Amawaterways

Case Study: Amawaterways

BSS ICT group provides quality 24/7 Internet access on river cruises. One of BSS’s customers is the award-winning luxurious river cruise operator in Europe – AmaWaterways. 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.

Cruise passengers need internet access for web browsing, to keep in touch with friends and family, and share their journey on social networks. Internet is so integrated into the everyday life that, it is often the first thing a passenger asks when boarding.

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.

Challenge

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.

Internet audio and video call let passengers stay in touch with family and friends. They do also add bandwidth usage and data cost.

Mobiles devices by default perform app and system updates when connected to a WiFi network. These updates bring new features and security enhancement, but having these automatic downloads onboard significantly increases bandwidth usage and cost.

This raises a challenge of fulfilling passengers’ increasing bandwidth needs without skyrocketing data cost which already amounts to €800 a day.

Solutions

Peplink Balance with MediaFast router comes with built-in SSD storage. This allows the router to seamlessly cache content in the built-in SSD storage.

Content e.g. news website and mobile app or system update will be cached in the router’s built-in SSD storage when they are requested by a passenger’s mobile device.

Subsequent access to the same content by other passenger’s mobile devices will be delivered instantly from cache without having to download the same content again from the Internet which would incur additional bandwidth usage.

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.

Benefits

Total bandwidth usage is reduced by 2GB to 5GB a day saving €1,200 to €3,000 a month in data cost. This provides a n immediate return on investment for AmaWaterways. The substantial cost saving is able to pay back their investment in Peplink MediaFast in only months.

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 download and smooth web browsing experience for passengers.

Bandwidth is freed up for other use e.g. internet audio and video call. This provides a much smoother call and Internet experience for passengers.

AmaWaterways will use the Peplink MediaFast solution on their entire fleet of cruise ships.

“Peplink MediaFast pays for itself in a matter of months !”

Hans Dominicus

BSS ICT Groep

“A proactive, personalized approach to exceeding expectations is a hallmark of the AmaWaterways experience.”

AmaWaterways River Cruises

5-star river cruise

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 First

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.

The Need for Bandwidth

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.

Internet audio and video call let passengers stay in touch with family and friends. They do also add bandwidth usage and data cost.

All of these are using up all the bandwidth available and pushing up bandwidth usage.

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.

BSS ICT – The River Cruise ICT Provider

AmaWaterways turns to their trusted IT and AV provider – BSS ICT Groep, for help. They both share the same customer-centric value and are driven by customer satisfaction.

BSS takes pride in their expertise. They stay at the forefront of technology and are continuously on the lookout for innovation and disruptive technologies that would be beneficial to their customers.

For a long time BSS has been using Peplink products. Peplink is among the first to research and develop products that use multiple Internet connections for more bandwidth and higher resiliency, before the industry coined a term for it – Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN).

Peplink is also an engineering-centric company with a firm belief in innovation. The team at Peplink consists of mostly engineers and product developers who listen to their customers on their community forums for feedback and suggestions, and bring them to reality.

Not only new customers enjoy the field-proven reliability of the product and the advanced software features from relentless research and development. Existing customers receives also regular free software upgrades that enhance the hardware performance and bring useful new software features – a Peplink is like a good wine that grows in time.

When Peplink introduced the MediaFast content caching technology, BSS knew that this would solve the challenge that AmaWaterways faced.

The Peplink MediaFast Solution

Peplink router with MediaFast content caching technology comes with built-in SSD storage. This allows the router to seamlessly cache content in the built-in SSD storage.

Content e.g. news website and mobile app or system update will be cached in the router’s built-in SSD storage when they are requested by a passenger’s mobile device.

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