Data offloading: How can cellular operators build an effective wireless network?

The data avalanche effect in cellular networks

Exponential growth in smart mobile devices has fuelled demand for data service on wireless network. As an effect, likes and usage for bandwidth hungry web application is also growing among users. In past, cellular network was primary source for mobile users to quench their daily data need. But now, with multi-fold increase in their data appetite and lack of speed/bandwidth in traditional cellular networks, these mobile users are often left unsatisfied.

Today’s users have already started using “Phablet”, a device that can be used for both internet browsing and calling and looks like a tablet. These new generation gadgets are designed to be “Aways On” device and rarely turned off or shutdown. Hence, as soon as they connect to the network, various apps running on these devices start establishing persistent connections to their corresponding web service. Unlike voice call session, data session established by these devices rarely terminate. They keep consuming resources over the air. As the number of such devices grow, it becomes extremely difficult for cellular provider to handle exploding data upload/download requests and deliver promised quality of service to end user.

Diaspora of mobile users

A drift in user’s tendency to use data service as a new medium of communication is an alarming sign for cellular operators. It means, soon the above symptom may lead to fall in total number of voice call per circle. Following are the key reasons for user’s diaspora from cellular network:

• Availability of competitive wireless technology for offering wireless internet access: Even 3G/4G technology that offers high speed fails to make economic sense as the cost of one byte of user data is much higher in cellular networks compared to competitive Wi-Fi technology. One of the prime reasons for this multi-fold increase in the cost can be attributed to costly licensed frequency spectrum used by cellular networks to run data networking services. Wi-Fi uses unlicensed frequency spectrum and hence there is no cost associated with it. Hardware gears needed to implement a Wi-Fi network is also come cheap compared its cellular counterpart.
• User’s tendency to pull data content as per their convenience (both with respect to time and location): Majority of user base has already high speed broadband connection available at home or at workplace which is sufficient to meet their requirement. Though, there is high affinity among users for data applications, users themselves control schedule of accessing data applications and hence they plan it as per the availability of the service and convenience.
• Free wireless infrastructure for Internet access: A lot of local businesses are seeing great incentive for them in offering free Wi-Fi internet access to the customers. Businesses are leveraging wireless networking infrastructure as a customer engagement, loyalty and brand building tool. On the other hand, users find free Wi-Fi service as a good alternative to connect to the Internet when they are away from home or workplace.

Call to action

Operators need to focus on creating their foot–print of Wi-Fi networks at public places such as marketplace, railway stations, bus stand etc. While doing this they must ensure following:

1. User’s privacy and data protection: They must focus on building public Wi-Fi network which can provide privacy and data protection to all its users without requiring user’s involvement or dependency on third party client software or apps.
2. Seamless internet access: Users must be able to access internet seamlessly. An operator run Wi-Fi network should be simple to connect and access the Internet.
3. Collaboration versus domination: There are businesses which own and run their Wi-Fi network. Instead of trying to dominate, it would help cellular operators if they can simply collaborate with businesses and help build more Wi-Fi prints.
4. Low cost wireless infrastructure: Operators can further think of reducing the overall cost of Wi-Fi network by choosing smarter and cost effective solution available in the market.
5. Prepare to migrate to Hotspot 2.0 (HS 2.0): There is a huge gap between how today’s public Wi-Fi hotspot network is implemented and used and what HS 2.0 standard has proposed. The new standard also requires software/firmware upgrade on both wireless network and user equipment. Operators in country like India are going to face problem of managing heterogeneous set of mobile devices (devices with and without HS2.0 support). Operator should use Wi-Fi system that can be used to run multiple networks concurrently including HS2.0 enabled wireless network.

What Wi-Fi can do for single shop service businesses?

Technological advancement has always brought some kind of change in people’s lives. A similar shift can be observed happening in our lives as the penetration of smart mobile devices are increasing. Average internet usage per person can be seen going up due to presence of these Internet browsing capable smart handhelds and new medium of communication platform such as Facebook and Twitter. People are increasingly using social networking platform to stay in touch with family, friends and friend’s friends.

