In today's age of ubiquitous mobile devices, wireless has become the de facto standard for connectivity. So much so, in fact, that businesses of all types and sizes are offering wireless hotspots to customers as a value-add.
However, these hotspots have often resulted in headaches for the companies wishing to enable easy Internet access to their clients. "Historically, businesses would struggle to control a hotspot after a solution provider has installed it, with no way to monitor whether customers are using it for large downloads or hogging bandwidth," says Ludwig Myburgh, Chief Technology Officer at Sintrex.
Sintrex, therefore, applied a different approach when one of its clients approached it to provide a wireless hotspot solution for its retail outlets across the country. Designing the solution on the basis of the client's requirements, Sintrex created a fully managed and monitored connectivity offering.
Using LTE/3G, Sintrex's wireless hotspots require only a power connection for installation, and offer Internet access, user limitation controls for fair use policy implementation reporting on user activity, capturing customer information for marketing purposes, and customisable landing pages for branding and promotions.
"Many basic Internet services exist in the marketplace, but very few offer these as managed services," says Myburgh. "By adding the managed service layer, we have enabled visibility, governance policies, and reporting for the client. The managed service allows for the administration and control of leeches, bandwidth abuse, big downloads, software updates, hackers, and negative sites. In addition, it enables fault-, configuration-, accounting-, performance- and security-management."
The solution's custom set-up allows for marketing initiatives, authentication, vouchers, and pay-for- usage services, as well as time and download limitations. All information is collected centrally for ease of management, including device status, configuration, application logs and authentication logs. Central push administration also allows for policy configuration changes.
Myburgh adds that problems that occur should be tracked, managed and escalated to be resolved in a timely manner. This should be accomplished with adequate audit trail facilities. "It's crucial for companies to be able to have rigorous control of their assets, including network and application performance management, as each network component is critical to business operations. Sintrex has developed a cost-effective services solution for operational management in a historically product-driven market, which is characterised by complexity, fragmented islands of information and high cost and effort of ownership."
The solution's fault management capabilities include automated identification of alarms and faults, including root cause analysis and information enrichment to quickly resolve problems. In addition, Sintrex provides a graphical view that enables a quick view into any areas that require attention. If a fault is detected, this view allows Sintrex to quickly and easily deploy another unit to that location. It also simplifies the administration and documentation of all deployed devices.
"Our expertise lies in our management solutions, and we leveraged our experience in the industry to produce a solution that's simple to deploy and easy to use. By enhancing it with the ability to customise the branding and access rules, we have created a solution that allows our client to meet the needs of its customers, while ensuring that it is never a headache as a result of it being a managed service," Myburgh concludes.
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