The Plas in Houthalen-Helchteren is a twenty-hectare swimming lake in the Kelchterhoef estate, with a beach and a swimming zone. The municipality and the Agentschap voor Natuur en Bos renovated the estate this spring, with new banks and walking paths, and officially presented it in April. Late May still saw Extrema Outdoor take place there, an event where we were also working. On June 13, the TVL Plasage Beachbar opened, with three food trucks and a terrace by the water.

The Plas is also notorious for its poor mobile reception. Last year, wifi was already provided for beach bar visitors, paid for by the municipality at the time. This year, that budget was gone.

The operator still wanted to offer his customers internet again. His own budget was too tight for that on its own, and our standard rate didn’t fit either.

Vouchers instead of an invoice

We sat down together and talked through what he was actually looking for. That led to a proposal quite different from what we normally do. The operator paid a fixed amount for setup and teardown. The rest we had to earn back through internet vouchers. Anyone on the terrace who wanted to get online bought a voucher from the operator and logged onto the network with it. We split the revenue from those vouchers.

That also meant we carried part of the risk. If he sold few vouchers, we’d have a weak summer at the Plas. That kind of arrangement doesn’t fit every job. Here, it worked for both of us.

Three months to experiment

On June 12, we installed the network, with a Starlink for the internet line, a gateway, and three access points outdoors on the site. The next day, the beach bar opened.

An event network that stays in the same spot for three months isn’t something we see often. At a festival, you set up, run for a weekend, and tear down again. At the Plas, we could adjust things along the way and see what worked, discovering which setup performed best in which situation. Whenever an event took place on-site, we scaled up capacity. In late June, an extra network was added for an event’s ticketing.

Over the whole summer, well over a few hundred GB passed through that single Starlink, and on a busy day nearly 200 different devices were connected to the network.

When the operator heard we were still looking for a place to test NetGuard and NetView, our new products for site security and camera surveillance, in practice, he let us set those up at the beach bar too. The cameras were up from opening day. He had his site under watch, we had a test setup running for an entire summer.

Cashless with EntryTickets

In August, the operator switched to cashless payments with EntryTickets, a Belgian ticketing and cashless payments platform we already partner with. Visitors pay with their card or phone, and the operator tracks everything in one system. We set up a separate network for the tills for this, apart from the visitor wifi, so payments wouldn’t have to wait on visitor traffic. It worked so well that the operator kept using the system even after summer ended.

What we’re taking with us

We could have let this project go once it turned out the budget didn’t fit. By continuing the conversation, we landed on an arrangement that gave us both more than a standard invoiced rental would have. The operator had his wifi and his cameras. We had a testing ground and a new partner.

What we learned this summer at the Plas, we carry forward to the next client. We now know what a terrace by the water uses on a hot day, and how to set up a till network next to a visitor network without them getting in each other’s way. That way, one client helps move the next one forward. And if that benefits us, it benefits the clients we work with too.

Do you have a location or event that needs internet, but doesn’t quite fit a standard rental? Let us know, and we’ll figure out together what’s possible.