About Us
What is Beacon?
Beacon has been leading the Marina Wi-Fi market since 2002 and has installed over 750 outdoor locations. We provide a complete Technology and Networking Outsource to marina management and yacht clubs on all coasts, Great Lakes and inland lakes of the US, and throughout the Caribbean.
Beacon's NextGen platform was introduced in 2014 as a completely new and innovative set of technologies, installation methodology, unique focus on the mobile device and has become the industry standard.
Beacon - The Beginning
Beacon was started in 2002 by two avid boaters with an idea, a desire and a passion to own a lifestyle business. The idea was to provide high speed wireless access to the Internet for boaters while at their marinas. The desire and passion came from a vision to actually enjoy going to work every day. Their experience was a combined 45 years of direct experience in building wireless companies, while holding every management and major executive position. The work to develop the Beacon Wi-Fi Network started in a co-founder’s living room with a couple of friends, a business plan and a single marina installation. After more than 15 years, Beacon has been the established nation wide leader. The Beacon Wi-Fi Network covers multiple states, territories, countries, coasts, bodies of water, cultures and time zones – servicing over 5,000 boat owners every day.
Beacon Wi-Fi Amenity
These services are offered at most of our marina, yacht club and port partners as a FREE service to their boating customers, slip holders and members. Beacon's multiple tiered systems allow marinas to offer an effective speed as a FREE amenity to their customers while charging a fee for faster speeds. This allows some payback to the marina, allowing them to bring in faster speeds from their local ISP. Beacon's systems are dynamic and flexible for all shapes and sizes giving marina management the options they need in order to compete.
The Beacon Difference
Decades of Experience
The Beacon Wi-Fi Network currently has over 1,500 access controllers and access points installed in over 17 states/provinces/territories, supporting over 300 marinas and 500 peripheral locations. Upwards of 5,000 wireless customers use the network daily with a wide variety of wireless LAN cards from unusual angles, vantage points, locations beneath the water line, inside/outside of buildings – all with the same expectations: It should work better than their home networks. Success in responding to these types of difficult expectations starts and ends with a professional and proven wireless network which anticipates the issues that users will face and – addresses them upfront during the design and installation. Over the years Beacon engineers have learned to optimize power, gain, throughput and cost to deploy best in class marina networks on the market today, period. The Beacon wireless technology is simply different. There are software scripts, unique configuration settings, wireless noise management and unique layouts that set Beacon apart from the rest. There are many companies that take pictures of our equipment and layouts and try to find something off-the-shelf that looks similar to our installations – only to find out the hard way that “what’s under the hood is what counts”. We BEACONIZE their performance! Beacon has been designing, installing, supporting and managing complex outdoor and indoor wireless networks since 2002. Inherent in our core business, providing wireless networks and media to the marine market is a “last mile” problem. The complexities of this market have forced us, over time, to develop a certain expertise and problem solving skill set that combines engineering and art, nuance and revolution, compounded expertise and good-old-fashioned trial and error. Network administration and management companies that once littered the marine market with traditional networking solutions have long since been relied upon to solve the most complicated and ever changing technical and wireless challenges of the marine market. Proof of this dilemma is evidenced by the fact that 50% of our new business (new marinas added to the network) is a direct result of failed installations by our competition, driving marina management to abandon existing networks and entering into relationships with Beacon Wi-Fi, the proud and proven Marina Wi-Fi leader.