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Guaranteed critical communication for Wildlands

Wildlands Adventure Zoo Emmen is a beautiful, adventurous animal park with three large themed areas: jungle, desert and the polar region.

On an area of 24 hectares, the animal houses, buildings, catering, shops, entertainment and attractions are located. With an average number of visitors of no less than one million per year (for Covid-19). “That means that the communication and information processes between people, humans and machines must be guaranteed 24/7.” says John Vogelvanger, system manager at Wildlands and responsible, among other things, for the communication tools of both Wildlands and the Atlas Theatre.

Flexibility

“The communication needs differ per season, among other things because of the number of visitors, and it must be scalable. The large number of visitors in particular ensures that we have a emergency response services organisation of respectively 45 emergency response officers for Wildlands and 15 emergency response officers for the Atlas Theatre. We also have 8 trained marksmen, two of whom are present every day. These people can be deployed in case of an outbreak of a dangerous animal (Class 1 animal).” John Vogelvanger explains.

Innovative techniques

Due to the relocation of the former Emmen Zoo to its current location, Wildlands was open to new innovative techniques and systems that would improve the communication plan. John Vogelvanger: “In 2016 we moved and also had a number of ‘normal’ walkie-talkies ready to be used in case of an emergency. Due to the age of the equipment, which caused more frequent problems, we looked at replacing the system. We wanted a new, reliable system. Because time has not stood still in terms of new technology, business partner Flash Private Mobile Networks offered a solution with ‘Smart’ walkie-talkies. A walkie-talkie with the functionality of a mobile smartphone. This offered many extra possibilities.

Reliable communication

The smart radios are used by both the emergency response services organisation and various employees such as the day manager, first aiders, animal caretakers, shooters and the duty manager. An additional advantage of these devices is that they have an Android operating system, which means that applications can be installed just like on a smartphone,” explains John Vogelvanger.

'copyrights WILDLANDS

Photo: copyrights WILDLANDS

Especially at Wildlands, there are regularly busy peaks in the number of visitors, which can overload the network. This is exactly why we chose SmartCom – business partner Flash Private Mobile Networks markets the PrioCom mission critical voice and data service under the name SmartCom – because of its maximum availability, reachability and stability. One of the ways PrioCom realised this is by reserving capacity on the T-Mobile 4G network especially for PrioCom users. This capacity is not available for non-critical users.

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