Interestingly, businesses can take benefit of user’s tendency of getting online frequently by providing user friendly and convenient option to connect to the Internet and thus deliver value added differentiated customer experience. One of such technologies is Wi-Fi. Businesses can use it for their own advantage in following ways:

Customer engagement: There are a lot of single shop service businesses or a chain of a business such as fine dining restaurants, beauty salons etc. where customers have to spend on an average 10-15 minutes before getting the service. Sometimes, professional services like beauty enhancement make customer sit idle for several minutes. By offering free Wi-Fi internet access, businesses can easily get customers engaged and let them use the idle time of service waiting period or processing period.

Free and effective social media marketing: Businesses can take advantage of wireless solution that can help get their customers redirected to the website or Facebook page of the businesses and ask them to like the product , service or business page in return of free wireless internet access. A like on Facebook immediately gets reflected to all connection of the customer thus businesses get free marketing of their brand among all connections of a visiting customer. A single shop local business heavily relies on local advertising medium as their prime customers are those who stay in the close proximity of these businesses. Facebook based social media marketing using existing satisfied customer is one the best form of effective, local advertising that today’s businesses must adopt.

Personalized greeting message: A lot of service businesses are looking for opportunity to greet their customers by their name in order to deliver unmatched personal touch in the service. This is hard to achieve using human resource as it is very difficult for people to remember each and every customer by their name. But businesses can use technology to greet their returning guest by their name with some custom message.

Why off-the-shelf Wi-Fi Access Point fails to meet above expectations?

A lot of wireless service providers are using low cost wireless gears available in the market to setup wireless internet access for the businesses. Unfortunately, these gears are only good to create a private wireless networks to be used in home environment. Wireless security implemented in these products is not suitable to be used in shared network environment as these wireless gears support common password. Once the password is shared among customers, it no more remains confidential information and may lead to unauthorized access by unwanted users sitting outside the fence of the shop. So, in order to protect unauthorized access to the Internet, it requires additional overhead of frequently changing the wireless network password. Even though if some businesses are willing to take the pain of wireless device re-configuration, social media marketing and personalized greeting message are value added advance features not supported in off-the-shelf gears.

How does Airegis solve it?

Airegis has developed a wireless system which is purposely built to meet expectation of single shop businesses. The product can be used by businesses leverage social media marketing, send automated greeting message to customers on arrival or let them simply enjoy high speed internet and indulge in online activities. Cloud based deployment reduce the overall cost of the solution and drastically reduce the deployment time.

Seeing is believing so feel free to send your request on contact@airegis.com for a free product trial.

The Emperor has Nothing On: Why VPNs may do nothing and millions like you are fooled to believe protected in Wi-Fi hotspots!

VPN services offered by a lot of service providers are marketed as solution to Wi-Fi hotspot’s insecurity. I have been advocating this since long that it might improve the situation but fail to offer privacy and data protection to wireless hotspot users.

When a user first time connects to the Internet in a Wi-Fi hotspot, his VPN client remains in disconnected state. It requires manual enabling of the service. During this small time window when his VPN is not ON, he is vulnerable to various wireless threats. For the sake of point being mentioned in this post, lets ignore this vulnerability that exists in a small time window.

Majority of Wi-Fi hotspot all across the globe requires you to pay for Wi-Fi internet access at some point in time. Some may ask you to make a transaction upfront, while others provide free few minutes Internet access and thereafter access needs to be purchased. When a user tries to purchase Wi-Fi internet bandwidth, he has access only to the payment gateway. Since the user cannot access any service on the Internet, he cannot utilize VPN service to protect his transaction done to purchase Wi-Fi internet bandwidth in a fee based Wi-Fi hotspot. So, all Wi-Fi hotspots offering paid internet access and requiring users to make payment through their web portal make users vulnerable to Wi-Fi threats irrespective of users having VPN subscription.

In a Wi-Fi hotspot that offers few minutes of free Internet access and then fee based internet access, suddenly, makes the user vulnerable to wireless threats on expiry of the free session by blocking all connections from his device to the Internet including VPN tunnel. At this stage if a user proceeds to purchase more wireless internet bandwidth, he will end up risking his credit card information or bank account details.

