Virgin Voyages is deploying Aruba's ESP (Edge Services Platform) network on all four of the company’s inaugural fleet of cruise ships to help deliver real-time services and always-on connectivity for passengers and crew members. 

Virgin Voyages partnered with technology partner DeCurtis for the deployment. It includes Aruba Wi-Fi 6 access points with built-in location services and access switches. It also uses ClearPass for network access control (NAC) and policy management, and AirWave for network management.

The network is built to accommodate around 15,000 devices, including crew devices, PCs, laptops and tablets supplied by Virgin Voyages, and also devices brought on board by customers. 

The system will also provide location-based quality of service via location-based data, like the virtual “queuing system” Virgin Voyages created. The cruise line has an application that sends alerts when it's a customer’s turn to board the ship, sit for dinner, enter the spa, or disembark in their port of call. 

Aruba VP of Portfolio Solutions Marketing Larry Lunetta told SDxCentral that Virgin Voyages started the deployment process several years ago and was “absolutely visionary in how they thought about not only their business and their customer and staff experiences, but what role they wanted technology, and specifically networking to play.”

“Many times organizations will think about the technology last, or they'll think about it as an add on,” Lunetta said, but Virgin Voyages thought about the experiences they wanted to generate with technology in mind. “You really have to build the network into the architecture of the ship as opposed to waiting for the ship to be done, then figure out how to put access points in and things like that."

“I think that was the power of what the outcome is in terms of using our location technologies, our connectivity technologies, our management capabilities, all of that to not only improve their, they call them the sailor experiences, but the staff experiences as well,” he added.