WiFi Manager as a solution for Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISP) is aimed at enabling the Service Providers to easily and effectively manage their infrastructures such as Access Points, Wireless gateways, Switches and Routers deployed at hundreds or thousands of remote locations from a centralized place. With support for devices from most of the prominent vendors in the market today, this solutions is truly a multi vendor network management solution.
WiFi Manager automatically discovers the devices in the network, builds up an inventory database and monitors the infrastructure continuously for their health and other important parameters like the bandwidth used, the number of users associated, signal strength available to the connected users etc. It also allows configuring the important parameters (radio settings, security settings, services settings etc.,) and in managing the firmware of the devices thus giving the WISP administrators full control of their deployment from a single central web console. Highlighted below are some of the challenges faced by WISP in managing their hotspots and how WiFi Manager helps address those challenges: -
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Inventory Management : Tracking inventory is not unique to WISPs, but given the fact that their inventories are deployed at places outside their direct control, makes it doubly important to know where it is and to take control over it. WiFi Manager can automatically discover these infrastructure devices, maintain them in its inventory database and track them regularly.
Visualizing Hotspot Deployments and Centralized Monitoring :Deployments are generally distributed, often across cities or at times even across countries. It is not practical to have dedicated network administrators stationed at each of these deployed site to manage them. Ability to monitor and manage these deployments from a centralized place with minimal number of operators is key to success. Also the ability to visualize the geographically distributed deployments along with the capability to drill down to the information of interest and troubleshoot wlan problems remotely from the central site is important. WiFi Manager with its Business Views aids administrators in not only visualizing the network but also to troubleshoot wlan problems.
Managing Hetrogeneous Environment : As the business grows, new cities open up, accquisitions happens, installation personnel changes, availability of a particular device model changes, all these factors literally makes it impossible for the WISP to stick with device from one particular vendor. WISPs are forced to work with different models of devices with different manufacturers making the environment truely hetrogeneous. So, when it comes to management of these devices, it is always better to go in for a vendor neutral solution . A single configuration and management interface for all the wireless LAN equipments eliminates the hidden costs associated with operators learning how to install, configure and manage wireless infrastructure. WiFi Manager with its unique capability to manage more than 50 leading models of Access points & Wireless Gateways ( APs models supported in WiFi Manager ) in the market today ensures uniform experience for the administrators to manage this hetrogeneous environment.
Managing Interference and Ensuring Better Quality Of Service : WISPs often setup hotspots at places which are outside their control. They have no control over the environment or the other similar devices operating at those places. Due to very nature of RF and the fact that WiFi devices operate in ISM Bands there can be interference and host of other signal and noise related issue. So the environment has to be continuously monitored and issues if any has to be identified and sorted out immediately. WiFi Manager with the its unique capabilities to gather such vital information from the hotspots can really come handy for the WISP operators.
Any where, Any Time, Access to Information : Due to very nature of their business the WISP administrators are always on the move. Anytime anywhere secured access to the status and other important information about these hotspots without to need to install any special software is absolutely essential. WiFi Manager sports a user friendly web client using which information about the hotspots can be easily accessed using a simple browser. Also the communications between the client and the server is encrypted using SSL, making the communication absolutely secure.
Access Control : Ensuring that the service is used only by the authorized or intended users is absolutely essential. More over the authentication policy has to be very flexible and may vary from one location to another and may also change from time to time. WiFi Manager can help pushing such authentication policies / configurations to hundreds of Access points in the network in a single shot. It also helps grouping of Access points based on various criterias like location, manufacturer, model etc and push the configurations on those defined groups. WiFi Manager helps defining configuration templates and push the settings in the templates to the group of Access points, it also facilitates importing configuration from one AP and importing it to others.
Firmware Upgrades : This problem again is not unique to WISPs, but generally faced by any administrator. The problem is more acute in wireless where the standards are not matured and vendors keep releasing new firmwares to address the security flaws. As and when new firmware versions gets released the administrators have to go through the pain of upgrading the firmware in hundreds of Access points deployed in the network. The problem gets compounded when the devices are not from a single manufacturer. In situations like this WiFi Manager can really come handy, using WiFi Manager the administrators can upgrade the firmware of hundreds of Access points in a single shot. They can also schedule firmware upgrades during off hours when the network is relatively free.
Event Management : WISP Administrators are always on the move. So, in case of any problems in their hotspot deployments they would like to get notified automatically instead of logging into some software and checking the status of the deployment individually. WiFi Manager with its Intelligent alarm correlation and notifications mechanism (email, SMS, etc) addresses this problem for the administrators. WISP administrators can configure WiFi Manager to monitor a hotspot and have it send an SMS when any deivce / Access point the hotspot fails or on any other problematic condition.
Bandwidth Management :Managing the bandwidth usage across hotspots and the per user bandwidth management is important for the service providers. Most of the popular wireless gateways and devices support configuring this but the problem for the administrators is to configure hundreds of devices in their deployment and also to ensure that the configuration is in line with their policy. Also when their policies changes, the administrators have to go through the pain of re-configuring all the devices again. WiFi Manager can be very handy to the administrators in cases like this, it helps pushing the configuration across a set of devices in a single shot. Devices can be grouped and different configurations can be applied to the various groups.
Capacity Planning :Studying the service usage pattern across all the hotspots and planning for the capacity needs is critical to success. This becomes especially important in case of WLANs where Voice-over-WiFi and other new productivity enhancing wireless applications keeps emerging day after day. WiFi Manager keeps track of the usage of each and every Access point and other important devices in the network. With excellent graphs and neatly designed reports it can easily pin point the bottle neck and help administrators address the problem. Administrators can set thresholds for usage and can get automatically informed whenever the usage exceeds this threshold limit.
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