The situation of a VPN service subscribed user in any paid Wi-Fi hotspot environment is similar to the Emperor who thought he had new clothes but he had nothing on.

Your Wi-Fi Hotspot Sucks!

If you are responsible for providing wireless hotspot service and still not ready to accept the change happening around, then better be prepared to get a customer feedback like this. Your visitors are no more just citizen. They are now netizen and smartphones have become their new passport to go over the Internet. Your outdated conventional Wi-Fi hotspot service might becoming a big hurdle to their desperation to get online as quickly as possible. Why?

Majority of smartphone users use various apps installed on their device for accessing different web service, be it accessing corporate emails, or getting access to their social content. There is an app almost for every service that you may have heard of.

Accessing the Internet in a conventional Wi-Fi hotspot environment is a multi-step procedure. A wireless hotspot user has to identify a right wireless network to connect, opt for a network usage plan online (or buy) and and complete the user authentication procedure. All these are browser inspired  steps that a hotspot user has to follow before getting access to the Internet. Unfortunately, smartphone user, rarely taps on browser app to access online content. As a result what might happen is that a guest staying in your five star hotel might not be able to figure out why none of his apps are working even though smartphone shows that it is connected, leading to technical support call. In other case, if a user knows about it, he might not find user authentication very convenient over smartphone. Some wireless hotspots also have user session maintained , which gets marked to unauthenticated after inactivity of user device is detected. It becomes extremely annoying for smartphone user to do web based user authentication every-time his session expires.

Did you say that you were already experiencing similar problems ? Good news is that you are not alone and there smart Wi-Fi hotspot solution available that also fixes some other very challenging wireless hotspot problems arising due to handhelds. If interested in the solution, contact us at contact@airegis.com and we will help restore peace of your technical support team and improve your service review feedback. :-)

Airegispot 1.0 or Hotspot 2.0: Choice is yours!

New Challenges for Next Generation Wi-Fi Hotspot Providers

      1.       Increase in Wi-Fi devices and amount of user’s data on the network

Number of wireless devices connecting to a public wireless hotspot networks are multiplying day by day. The main reason behind this increase of devices can be attributed to growing base of mobile users carrying multiple wireless gadgets such as smartphone, iPad, and notebook, wherever they roam.  In fact, today’s internet users are going through a paradigm shift as they are always wanted to be connected to the internet. This has resulted into exponential growth in user’s data on the wireless hotspot networks.  A lot of free Wi-Fi internet service providers have to cope-up with the demand for additional bandwidth required to handle the sudden growth of user’s data on their network.

2.       Demand for throughout coverage

Since transmit and receive range of smartphones and other similar handhelds are less compared to laptops, new coverage holes are getting created in an already deployed conventional Wi-Fi hotspot network. Service providers are under intense pressure to provide throughout coverage, for example in hospitality industry where guests need to have Internet access not just in rooms but also in passage, terrace etc.

3.       Digital certificate cost

In conventional Wi-Fi hotspot, authorized access to the Internet access is provisioned using a web based login portal. Providing user authentication without application layer security is a serious security threat to a service provider. Awareness about the insecurity of open Wi-Fi configuration is growing fast and hence application layer user authentication control can be easily bypassed. Therefore, service providers have to also bear the cost of digital certificate required by https based user authentication procedure.

4.       Unwanted connected device handling

Today’s hotspot infrastructure is churning out as it is unable to deliver desired performance due to large number of wireless clients connecting to the network, causing network to reach its maximum capacity soon. Under such condition, wireless hotspot infrastructure has no inbuilt intelligence that can help differentiate between a paid and unpaid user and hence when the number of clients exceeds the connection limit, even paid users have to suffer. Problem like this is affecting the revenue from fee based wireless hotspot service.

