Executive Summary
Queensland Airports Limited (QAL) is a regional airport specialist in Australia which handles approximately 153,000 passengers per week across four locations; Gold Coast, Townsville, Mt Isa, and Longreach. QAL’s primary focus is on creating an excellent customer experience for passengers using their airports. A component of this is ensuring that fast and free Wi-Fi internet is available for all passengers, and as such, QAL looked for ways to improve their internet performance while keeping costs down. Through their partnership with Megaport, QAL increased user download speeds on their free passenger Wi-Fi service using Megaport Internet Exchange (MegaIX) peering exchange. This improved QAL’s passenger experience at a fraction of the cost of traditional internet bandwidth.
Snapshot
- Improved passenger experience by increasing user download speeds on their free passenger Wi-Fi service.
- Deployed a 10G Port to the MegaIX giving passengers access to services like Netflix.
- Increased network performance and saved approximately 90 cents to the dollar with Megaport.
Challenges
Performance: In order to provide an outstanding customer experience, QAL identified the need for a complimentary Wi-Fi service for all passengers. However, due to increasing passenger demand, it was difficult to achieve consistently fast and reliable internet access for passengers. QAL needed to investigate new and innovative connectivity solutions in order to enable a world-class internet experience for all users.
Cost: Traditional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can deliver a reliable internet solution, however, this often comes at a high cost. QAL needed an efficient way to supply their passengers with the content they wanted at ever-increasing speeds, without significant increases in their internet access costs.
Flexibility: Traditional connectivity solutions are often inflexible which makes it difficult to adjust to changes in demand. QAL required a solution that allowed for rapid provisioning and flexible contract terms in order to swiftly react to changes in user demand.
Solution
QAL increased their network performance without significant increase in network cost. QAL deployed a 1Gb Port to provide supplementary bandwidth to their internet connection. This was accomplished using a Virtual Cross Connect (VXC) to MegaIX, which delivers free, scalable bandwidth to some of the world’s largest content providers. This significantly improved the speed of QAL’s free passenger Wi-Fi internet service.
QAL estimates that they saved approximately 90 cents to the dollar with Megaport when compared to other options they investigated. By leveraging the MegaIX peering platform, QAL was able to provide improved connectivity to high-demand internet-based content for their users. To achieve similar speeds using only traditional ISP bandwidth would have represented a much higher cost to QAL, potentially rendering the project itself unfeasible.
Rapid deployment meant QAL achieved an outcome in days, rather than weeks. Unlike a traditional telco deployment which could potentially take weeks or months, QAL was able to initially deploy Megaport services within a matter of days. QAL can now scale bandwidth up and down within seconds, allowing them to adjust their connectivity to meet changing customer needs.
QAL can now directly exchange data with the Megaport Ecosystem of leading service providers from one Port. Choice is a significant benefit of the Megaport Ecosystem in which QAL was able to connect with many of the key content providers their users want to access. Netflix, in particular, is a key contributor to the growing demand for bandwidth from passengers in QAL terminals. Leveraging the peering capabilities of MegaIX, QAL can deliver content to users at high speed and at no cost. This allows passengers to quickly download and access movies and other entertainment before and after they fly.
“Queensland Airports operates four airports, however, providing free Wi-Fi internet services at each of these is rather costly. Peering through Megaport has enabled us to reduce associated costs, but also allows QAL, as a business, to utilise these services.”
Peter Carter, Technology Business Partner, Queensland Airports Limited
Future Plans
Upcoming projects include a terminal expansion on the Gold Coast, as well as the deployment of complimentary passenger Wi-Fi throughout the terminal carparks. To support the increased bandwidth demands expected from increasing passenger numbers, QAL plans to expand their MegaIX peering capabilities to 10GB.
Additional services may also be considered to enhance QAL’s network, such as deploying supplementary internet services via the Megaport Exchange, and leveraging Megaport’s public cloud interconnection services.