In September 2015 our marine engineering team were asked to produce a solution for VoWLAN (Voice over Wireless LAN) to enable Mobility onboard a fleet of 4 cruise ships. This solution involved 4 SIP gateways, 320 Spectralink handsets and integration to 4 existing legacy telephone systems. Working with WMS at Sea (AT&T Mobility) who designed the wireless infrastructure, we integrated our solution on each vessel over a period of 6 months with an average attendance of 8 days on each ship. The introduction of this technology results in staff around the vessel being contactable at any time and in any location. Should the handset be switched off or not receive a signal, the caller has the option to leave a voicemail message and the user is notified as soon as the handset is available again. This £250,000 project was completed in January 2016, managed and implemented by our project engineer and technical director, Steven Henstock.
We are now in the process of developing an application to run on the Spectralink handsets to enable messaging and emergency alerts via a centralised server.
All in all an extremely interesting project, which involved traversing the Panama Canal and flying to Peru, Mexico, Gibraltar to name a few locations.
