3,500 access points, 20 decks, one shipyard deadline

• Travel and hospitality at sea. A 350 metre ship, 20 decks, guest cabins, restaurants, theatres, crew quarters and technical spaces. Over 3,500 access points covering guests, crew and operational systems, in a steel hull that behaves like a hotel, a high density venue and an industrial site at the same time.

• Over 3,500 access points spread across 20 decks and 350 metres of hull, all needing to be placed, named and handed to an installation crew that works to a fixed shipyard schedule.
• The modeling software could not carry the whole ship. Ekahau slowed to a crawl once thousands of access points sat in a single project file, making the design slow to edit and slow to review.
• The client required one PDF per deck showing every access point location, colour coded, using a strict naming convention encoding port or starboard and the distance of each access point from the front of the ship.
• Producing those maps by hand is fine for 10 access points. For thousands it is weeks of manual drawing, and every single design change invalidates the work already done.
• The timeline could not move, so late documentation would have stalled the ship, not just the network.

A full vessel Wi-Fi design, delivered alongside a purpose built automation pipeline that produced the documentation.

• One Ekahau project file per deck, so the model stayed faster and each deck could be designed and reviewed on its own.
• A naming convention agreed up front with the client: port or starboard, deck, and the measured position of each access point from the front of the ship.
• Scripts that read the Ekahau project files and generated the access point location maps automatically, with the correct names, colours and look and feel.
• The Ekahau project file as the single source of truth. Every change was made in the design, then the scripts were run again to regenerate the documentation.
• An Excel installation summary produced by the same pipeline, giving the shipyard every access point and its installation details in one file.
• Two engineers, split by strength: one building the automation, one designing in Ekahau, working in parallel against the deadline.

3,500+

Access points designed, named and documented across the vessel

20

Decks, each modelled in its own Ekahau file and published as its own map set

2

Engineers delivered the whole project: one on automation, one on design

Delivered inside a strict shipyard timeline, with documentation that stayed correct through every design revision.

• 3,500 plus access points designed, named and documented, with no maps drawn by hand.
• 20 deck map sets regenerated on demand. A design change meant rerunning the scripts, not redrawing the deliverable.
• Zero drift between design and documentation. Because the maps were generated from the Ekahau file, they could never disagree with the design.
• The naming convention applied identically to every access point on every deck, so installers on the ship had no ambiguity about what goes where.
• The shipyard received an Excel installation summary covering every access point, ready to hand to the installation crews.
• A fixed, unmovable delivery date met by a two person team, on a project whose manual version would have taken weeks of drafting alone.