Miami Boat Show 2016

The Miami International Boat Show is a 5-day event where people come from all over the world to show off their yachts, powerboats, and more! Attendees can experience the boating lifestyle, along with entertainment, dining, and more. As one of our clients, the Miami boat show presented many unique challenges for us in providing Wi-Fi and Network services. One of the main unique challenges for us here at C3-Wireless with an event like the Miami boat show is that it is outdoors, so anytime you have an outdoor event it makes Wi-Fi and wireless much more challenging.

The 2016 Miami International Boat Show in particular was very challenging because they were moving from an indoor convention center, the Miami Beach Convention Center, to an outdoor venue on Virginia Key. The new venue on Virginia Key is the Miami Marine Stadium Park & Basin, so it was on a causeway, on a key, and we had the challenge of not only providing Wi-Fi outdoors under these enormous tents where distributors were, but also providing Wi-Fi out on the docks where they also had exhibit booths. About 3 or 4 football field lengths out (300-400 yards) they had huge exhibit tents set up for the boats, people, etc., so that’s quite a distance and large area to have to provide wireless services for.

People hire us, C3-Wireless, when there are challenging situations or environments, like the Miami Boat Show, where they need an enterprise class, high density network. The Miami International Boat Show is roughly 150,000 people coming and going over those 5 days, so it’s just a lot of people in a pretty large area constantly moving around, as well as the 1100 exhibitors that we had to provide all the Wi-Fi infrastructure for.

Our Wi-Fi infrastructure and Network services are necessary for a combination of different reasons. First, we support the production, or the back of the house, which basically runs the whole Miami Boat Show. So all the offices from registration, the media tent, and VIP areas, to the production people that are running the event and all of their offices, we have to be able to provide the Wi-Fi so that they are all able to do what they need to do in order to run the entire show.

The second reason our Wi-Fi services are necessary is that with the Miami Boat Show, they require Wi-Fi for all of the food service vendors as well. They have a main food service vendor company, along with several food service spots where they needed to run their POS (Point of Sale) systems, so we had to provide Wi-Fi for all of that.

We were also responsible for providing Wi-Fi hot spots that were sponsored by Heineken, which served as Wi-Fi hotspots for the actual attendees that came to the event. That way the attendees could post pictures, comments, etc. on social media and the like, just as they normally would at home or anywhere else with a fast Wi-Fi network.

Finally, the 4^th piece of the puzzle was the exhibitors themselves. The exhibitors at the Miami International Boat Show do a lot of things that are digitally interactive. This includes anything from wide streaming at their booth, to needing a hard line network connection for their laptops, their standup devices, and their display devices, so we had to provide Wi-Fi and network services for them as well.

As you can imagine, providing reliable, high-speed, enterprise class Wi-Fi and network services is a large and daunting task for any wireless service provider. This was the second year in a row that C3-Wireless was chosen to be the wireless provider, and we will be returning next year, 2017, as well. We are very proud of our services and ability to meet and exceed our clients’ expectations.