Heritage walls. Bimodal use. Safeguarding-ready.
WiFi designed for thick stone walls, 8,000-Saturday-visitor cathedrals and 80-Wednesday-Evensong parishes, multi-tenant community programmes, and the diocesan estate manager who runs 200 buildings on a finance team of three.
Heritage. Bimodal. Safeguarding. Stewardship.
Religious venues are the hardest WiFi environment we serve — Norman walls, Faculty Jurisdiction, no IT staff, microscopic budgets, and an obligation to the worst-case visitor. Purple is the platform designed for the diocese estate manager and the parish church administrator at the same time.
The cathedral isn't a venue. It's a heritage-grade community hub.
9.9 million visitors to the 42 Anglican cathedrals last year. 33,000 social-action projects on church premises. The estate is bigger than most retail chains and carries safeguarding obligations no commercial venue does. Purple is the WiFi layer designed for it.
Visitor joins WiFi at the West Door. Tour starts. Donation captured.
Tourists at Canterbury, York, Durham, Salisbury — international visitors with phones in their hand looking for connectivity and a deep-link to your tour app. Purple's captive portal lands them on your tour, captures Gift Aid declarations alongside a CollecTin / GoodBox prompt, and turns anonymous tourists into reclaimable donors at the moment they're most engaged.
Food bank, AA group, parent-and-toddler — three networks, one fabric.
A typical parish hosts a food bank on Monday, AA on Tuesday, parent-and-toddler on Wednesday, debt advice on Thursday. Each group has different needs — the food bank wants tablet inventory access, AA wants anonymity (no captive portal data capture), parent-and-toddler wants simple signup. Purple deploys per-tenant SSIDs with appropriate filtering and logging — without buying a separate network per group.
Evensong streams clean even when 200 tourists are on guest.
Cathedrals routinely livestream services — Evensong, Compline, weddings, funerals. The encoder competes with tourist guest-WiFi for backhaul, and a stuttering livestream is bad for the parish. Purple's QoS recognises the encoder MAC, reserves uplink bandwidth, and deprioritises tourist traffic during the service window — automatically, by service-time schedule.
An estate bigger than any retail chain.
16,000 churches across 42 dioceses in the Church of England alone. ~12,500 listed buildings. ~9.9 million cathedral visitors last year. ~33,000 social-action projects on church premises. The estate is national-scale — and procurement should be too.
One contract. Hundreds of buildings. The diocesan-procurement-friendly platform.
A diocese can't sign 200 individual broadband contracts. The estate manager needs one platform, one bill, one safeguarding evidence trail, one procurement decision — covering everything from Canterbury to a 60-seat rural parish. Purple is priced and packaged for diocesan procurement, with parish-level operability via a portal a churchwarden can run.
- Diocese-level master contract, parish-level local control
- Safeguarding evidence centralised, exportable on demand
- Faculty Jurisdiction-friendly install practice
- Integration with GoodBox / CollecTin / SumUp donation hardware
Tour languages on arrival. Service sheet on Sunday. Volunteer roster on duty.
Visitor experience and parish life on the same network. Tourists at the West Door get the tour app and Gift Aid prompt. Regular worshippers get the order of service for today's Eucharist. Food-bank volunteers get auto-flagged as on-shift the moment their phone joins the parish hall SSID.
Privacy-by-default. Tourists are recognised by location, not identity. Worshippers opt in to the service-sheet push. AA group attendees are never seen on the captive portal. Community programmes get the safeguarding attendance record the diocesan officer needs — without breaking the trust the regulars came in with.
Visitor, worshipper, volunteer — three views, one safeguarding-clean dashboard.
The diocesan estate manager wants visitor-economy data. The cathedral chapter wants service-attendance data. The safeguarding officer wants community-programme evidence. Purple gives all three the dashboard they actually need — without ever turning the AA Tuesday meeting into a marketing list.
Visitor counts, dwell-by-zone, language preference, and Gift Aid conversion — for chapter and diocesan funding cases.
Worship attendance, livestream viewership, and service-sheet engagement — measured cleanly, opt-in only.
Per-tenant attendance logs, content-filtering policy in effect, and incident trail — exportable on demand for diocesan officers.
Common religious-venue WiFi questions, answered.
How does Purple handle Faculty Jurisdiction (Church of England)?
We work with church architects and DAC (Diocesan Advisory Committee) approvals routinely. AP placement is heritage-sensitive — no visible mounting, hidden cable runs, and approval-friendly survey reports designed for the Faculty process.
Can a parish run Purple without an IT person?
Yes. The parish-side interface is operable by a churchwarden — no CLI, no controller upgrades, no VLAN configuration. The diocese sets policy centrally; the parish only sees a simple status page.
What about safeguarding for AA / 12-step / debt-advice groups?
Per-tenant SSIDs with anonymity profiles. AA's network captures no personally-identifiable data via the captive portal — anonymity is preserved by design. The safeguarding evidence the diocese needs (attendance counts, policy in effect) is recorded without ever identifying individuals.
Does it support cathedral livestreaming?
Yes. QoS recognises encoder MACs and reserves uplink bandwidth during scheduled service windows. Whether you're livestreaming Evensong, a wedding, or a funeral, the encoder doesn't compete with tourist guest WiFi.
How does diocesan procurement work?
One master contract covers all sites under the diocese. Pricing is per-site with volume tiers, billed monthly to the diocese, with parish-level reporting visibility. The procurement decision happens once, not 200 times.
Ready to give the diocese the WiFi the heritage deserves?
Speak to a religious-venues specialist who's deployed Purple at cathedrals, parish churches, and diocesan estates. We'll scope a single-cathedral or pilot diocese, prove the visitor-economy and safeguarding numbers, and roll out from there.
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