How to get value from offering public WiFi

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Free public Wi-Fi is a popular service for retail, events and hospitality providers to offer, and increasingly becoming an expected service among the public.

This needs careful thought: not least technical considerations like how to keep public networks isolated from work networks, and providing strong enough connectivity to support the user environment.

But most importantly: how should a businesses or organisation to gain value back from providing free Wi-Fi? We take a closer look at some of the best techniques.

 

Authentication & Audience Participation

Most public Wi-Fi networks expect connecting users to ‘authenticate’ by providing details such as their email address or name, and often accepting some terms and conditions of use.

This can be a fantastic marketing opportunity to gather email subscribers, demographic data, survey product popularity, or simply count customers.

Alternatively, commercial quality systems like Cisco Meraki also offer hidden gems like Facebook Authentication – in which the user has to ‘Like’ the business brand or page to gain access. This kind of authentication is superb way of increasing your visibility online by leveraging value from public Wi-Fi – effectively asking the public to become your marketeers via social media.

Physical signage and other real-world marketing can also encourage visitors to share their experience of your venue or event online while their complimentary connectivity is available.

Targeted Advertising

‘Splash’ Pages loaded on the User’s device when they first connect are customisable on many business Wi-Fi platforms, and this creates a perfect opportunity to brand the experience.

Treating this like a regular webpage offers the chance to advertise offers that are time-sensitive, updated seasonally, or promoting key products.

Alternatively, if your audience is large or targeted enough, then this space can be treated like digital real-estate, and sold on as advertising space to others looking to reach an audience.

Footfall Mapping

By combining signal strengths from different access points and triangulating the direction, enterprise systems like Meraki are able to produce animated ‘heatmaps’ of footfall around a site or venue over time.

This is valuable information it itself for public-spaces and retail centres – who rely on being able to control or exploit human travel to maximise sales, minimise costs or optimise the flow of people.

Prompt for Reviews

You’ll never get a more geographically targeted audience than this – so why not ask the key question when it counts?

To online brands in particular, digital reviews are worth serious investment, and smartphone connections direct with the customer is a perfect opportunity to prompt via the web for useful feedback or survey customer satisfaction.

Alternatively ask publicly: and gather Google Reviews, Facebook Ratings, Trustpilot Stars, or any other feedback that is of value to your organisation en masse.

 

For Wi-Fi guidance and networking expertise, please contact our team today

Cisco launch Meraki GO for Small Businesses

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Cisco’s Meraki have announced the release of Meraki Go, a new range of wireless access-point infrastructure designed for small businesses and the service sector.

The move suggests Cisco is seeking to expand their enterprise WI-Fi offering to a wider market, supporting smaller installations and public-access areas such as cafes, shops, hotels and small offices. Pricing is currently only available via certain routes (including Lineal), however many expect Go to represent a more cost-effective way to deploy the premium Wi-Fi features for which Cisco’s Meraki technology has become famous.

New access points have been previewed, for both indoor and outdoor settings. Slightly smaller than the enterprise range, these include a simple 1 Year hardware warranty, suggesting the hardware may be better suited to public-access locations, carry a lower cost of entry, and make more regular replacement a viable option.

Not that Cisco have fallen short on the feature set. In addition to web blocking of unwanted websites and usage limits on traffic, Meraki have included the all-important ability to run multiple Wi-Fi networks in parallel via the same hardware – an important tool for the service sector businesses needing both staff and public access Wi-Fi.

Both indoor and outdoor access-point models can be powered via a single ethernet cable from a POE switch to minimise cabling, include wall mountings as standard, and act as a ‘Mesh’ network; passing connected devices between the access-point with the strongest connection, without the need for the end-user to re-connect to the network as they move location.

Like its big brother, Meraki Go will require a subscription (either 1, 3 or 5 years), which provides support and security updates to Meraki’s supporting cloud-management app. As before, system admins can cloud-manage and configure their whole Meraki Go network via the Meraki management app, on PC/Mac, remotely or via their smartphone.

 

For Wi-Fi installations and support, contact Lineal today.

Adobe discount slashes pricing for education sector

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Adobe has announced a large discount for its Creative Cloud suite of apps, in a special Adobe discount scheme designed to win over the education sector.

The leading creative software package will now cost only $5 per user/month in the US, or around £4 in the UK – a large discount on the original $25/£18 per user/month price – although this Adobe discount price will currently only be available to academic institutions purchasing a minimum of 500 licenses.

Many of the big names in software, including Microsoft’s Office 365, Google’s G-Suite and other popular products such as ESET’s antivirus range, have been offered with significant discounts for the education sector through partner resellers, in the hope of capturing the next generation of technology users early, and contributing to wider learning.

In each case, the gesture is undoubtedly a worthy public relations boost, with Adobe also pledging to support workshop schemes to show educators how to teach with Adobe’s suite of creative apps in the classroom.

In both cases early access is especially important for Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign and many other leading creative apps, because of the very high high barrier to entry: both creatively and by cost – despite the software brand being simply unrivaled across the creative sector.

Adobe clearly hopes the dramatically reduced Adobe discount pricing will wet the appetite of larger organisations, and introduce high quality design apps to a much wider audience at an earlier age.

Fake hardware seized by Police

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Fake hardware has been seized by a City of London Police intellectual property crimes unit, following a recent raid in Kent.

The counterfeit networking equipment, worth at least £300,000, is believed to have been manufactured by organised criminals imitating the high-quality hardware of IT giant Cisco.

Small form-factor pluggable transceivers were recovered, which are used to convert optical data to conventional electrical signals as part of fibre-optic networks. 

Police believe the risks of organised criminal gangs being caught transporting imitation IT hardware are lower than for drugs or firearms, and that only technically-trained specialists would be able to distinguish counterfeit technology from the real thing.

Although no evidence of cyber-security intrusions have so far been found, engineers from Cisco stressed that small items like these could easily find their way into a business or public-sector supply chain, become mixed up with genuine network hardware, or fail due to low-quality manufacture.

Customers who suspect they may have encountered counterfeit items should isolate the hardware in question from other devices and report their suspicions to IT staff.

 

Lineal are a Cisco Select Partner – for hardware advice and support, please contact our team today: 01271 375999