venue switching from one access point to another automatically. So all access points effectively work as a single ‘virtual’ network with users unaware of the multiple devices they may be connecting to.

The DrayTek managed wireless solution is also highly effective at managing high usage and high concentration of access requests by connecting all devices in an intelligent and highly effective way using a combination of the following features:

Band-Steering - Typically, mobile devices also have flexibility of Wi-Fi standards. DrayTek Wi-Fi can take advantage of this and ‘force’ the Wi-Fi connection per device at the most efficient mutually compatible standard. This can help reduce congestion on the network.

Air-Time Fairness - This ensures that a user connecting on an especially slow Wi-Fi link perhaps limited by their mobile device does not ‘unfairly’ slow down other users with faster connections available.

Load-Balancing - By using DrayTek’s load-balancing feature, users will connect to the nearest available access point that has the least concurrent connections at that time, thus reducing potential bottlenecks.

The VigorAP 910C conforms to the very latest in Wi-Fi Standards, Wireless “ac”, and is also backwards compatible with previous standards including wireless “n”, dual-band and wireless “g”, thus ensuring support for the typical mix of mobile devices used by the users.

Each access point was connected with PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) to provide the network connectivity and power to the device using a DrayTek VigorSwitch P2261 PoE Switch. For connecting to the Internet, a DrayTek Vigor 2860 VDSL/ADSL Router connected the PoE switch to two broadband circuits allowing traffic to be balanced across both networks.

The Results

The installation of ten VigorAP 910C access points powered through PoE connections provided by a VigorSwitch P2261, alongside a Vigor 2860 router for Internet connectivity, created a stable and powerful wireless connection for the guests of The Gatsby Club.

“We are delighted to say that during the two weeks of the tournament, we didn’t receive any adverse feedback regarding the connectivity throughout the facility. This is a fantastic testament to the reliability of the equipment as well as the method and planning of the installation.”

Vicky Vine, Wimbledon Events Manager

Contacts:

• Keith Prowse – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. / www.keithprowse.co.uk
• Julian Hubble – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. / www.draytek.co.uk
• Audrey Denyer – This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. / www.macsystems.co.uk