Free WiFi to be offered to visitors to Dartmoor National Park

March 2nd, 2015 by Sandy

The vast protected area of natural beauty that is Dartmoor National Park, in south Devon, England, will be offering free Wi-Fi access to the visiting public. Thanks to a Box Wi-Fi solution, from The Cloud, the park will be able to provide mobile phone coverage at all three main visitor-centres. The Box kit allows small organisations to offer free Wi-Fi to customers. The park had done a 6-month trial last summer in the main visitor-centre, before deciding on the free Wi-Fi service. They will be soon rolling out the service on the remaining 2 visitors centres, in time for the next season in 2015.

Although 2.4 million visitors arrive annually, the park previously hardly had a basic signal across the area. It would be too difficult to convince a mobile operator to make such a high investment to serve in such a remote area and the risk of spoiling the landscape too was an issue.

The ICT and premises head, Ali Bright, said that a separate cloud based network actually protected the park’s information, as the park’s authority acts as a local authority too. The 2-member IT team could also hand over the network’s responsibility over the provider effectively, he pointed out. He also added that the free Wi-Fi at the visitors centres gave a host of opportunities and put the visitor at the centre of things, besides the facility being set-up on a suitable budget.