Baltimore Inner Harbor Public WiFi

The Inner Harbor of Baltimore has long been a draw for both tourists and local citizens. With shops, restaurants, ferries and more this locale has long been a major attraction. In an effort to support this vibrant area, the City of Baltimore launched a project to bring free public WiFi to the Inner Harbor.

The City of Baltimore approached Port Networks, a local System Integrator, to provide a WiFi network that would provide both tourists and locals frequenting the Inner Harbor with easy access to the Internet. Included in this network was backhaul for the Access Points.

Since fiber doesn’t reach every WiFi access point in the harbor and deployment would have been costly and disruptive, there were two primary requirements for a wireless backhaul solution. The first was a low profile or footprint that would be unobtrusive in the historic setting. In addition, the solution had to support Gigabit speeds to support the WiFi traffic peaks expected during holiday weekends and over the summer.