5.       HS 2.0 integration overhead

In order to provide support for roaming customers, a new technology called Hotspot 2.0 (HS2.0) is being adopted by the wireless broadband industry. In order to support HS 2.0 WISPs need to upgrade their wireless hotspot infrastructure. The technology also requires integration with cellular service providers in order to support SIM card based user authentication. This is probably ok for carriers who are creating their own wireless hotspot infrastructure to support data offload. Wireless service providers already having hotspot running need to shell out additional cost in order to bring support for user authentication required in HS2.0. On contrary to this, wireless user base is still not ready to use the technology as it requires software/firmware upgrade on client device, which can be a big barrier to HS2.0 based service monetization.

The cost of running a Wi-Fi hotspot service is growing while the revenue from the service is not showing similar growth sign.  Airegis solution for Wi-Fi hotspot enables wireless service providers to run a truly secured wireless internet service that can be offered to hotspot users as value added premium service. Apart from providing privacy and over-the-air data protection, the most attractive advantage of Airegis powered wireless service is that network connectivity, authentication, and network usage policy are clubbed together into one that helps next generation smartphone user in getting a quick access to the Internet. The inbuilt intelligence of the Airegis powered Wi-Fi hotspot system allows only authorized device to connect and use the service. This helps in keeping the wireless network resource available for those who have subscribed to premium wireless service.  The cost of digital certificate needed for conventional captive portal authentication can be also saved as with layer-2 security based wireless system, need for a secure web authentication becomes redundant.

In short, by embracing Airegis powered Wi-Fi hotspot solution, wireless internet service providers can easily beat new challenges of next generation wireless hotspots.

Hotels a Hotspot for Credit Card Fraud: Wyndham Hotel is the Latest Victim

According to a study published on the creditcards.com around two years back, hotels were found to be the hotspot for credit card fraud. The same study had indicated that the hotel’s services were targeted the most-even more than financial service company.

Last month, FTC had filed a complaint against Wyndham hotels and its subsidiaries for alleged data security failures that led to three data breaches at Wyndham hotels in less than two years.  The FTC charges that these failures led to fraudulent bills on consumers’ accounts, millions of dollars in fraud loss, and the export of hundreds of thousands of consumers’ payment card account information to an Internet domain address registered in Russia.

This may be a case of misrepresentation of security related privacy policy by the hotel as alleged by FTC and the problem could have been avoided by having a well secured system for storing credit card data and personal information of guests. What would not be possible is restoring the damage due to such an incidence in the hotel which already had done serious brand erosion of the hotel.

Others may take it as a lesson and may possibly give attention to a security assessment of their own systems; there has been another big door open which has remained invisible to many security experts and auditors. This is nothing but insecure form of Wi-Fi service being offered in hotels.

In the past, guests had option to use wired internet connection available inside rooms to have safe and secure browsing. But lately, due to high adoption rate of smart mobile devices which can only be used with wireless networks (either Wi-Fi or cellular) to go online. This implies, guests are increasingly going to use the same insecure wireless hotspots installed in the hotels for their personal and professional requirements which at times might include credit card or bank account transaction apart from other private and confidential data. Transmission of any such data in insecure Wi-Fi hotspots is available in air and can be captured with no or little effort.

Most hotels across the globe provide similar form of Wi-Fi internet service inside hotels and which means no data privacy to their guests. A wireless hacking incidence in any star hotel can also lead to credit card theft, though might not be as voluminous in nature as it was in the case of Wyndham hotel, and hotel may also be able to avoid fine or penalty for the loss of guest’s credit card data as they do provide warning to their users about insecurity of wireless service, what they may never be able to do is saving hotel from brand name erosion due to such an incidence if it happens.

Wi-Fi technology has undergone a lot of advancement in recent years and with Airegis proprietary technology it is possible to offer truly robust Wi-Fi service to guests. One of the key advantages of Airegis solution is that it does not require installation of any custom made software or apps on the client device. So, users with any Wi-Fi certified device can connect to Airegis powered Wi-Fi hotspots and browse internet without worrying about wireless threats and data privacy.

It is high time for the hospitality industry to sacrifice the decade old Wi-Fi hotspot system, adopt and upgrade their wireless infrastructure with the Wi-Fi hotspot technology available today and let their guests wear the same wireless security cover that they use when they are at home or in the office. Ultimately, Guest is King!