35 Hospitals and Clinics on One Network

A hospital waiting room is one of the most demanding WiFi environments there is. People sit for hours, anxious, with nothing to do but use their phones — and they do it in dense clusters, in rooms that were designed for infection control rather than radio propagation.

The same network carries electronic health records and telemedicine sessions. In an office, a visitor streaming video while a colleague joins a call is an annoyance. In a hospital, if guest traffic degrades a telemedicine consultation, that is a clinical problem, not a comfort one.

Spread that across 30 clinics and five hospitals in different parts of Dubai, each with its own building, its own patient volume and no local network engineer, and the management problem becomes as hard as the technical one.

• Patients, visitors and staff all connecting simultaneously, in dense waiting areas
• Clinical systems and guest traffic sharing the same infrastructure
• 35 geographically dispersed sites, with no on-site network staff
• Mandatory compliance with UAE Public Internet Access Provider (PIAP) rules
• Headroom for growth without a second capital project

We surveyed every one of the 35 sites and deployed Wi-Fi 6 access points throughout — indoors across waiting areas, patient rooms and administrative offices, and outdoors across parking areas and courtyards. Each facility was sized on its own patient volume, from 200 to 500 concurrent users depending on scale, with placement driven by the survey rather than by the ceiling grid.

The decision that matters most sits in the quality-of-service rules. Electronic health records and telemedicine take priority over streaming and general browsing, so a full waiting room cannot slow a consultation. Visitors still get a good experience; they simply get it after the clinical systems have what they need.

A carrier-class gateway handles PIAP filtering, so compliance is enforced in the network rather than left to policy. Guests authenticate through a branded portal using an email address or phone number. And all 35 sites report into a single cloud dashboard, with proactive alerts for access point outages and latency — which is what makes a 35-site estate manageable without local engineers.

• Wi-Fi 6 indoors and outdoors, surveyed for 100% coverage with no dead zones
• 200–500 concurrent users per facility, sized individually
• QoS prioritising health records and telemedicine over non-essential traffic
• Carrier-class gateway with built-in PIAP content filtering
• One cloud dashboard for all 35 locations, with proactive alerting
• Modular access point architecture, so new clinics join without redesign

The network now serves more than 200,000 users a month across the estate at 99.9% uptime, with proactive monitoring catching access point outages and latency before they reach a help desk.

The scalability held up in practice rather than on paper: within six months, connected devices grew by 20% and the network absorbed it with no additional hardware and no additional cost. Anonymised analytics from the portal give DHA a view of peak usage times, which services are most used and how visitor behaviour differs by site — useful for facilities planning as much as for IT.

• 35 facilities live on one managed, centrally monitored network
• 200,000+ users a month at 99.9% uptime
• 20% device growth in six months absorbed with no additional hardware
• PIAP-compliant filtering and authentication across all public access
• Clinical traffic protected — telemedicine and health records never queue behind streaming