Church uses wireless technology to bring community together

Instead of having people travel to a singular physical location every week, this church brings their services to the people, therefore reducing barriers in spreading their message.

Eastlake community church is located across 8 campuses in Seattle area in Washington. Their main objective is to create a feel of a singular church across physically disconnected campuses.

The use of technology such as video allows them to do connect to a wide audience like never before. In addition to delivering their main services, they are also able to offer secure child services at their locations using electronic check-ins.

Unique challenges

In order to conduct their services week by week, they required a reliable network with a widespread wireless network with simple management for their volunteer-based IT. They also needed to keep their operational costs low considering the nature of their organization. More interestingly, Eastlake church faced some additional unique challenges. Out of their 8 locations, only 2 of them are permanent while the others are “pop-up” locations such as schools and public places.  All these dynamic, “pop-up” locations needed to support secure BYOD and yet simple management.

Check out this case on Eastlake Church on their goals, challenges, and Cisco midmarket network deployment solutions: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/wireless/eastlake_community_church.pdf.

Solution

By deploying Cisco’s solution designed for the Midmarket, Eastlake Community Church was able to use the network to their advantage in a way that was not possible with their old setup. To meet their major pain point, which was wireless, they chose Cisco Unified Access featuring one policy, one management, and one network.

The main products deployed were:

Cisco Catalyst 2960 Series Switches at their permanent locations

Cisco Aironet 2600 Access Points across all campuses.

Cisco Virtual Wireless Controller and Cisco Prime Infrastructure.

Outstanding results

Using Cisco’s Midmarket solutions, Eastlake Community Church now has an extremely reliable wireless network which supports their regular services across all their campuses. In addition to their regular services, they are also able to host special events in which there are many participants with mobile devices and manage all the devices with ease. This also makes the IT volunteers’ job easier. All this proved to be very cost effective as well. The church saves $2,000 per month in wireless hotspot costs they would incur otherwise.

Read the entire case study to learn more: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/wireless/eastlake_community_church.pdf

And visit http://www.cisco.com/go/midmarketbyod  for more information.