Case Studies
Robust Wi-Fi at prestigious retail shopping centre assets
LEVER’s customer, an International PLC retail landlord, provides a branded public Wi-Fi service at their properties, with a portal that captures essential user data and demographic information.
Wi-Fi is seen as an important service, because it enables shoppers to stay connected, and to perform product and price comparisons at venues where the performance of mobile data network services can be variable across the property.
Being branded, the Wi-Fi service must reflect the high quality of the premises and the retail brands located there, however with poor Wi-Fi performance reported at several venues, the customer wanted an independent and authoritative audit of the Wi-Fi service at ten shopping malls.
Ten prestigious shopping centre venues had to be surveyed urgently and detailed reports produced within five weeks of project initiation.
LEVER’s work had to give both the customer’s management team and the Wi-Fi service provider the information they needed in order to make rapid and effective decisions that would overhaul and upgrade the service, particularly at problematic venues.
LEVER worked closely with the customer, and with the third-party Wi-Fi service provider, to define in detail the survey tasks, methodologies, tests and procedures to be conducted on site.
LEVER also defined the data sets that would be collected and provided both to the customer and the network operator.
LEVER presented the customer with a comprehensive proposal, listing the essential survey services that were required, plus a series of additional enhanced survey, testing and analysis options.
The customer saw substantial value in each of LEVER’s recommendations and decided to accept all options in the proposal.
LEVER worked to a tight schedule of site visits, combining customer liaison, co-operation with the Wi-Fi service provider, comprehensive on-site survey and testing at the retail premises.
In addition, LEVER performed extensive testing of the major mobile network operator’s services at each venue, again with agreed tools and methods for testing.
The initial report was supplied ahead of schedule, so that the structure, content, data, analyses, and recommendations, could all be approved prior to the remaining site visits and reports being produced.
LEVER’s reports quickly revealed significant problems with the Wi-Fi networks at several venues, with comprehensive analysis and reporting that compared Wi-Fi service at all venues graphically and quantitatively, with a scale of user satisfaction ratings.
LEVER’s technical reports provided essential feedback for the Wi-Fi network operator, with recommendations ranging from high-level next actions for the Management team, through to detailed and actionable recommendations for the service provider.
As a result of LEVER’s work, the service provider was able to take a range of actions, including reconfiguration of several sites, software upgrades, and enhanced remote monitoring and supervision.
Following the initial assignment, LEVER have performed repeat visits at many sites to evaluate the improvements made by the service provider and to assess the on-going standards of Wi-Fi service at the venues.
This has been vital because, whilst improvements have been made at many locations, continuous testing and monitoring have shown that Wi-Fi network performance tends to degrade at some sites due to equipment faults and configuration changes, requiring further remediation by the service provider.
Following LEVER’s recommendations, Wi-Fi service was improved across all venues.
The average Wi-Fi service score of 43% was increased to 80% and 90% at most locations.
Wi-Fi speeds increased between 5x times and 25x times following LEVER's intervention.
- UK Retail Technology Manager
Many companies recognise LEVER as an authority in Wi-Fi network engineering. In this case, our customer needed a partner with a strong reputation, independence and impartiality, operational flexibility, technical competence, and the credibility to perform a critical review of the services provided by a well-known Wi-Fi network operator.
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