The challenge
The Grounds of Alexandria is one of Sydney's most beloved destinations — a sprawling hospitality precinct hosting multiple restaurants, a cafe, retail spaces and a florist. With thousands of visitors every week, reliable technology is not a luxury. It is the backbone of the entire operation.
When the team reached out to OZITGRAND, they were dealing with a maze of interconnected problems. The network had grown organically over years, with different vendors, mismatched equipment and no unified management. The result was constant dropouts, POS system failures and frustrated staff.
What we found
After an initial on-site audit, our engineers uncovered several critical issues:
- Overlapping IP ranges causing address conflicts across the venue's multiple network segments
- Outdated switches and access points from at least three different vendors, with no central controller
- No VLAN segmentation — POS terminals, guest Wi-Fi and back-office systems all sat on one flat network
- A single point of failure on the primary internet link, with no failover
- No monitoring in place — the team only knew about outages when customers complained
What we did
We designed and deployed a complete network overhaul over a planned weekend window, to keep disruption to trading to a minimum.
We replaced the patchwork of legacy equipment with a unified Ubiquiti UniFi system — a single controller managing all switches, wireless access points and security gateways across the entire precinct.
We segmented the network into logical VLANs: one for POS and payment systems, one for staff devices, one for guest Wi-Fi, and a separate management VLAN. That isolation means a problem on the guest network can never take down a payment terminal again.
We also implemented dual ISP failover. If the primary link drops, traffic switches automatically to the backup connection within seconds, and the venue never knows there is a problem.
Finally, we set up proactive 24/7 monitoring through our NOC. Any anomaly — a switch going offline, bandwidth spikes, a failing access point — gets flagged and addressed before it becomes a customer-facing incident.
The results
Since go-live, The Grounds has experienced zero unplanned network outages. Staff report that the technology "just works" — a far cry from the constant fire-fighting of the past. The venue's IT costs have also come down, because proactive monitoring prevents the expensive emergency callouts they had been relying on.
Key takeaways
This project illustrates a pattern we see across hospitality and retail: IT infrastructure that grows without a plan eventually becomes a liability. The Grounds invested in a proper foundation, and it is already paying dividends in reliability and peace of mind.
If your business has similar symptoms — recurring outages, slow Wi-Fi, unreliable POS systems — it is worth getting an expert to take a fresh look. Often the root causes are straightforward to fix once you know where to look.
