Amawaterways Luxury Cruise Connectivity, EU
AmaWaterways is an award-winning luxurious river cruise operator in Europe. With a fleet of 16 custom-designed cruise ships, AmaWaterways provides the luxuries of a 5-star hotel while cruising along Europe’s Danube, Douro, Garonne, Main, Mosel, Rhine, Rhone and Seine Rivers in elegance and style.
Internet is so integrated into the everyday life that, it is often the first thing a passenger asks when boarding. Passengers need Internet access for web browsing, to keep in touch with friends and family, and share their journey on social networks.
“A proactive, personalized approach to exceeding expectations is a hallmark of the AmaWaterways experience.”
-AmaWaterways River Cruises.
Challenges
Being well aware of what passengers need for an enjoyable journey, AmaWaterways fits their cruise ships with 6x 4G LTE European roaming SIM cards and one VSAT Internet connection. Daily bandwidth usage amounts to around 40GB or €800 of data cost a day. Bandwidth usage is constantly on the rise. Websites are becoming increasingly content-heavy and media-rich for a better browsing experience. This results in a steady rise in the bandwidth usage and data cost over time. While Internet audio and video calls let passengers stay in touch with family and friends, they also add to bandwidth usage and data costs. Mobiles devices by default perform app and system updates when connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Mobiles devices by default perform app and system updates when connected to a Wi-Fi network.
These updates bring new features and security enhancements, but performing these automatic downloads onboard significantly increases bandwidth usage and cost. All of these are using up all the bandwidth available and pushing up bandwidth usage
Requirements
AmaWaterways does not want to disallow certain bandwidth-intensive services because it is committed to providing the best travel experience possible and Internet is an integral part of it. This raises a challenge of fulfilling passengers’ increasing bandwidth needs without skyrocketing data cost which already amounts to €800 a day.
Video Testimonial
Wouter and the team from Frontier BV explain how Peplink’s Solution, was simple to implement, saved money, and increased connectivity in this cruise ship case study.
Solution
AmaWaterways turns to IT and AV provider – BSS ICT Groep, for help. Since most passengers go to the same sources for news, weather forecast and sports updates, and that most mobile devices have the same bundle of apps installed, BSS installed the Peplink Balance with MediaFast 500 on cruise ships for content caching. Immediately the Peplink Balance with MediaFast 500 is able to seamlessly cache web content.
For example, if all 150 passengers have Facebook app installed on their mobile devices. Without MediaFast, when there is a Facebook app update, it will be downloaded 150x times. With MediaFast, it will be download once, and cached for all passengers’ mobile devices, reducing the bandwidth usage for as many as 150x times.
Result
Cached content is delivered instantly to passengers from the Peplink Balance with MediaFast 500 router’s built-in storage with no extra bandwidth usage. This provides lightning fast downloads and a smooth web browsing experience for passengers. Bandwidth is also freed up for other uses such as Internet audio, and video calls. This provides a much smoother call and Internet experience for passengers.
After a month of deployment, the MediaFast has already made significant bandwidth savings. In fact, the savings provide an immediate return on investment for AmaWaterways – returning their investment in Peplink MediaFast in mere months. With such success, AmaWaterways will use the Peplink MediaFast solution on their entire fleet of cruise ships.
Deployment
InControl 2
Save configuration time, minimize truck rolls, stay on top of the status of your network.
MFA 500
Load balancing across 5 WAN connection together with MediaFast, our supercharged content catching solution
Special thanks to
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AmaWaterways is an award-winning luxurious river cruise operator in Europe. With a fleet of 16 custom-designed cruise ships, AmaWaterways provides the luxuries of a 5-star hotel while cruising along Europe’s Danube, Douro, Garonne, Main, Mosel, Rhine, Rhone and Seine Rivers in elegance and style.
Internet is so integrated into the everyday life that, it is often the first thing a passenger asks when boarding. Passengers need Internet access for web browsing, to keep in touch with friends and family, and share their journey on social networks.
Committed to providing the best travel experience possible, AmaWaterways needs a way to provide quality 24/7 Internet access to the each of their 150 premier guests as if they were onshore
Requirements
AmaWaterways does not want to disallow certain bandwidth-intensive services because it is committed to providing the best travel experience possible and Internet is an integral part of it. This raises a challenge of fulfilling passengers’ increasing bandwidth needs without skyrocketing data cost which already amounts to €800 a day.
Solution
AmaWaterways turns to IT and AV provider – BSS ICT Groep, for help. Since most passengers go to the same sources for news, weather forecast and sports updates, and that most mobile devices have the same bundle of apps installed, BSS installed the Peplink Balance with MediaFast 500 on cruise ships for content caching. Immediately the Peplink Balance with MediaFast 500 is able to seamlessly cache web content. For example, if all 150 passengers have Facebook app installed on their mobile devices. Without MediaFast, when there is a Facebook app update, it will be downloaded 150x times. With MediaFast, it will be download once, and cached for all passengers’ mobile devices, reducing the bandwidth usage for as many as 150x times.
Result
Cached content is delivered instantly to passengers from the Peplink Balance with MediaFast 500 router’s built-in storage with no extra bandwidth usage. This provides lightning fast downloads and a smooth web browsing experience for passengers. Bandwidth is also freed up for other uses such as Internet audio, and video calls. This provides a much smoother call and Internet experience for passengers.
After a month of deployment, the MediaFast has already made significant bandwidth savings. In fact, the savings provide an immediate return on investment for AmaWaterways – returning their investment in Peplink MediaFast in mere months. With such success, AmaWaterways will use the Peplink MediaFast solution on their entire fleet of cruise ships.