flitwick church Case Study
Express Telephony delivers 4G internet for modern church livestreaming Sunday services.
The customer
King’s Church Flitwick, is more than just a building, it’s a team of dedicated worshippers that are building a
spirit-filled community and serving local residents with a mixture of children and adult-focused services,
as well as running Sunday services.
The challenge
Due to the church’s location, the Grade-II listed building was unable to get FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) installed at the premises, and had instead opted to run the building’s connectivity via a 4G router that took the data connection from a SIM card and distributed it was a Wi-Fi signal through the building.
However, coverage was very spotty across the entire site, thanks to thick walls and considerable interference from parishioners’ phones during services. The church even had an unwritten rule to keep doors open to ensure the strongest signal possible!
As a modern church, they had also adopted a card payment device that parishioners could use to make donations during events, as well as livestreaming Sunday services. However, the connectivity had a knock-on effect, timing out on donations and negatively impacting the streaming video quality, with leaders having to stay in specific areas to ensure a halfway-decent connection.
The solution
Express Telephony visited the church and conducted a site-wide audit and survey, measuring signal strength in all rooms, proving that signal strength was lacking in key areas throughout the building.
Given the church’s limited budget, the team came up with a cost-effective solution, consisting of multiple Wi-Fi routers in key rooms, all wired-back to a business-grade 4G router and external antenna, that would ensure a more reliable connection and higher bandwidth.
This would also enable the Church team to split the connection for internal uses – livestreaming, donations and admin – and a separate Wi-Fi network for the parishioners to use when they visited the church, with content filtering to ensure child-friendly content.
After designing the distributed Wi-Fi system, Express Telephony delivered the proposal to the local Diocese for approval, ensuring any potential religious, structural, safeguarding, environmental and community concerns were mitigated.
The results
King’s Church can now enjoy a more reliable connection throughout the premises, meaning a more productive team and happier parishioners, no matter where in the church they’re located!
A new business-grade Draytek router and antenna deliver the fastest possible speeds, enabling high-quality video livestreaming and reliable card payments, for the church to send its message, and donations from, as far and wide as possible.
Plus, Express Telehony’s segmented network with content filters ensures visitors, especially kids’ groups, can freely access the internet without the team having to worry about them accessing unsafe content, or a high volume of parishioners affecting the signal strength during livestreams
Godfrey Laws
Howard Ashmore, Owner
After adopting a VPN service for secure remote access to client documentation, we found our old connections weren’t fast enough. Express Telephony delivered a new connection that is more than fast enough and allows us to run our phones through it too!
Poppy’s Tea Room
Stuart Boardman, Owner
Having had a bad experience with our previous telephone system provider, Martin and his team have given us faith in the telephony and broadband service providers again. They worked closely with us to understand our current and future needs and provided a great value system that was far more cost-effective and responsive to future growth. V Happy with their excellent customer focus and ongoing service.
Charles Marks
Founder
Been using Martin and his team at various businesses for myself and clients for about 20 years now. Always been very reliable, helpful and good value. Bespoke services and solutions to all our communications and network needs. Highly recommended. Martin is reliable, honest and knows what he is doing. A rare combination in service providers – he is someone I recommend with 100% confidence that he will deliver what he says he will.
Blue Latitude Health
Martin Brass, Managing Director
Chugai Pharma UK
Manoj Jain, Senior Finance Manager
Martin is a great person with immense technical knowledge of IT and phone system (inside out). He is not afraid of thinking out of the box which gives new dimensions to the ideas and make things very easy. I am liaising with him for more than 12 years and I can say with my experience that he is highly dependable person along with his fantastic crew who are eager to help when required.
Lloyd Warwick Limited
Margaret Dean, Financial Director
I have worked with Martin for more than 10 years now and whenever I have the need for help with telecommunications, Martin is always the one I turn to first. He is always at the forefront of the latest technology, yet he does not try and sell you the latest or most expensive systems if he doesn’t think your business needs them. His sound advice and years of working in the industry means that you get exactly what you want from your telephone system, not what the suppliers pressure you to buy at vast expense.
Mignonette
Jane Aston, Owner
Contractors Design (CDS) Ltd
Nicki, Commercial Director
