Nolichucky Gorge Campground is an outdoor recreational campground and river guide headquarters. They serve families, fishermen, and paddlers access to local outdoor wilderness experiences for any age or experience level. From the edible gardens to the Noli. Nolichucky Gorge Campground year provides an enjoyable experience to hundreds of visitors throughout the year. They are located just off the Appalachian Trail and at the “take-out” along the Nolichucky River Gorge, which surrounds them with gorgeous views at the base of Unaka Mountain.
The Problem
Nolichucky Gorge Campground needed to provide Wi-Fi access to their entire campus which had 0 mobile coverage and limited access to outside networks. They were using a Ruckus solution that was not easy to manage, unaffordable to expand, and was not keeping up with network demands. Nolichucky Gorge Campground looked for a new Wi-Fi access point system that could withstand the outdoors, had long-range capabilities to encompass the full campground, and could drive high wireless performance for client devices. Erwin Utilities, a Grandstream installer, installed Grandstream’s GWN7630LR Outdoor Access Point.
The Solution
The durability of Grandstream’s outdoor GWN Wi-Fi access points, ease of management through the GWN.Cloud, and mesh capabilities were the reason why Erwin Utilities chose Grandstream. Erwin installed an ONT and Router with the primary GWN7630LR MESH AP attached to the router. The Router handles DHCP assignments for all clients connecting to the AP MESH network. The MESH APs are powered via POE injectors and mounted in strategic locations throughout the campground. The campground saw better performance by installing the GWN7630LRs in a Star Mesh Topology.
The Result
By choosing the GWN7630LR Wi-Fi access points, Erwin Utilities was able to provide superior coverage while maintaining a lower cost of operations for Nolichucky Gorge Campground. As a result of not having to run networking infrastructure to each AP, the total infrastructure cost was also lower. Erwin’s port costs for GPON and AE are much lower, which allows them to price this system at a competitive rate. As a result of the GWN7630LR’s high bandwidth capabilities of up to 2.33Gbps and running on Gigabit network ports, Erwin was able to adjust the deployment to accommodate many users in the camp’s large outdoor space. This also provided the ability to throttle the network on a per-client basis, meaning that despite the crowd size at the camp everyone could experience high network performances, Lastly, by leveraging GWN.Cloud, the GWN Wi-Fi access points were easily configured and ongoing monitoring the troubleshooting were completed swiftly from off-site.