Mars Hill Church Better Serves its Congregation with Technology

Mars Hill Church began in 1996 with a core group of twelve people in the living room of a Seattle rental house and now congregates in multiple locations throughout the Seattle metropolitan area and beyond Washington State, with a goal to expand to over 100 locations in the next decade.

Challenges

As its congregation has grown, Mars Hill Church has rented daily locations to provide convenient meeting places for its Sunday sermons. In order to utilize an interactive kiosk at mobile campuses, the church needed to establish a broadband connection, as landline access was either inconvenient or unavailable.

The church also found that when adding kiosks to meet user demand at permanent campuses, its Wi-Fi network could not provide the connectivity range needed to accommodate all kiosk locations.

Solution

With the help of systems integrator and Sierra Wireless partner Mobile ID Solutions, Mars Hill Church began integrating the AirLink™ Helix RT commercial 3G router with its front-end applications to quickly establish steadfast primary data communications capabilities for church services in the temporary building and the emergency connectivity needed to supplement the church’s Wi-Fi network at its permanent campus. A complete networking and business continuity solution equipped with WAN failover and an optional Wi-Fi access point, the Helix RT is an intelligent single-device communications solution to simplify commercial network deployments.

“The two locations with Helix RTs are about 30 miles from the office, which would take at least an hour to get to,” said Matthew Bodaly, help desk technician and member of the Mars Hill Church Information Technology team. “With AirLink Device Management tools, we can just push a button to re-set and avoid a site visit altogether, drastically reducing our cost and time to resolve any issues or re-configure the devices.”

Mars Hill Church’s secure, reliable primary connectivity solution using the AirLink Helix RT commercial 3G router produced the following benefits:

• Enabled remote management of network devices to eliminate service trips between the corporate office and campus locations
• Allowed secure transmission of valuable credit card donations at interactive kiosks
• Provided uninterrupted, reliable connectivity for mission critical apps through ALEOS intelligence
• Enabled quick and easy configuration and automatic system connection through AirLink Device Management tools
• Provided portability for re-deployment as needed in temporary mobile campuses