3 KM of Beachfront WiFi, Hidden by Design

Madinat Jumeirah wanted its guests to have easy WiFi access on the beach — the kind of connectivity they'd expect at home, extended across a three-kilometre stretch of open sand and waterway. On most sites that is a coverage problem. At a five-star resort it is also an aesthetics problem, and the aesthetics came first.

The brief was specific and unusually strict. The hardware could not be attached to flexible furniture or moveable objects, and it could not sit on custom poles planted in the sand. It had to be integrated into permanent features — a tree, a coffee hut — so that nothing looked like network equipment. On a beach with no existing infrastructure, that ruled out most of the obvious answers before design even started.

There was a performance question underneath it too, raised by EZELINK's own engineers: how do you place outdoor access points so that a heavy crowd of guests doesn't slow the connection for everyone — without a forest of visible hardware to spread the load?

• 3 km of open beach and waterway with no existing infrastructure
• No hardware on furniture, and no poles in the sand
• Access points to be hidden in permanent features — trees, huts, structures
• Density handled without a slowdown, and without visible hardware everywhere
• Equipment exposed permanently to sun, salt air and humidity

The work started with survey, not hardware. Our technical team ran repeated site surveys across the full three-kilometre stretch to find where coverage actually needed to land. An early idea — placing five access points on top of the beach huts — was raised and then dropped after consultation with Jumeirah's management, because roof-mounted units risked becoming a safety issue over time. The answer was to find the optimum discreet locations instead.

The outdoor access points were weatherproof units built for exactly this — dust- and water-resistant, with up to 28 dBm of transmit power across both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands for the range an open beach demands. They were mounted into permanent features across the resort, hidden in plain sight, and the layout was engineered so that the loss of any single unit degrades coverage as little as possible.

Indoors and behind the scenes it was a complete managed system: indoor access points, managed PoE+ switches and a wireless gateway and controller, with SSID-to-VLAN tagging and multiple VLANs so a secure guest network runs cleanly alongside everything else.

• Repeated RF surveys across the full 3 km before any install
• Access points hidden in permanent features, not on furniture or poles
• Weatherproof outdoor units, 28 dBm dual-band for long-range coverage
• Layout designed to minimise coverage loss if a unit goes down
• Managed PoE+ switching, gateway and controller with VLAN-segmented guest access

Guests now use their phones, tablets and laptops freely across the beach and waterways, with coverage that reaches the open sand rather than stopping at the buildings — and none of the hardware that delivers it draws the eye.

The more telling outcome is what happened next inside the Jumeirah group. Madinat Jumeirah is where Jumeirah trials new technology, and success there is what earns a rollout to its other flagship properties. On the strength of this work, the same approach was carried into sister hotels including the Burj Al Arab, Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Al Qasr and Al Naseem.

• 3 km of beachfront coverage, reaching the open sand
• Zero visual impact — hardware hidden in permanent features
• Weatherproof reliability in a permanent outdoor coastal environment
• Adopted across sister Jumeirah flagships after proving out at Madinat

"When new technologies emerge, Madinat Jumeirah integrates and evaluates them first. When they succeed, the products are implemented across sister companies such as Burj Al Arab, Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Al Qasr and Al Naseem."

Prasanna Pattabiraman · Assistant IT Manager · Madinat Jumeirah

"It was a tough battle, both organisational and technical, following the requirements of Jumeirah's management — and EZELINK has done a brilliant job."

Prasanna Pattabiraman · Assistant IT Manager · Madinat Jumeirah