Canterbury Cathedral has successfully implemented the Purple WiFi platform to deliver a secure and legal Social WiFi solution, while offering free WiFi to visitors of its new Cathedral Café.

Purple WiFi is cloud-based, which means that it can work with practically any hardware and is scalable in terms of customer need and geographic location. It offers an alternative to existing WiFi services by putting the focus back on the business or venue. It does this by offering marketing tools and analytics to derive value from interactions with customers whilst providing a secure and independent channel for commercial use.

David Tunbridge, IT manager of Canterbury Cathedral, said: ‘"We have been offering a WiFi service for our Cathedral Lodge clients and customers for a while, but this is an internally managed system.

"However, this system has never been made available to the public and although it works well for us, it requires a fair bit of administration, which is why we have been looking at alternatives for public WiFi access in our new Cathedral Café which opens on 20th February. Family-friendly access and legal compliance are very high on our list of priorities."

Purple WiFi supports legal compliance as part of its free product, while content filtering is incorporated into its premium product.

Purple WiFi is also a member of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), and blocks all IWF blacklisted URLs. It also allows venues to block certain content – i.e. porn and illegal content, essential for public venues such as cathedrals, universities, hospitals and housing associations. To date, Purple WiFi has blocked up to 10% of URL requests for its content filtering customers, meaning this traffic is getting through at open content venues.

Gavin Wheeldon, CEO, Purple WiFi, said: "People expect free online access at public venues and businesses wherever they are. But the industry has a responsibility to make sure that these venues are aware of legal compliance issues.

"At Purple WiFi, we make sure our venue customers can be safe in the knowledge that their WiFi is secure and meets industry best practice."