Nestled in Alberta’s rolling foothills just east of the Canadian Rockies, the Leighton Art Centre is a haven for art, community education, Native culture preservation, and boasts 80 acres of wildlife conservation. Despite its remote location, the art center draws over 20,000 attendees per year, but suffered from poor wired line infrastructure and expensive cellular data usage. The organization contacted DCI Technologies to solve their connectivity challenges, which their expert team quickly accomplished with Peplink technologies.
The Challenge
The ChallengeScarce wired broadband and costly cellular network infrastructure posed a challenge for the art center’s robust data transfer requirements. With their eCommerce platform, on-site point of sale system, and coordinated student programs through the local school system, along with visitor expectations for reliable public Wi-Fi, the art center needed a better solution for their demanding data usage requirements.
The Solution
Our experienced partner, DCI Technologies, understood the Peplink deployment that would solve the Leighton Centre’s connectivity challenges. With the help of FrontierUS, their teams procured the deployment solution. A Balance 20X serves as the main router, combining Starlink and cellular signal through a Telus Hub via two WAN connections. Peplink’s Mobility 42G antenna optimizes signal reception throughout the complex, and a Peplink 8-port rugged switch connects 5 external buildings to the network. WiFi signal is no issue with Peplink’s AP One AC Mini, which DCI installed in each of the buildings on site.
Multiple VLANs with variable outbound policies, priorities and content filtering were all configured through Peplink’s intuitive web GUI, InControl2, to efficiently route data traffic. Specific connections are assigned to the appropriate applications; for example, the art center’s eCommerce VLAN uses SpeedFusion Connect Protect for seamless connectivity on their hosted web store, and their Captive Guest Portal is powered solely by Starlink signal.
InTouch
Peplink enhances out-of-band management. Instead of building separate networks or adding circuits dedicated to OOBM, InTouch integrates everything onto one platform for seamless connectivity. A single login allows access to all remote devices behind the system’s router – IP devices, remote desktops, remote protocols for servers, and more. InTouch gives access to Leighton’s existing broadband radio system and Telus Hub through InControl2. This saves DCI’s tech support time and money by enabling diagnostic capabilities of the network infrastructure remotely from any location.
The Result
Peplink’s flexible multi-WAN solution allows the Leighton Art Centre network to operate with significantly higher speeds and reliability than previously possible, and adding to the success of the deployment is the much lower operating cost compared to the alternatives.
