Royal Caribbean deploys 900 access points
Nine hundred Cisco access points are allowing Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines to navigate the tricky waters of wireless at sea. As colleague Tim Greene reports, the world’s longest cruise ship presented plenty of churning tides for a network encased in the steel hull of the vessel.
Each one of the 2,700 cabins on board the 6,300 passenger ship has wireless access for IP phones or Internet. The network uses five different SSIDs, some of which support multiple VLANs.
There are also 1,100 IP surveillance cameras and 370 Cisco plasma and LCD IP touch screens to post notices of daily activities. All traffic runs across a routed 10Gbps MPLS backbone anchored by Catalyst 6500s with up to 27,000 Gigabit Ethernet ports, Greene reports. MPLS and VLANs help impose QoS on different classes of service.
The liner also uses WAN optimization gear from Blue Coat and Riverbed.
The ship uses a 4Mbps down, 2Mbps up C-band satellite connection to reach shore. Passengers can call to shore on their cell phones or with the wired VoIP phones in their cabins, Greene reports. The VoIP network supports 4,000 extensions.
From the satellite, passenger phone calls are routed onto Royal Caribbean’s headquarters network on land, then out to the public phone network.
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