Zyxel Nebula Solution Provides Fast, Reliable, Remotely-Managed Network to Bring Historic Battleship into Digital Era

Entering service more than 75 years ago, the USS Iowa deployed to the South Pacific in the early years of World War II. Upon concluding her duty, Battleship USS Iowa serves as a 501c3 non-profit historic naval ship museum and now becomes one of the top five museums in Los Angeles. The museum faced unique networking challenges when upgrading ineffective network infrastructure. On this ship, every bulkhead is constructed of between half-inch to eight inches of steel, and that tends to cause massive interference with a radio frequency signal. Aside from the WiFi network issues, many members of the executive and technical staff reside long distances from the ship. The ability to provide secure connectivity to the ship and remotely manage the network were other challenges that they faced. To address their unique networking challenges, the museum deployed the Zyxel WAX650S 802.11ax (WiFi 6) Access Points, XS1930-12HP Smart Managed PoE Switch and USG FLEX 700 Firewall. With Zyxel’s solution in place, the provisioning and deployment of the APs was easy. Additionally, Zyxel’s Secure WiFi Service provides secure remote access to the network. For more details, download PDF version.

By switching to the Zyxel WiFi 6 APs, we've increased our performance, range and reliability, and reduced our packet loss. What we've been able to do with this Zyxel solution is reduce the number of APs that we have in place while increasing speed and reliability.

David Canfield
VP and Chief Information Officer, Battleship IOWA Museum

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