Surfhire provides communication services for the events and touring industry, and its connectivity demands are varied: at trade shows visitors rely on the Internet to work remotely to share content in real-time, at music performances the production team will often collaborate online during rehearsals, and artists are constantly looking to be connected via Skype or social networks.
Often Surfhire are working to meet the demands of 150 crew members, each of who might have three smart devices meaning an average of 250-300 concurrent devices will be running on one network. Due to these many stakeholders’ demands for reliable, high-speed connectivity, Surfhire needs to deploy mission critical networks quickly and ensure the equipment can be moved easily from one set to another.
Surfhire needs to deliver a robust internet connection at every event, but moving switches from one event to the next takes its toll on hardware. The company’s Cisco 500 switches started to show signs of wear and tear, creating a need for new rugged equipment to offer wide-range indoor/outdoor network access for Internet, voice, VPN and other networking applications.
Simon Hodge, Director and Owner of Surfhire Limited, comments: “TP-LINK’s JetStream offers the best cross section of functionality: it is rack mountable, and it has built-in power supplies, cooling, and PoE management, ensuring we can deploy wireless access points quickly and easily, wherever our customers’ events might take us.”
Surfhire has purchased ten JetStream TL-SG3424P switches as well as a JetStream 24-Port L2 managed switch (SL5428E), and an 8-Port Gigabit Desktop Switch with 4-Port PoE (SG1008P), to create networks that can be used by artists, management teams and production crews.
Hodge concludes: “TP-LINK and its distributors are easy to work with. The products are feature-rich, giving us the flexibility to meet our clients’ needs without massive overheads. As we’re constantly on the move, the equipment we use needs to be rugged and quick and easy to configure. TP-LINK switches allow us to swap the configurations between devices so we can have the management team’s network up and running in 20 minutes and then just a couple of hours to complete the fully functional network for the rest of the users. TP-LINK ‘s JetStream ticks all the boxes for us.”