Oak Flats Anglican Church has a passion to reach all people for Christ. Jodie McNeill is the senior minister and approached Ministry of Tech to assist him in creating an online video streaming solution to send church out to those who are remote or too ill to go out.

Oak Flats is a small church and the church that David Wilson (Owner of Ministry of Tech) grew up in and so the challenge of great tech on a low budget had us hooked.

You can tune in at http://oakflatsanglican.tv

Like many Christian campsites, Greenhills Christian Campsite appeared to be destined to operate on a flakey 3G internet service. With the rollout of the NBN network providing only Satellite coverage for their area, Greenhills determined that Satellite was not an appropriate solution and talked to us about alternatives.

We were able to negotiate a corporate grade direct fibre connection after locating Telstra fibre easement through their property. We proceeded to install a roadside data cabinet, internet service and privately owned fibre cabling network to give them a superior network connection and campus-wide wifi network for staff and guests.

Running a campsite in rural NSW has enough challenges of its own, however when Attunga extended its computer network throughout the property using copper cabling, lightning strikes would begin to feature in the operating budget.

Whilst Attunga is keen to keep the low-tech country feel that the site is known for, the need to maintain reliable network communications was imperative, because it supported their booking system, VoIP phones and, without any mobile phone coverage, was their primary means of communication. Yet each year Attunga would spend a few thousand dollars replacing parts of this critical network.

Christian Venues Association (CVA) is a not-for-profit company which operates as an association of Conference Centres, Activity Service Providers, and individual members operating in the Community, Charity, Church and School environment in all States. Christian Venues was established in 1974 and incorporated in 1990 as Christian Camping International Australia. In 2008 the name was changed to Christian Venues Association.

CVA have had their office of around eight staff located in South Windsor for a number of years. Recently, NBN Co rolled out fibre internet throughout the suburb and under the terms of the NBN rollout most fixed copper lines are to be disconnected within 18 months.

St Edmund’s in Wahroonga is a Year 7-12 co-educational special high school for teenagers with a wide range of disabilities including sensory impairment, intellectual disability and autism. St Edmund’s also has a sister college, St Gabriel’s school that caters for primary aged children.

Communication within a school of 50 staff and around 130 students is very important. Too important to leave to an ageing, and failing phone system. The school realised that their existing phone system was old and obtaining parts were difficult and so the decision to upgrade was pretty obvious.

Katoomba Christian Convention has been running conferences for over 111 years. Primarily a volunteer run organisation, kcc provides residential conferences for Teens, Youth Leaders, Men, Women, and also run the annual Easter Convention for families. Like most sites, kcc want to provide the best facilities for their guests and free WiFi has long been available at all of kcc’s conventions.

In the early days it was slow and patchy with coverage only in critical locations, however the local network soon expanded across the 13 hectares and 12 buildings allowing the WiFi to be expanded as well.

El Rancho had an existing Unifi WiFi solution covering most of their campsite providing WiFi for guests and staff. The solution was installed by a local New Zealand provider however it was not working exactly how El Rancho wanted it to and the local provider was struggling to keep it working reliably. 

Ministry of Tech built a replacement Unifi controller and a Grase Hotspot server onto a virtual server hosted on a Mac-Mini running VMWare. This deployment allowed us to make use of a single network connection with V-Lan capabilities to separate the Guest WiFi from the server applications.