Public Wi-Fi is increasingly expected by consumers, though challenges remain in terms of providing a quality connection
In major urban centers across North America, finding a public Wi-Fi signal is about as easy as finding a Starbucks; which actually offers Wi-Fi service to its patrons at no additional cost. This partnership makes sense when you consider 75% of people say one week without Wi-Fi would leave them grumpier than one week without coffee – why not serve both in the same place?
It’s evident that providing Wi-Fi connections in public settings is a vital piece of the complicated connected puzzle known as subscriber quality of experience, but are service providers meeting their customers’ demands?
Public Wi-Fi in cafes, hotels and especially airplanes are commonly reviewed as spotty and unreliable, often damaging the reputation of the service provider. In one recent case, American Airlines received so many complaints about bad in-flight service that the company sued its provider. So how can you avoid the pitfalls of bad Wi-Fi service?
Gain intelligence at the edge
Optimizing your Wi-Fi deployment, be it public or private, starts with understanding the wireless environment, and leveraging that intelligence and known topology at the edge to best deploy your connection. Modern access points provide a wealth of information to diagnose and contribute to choosing optimal settings for the deployment using traditional Simple Network Management Protocol or push mechanisms such as Technical Report 069.
Broadband Forum standard TR-069 gives the ability to identify attributes such as multiple basic service set identifiers and network names, including number of radios; spectrum utilization – power indication, retransmission errors and number packets sent/received/dropped; and clear channel assessment, as well as settings such as encryption, security and standards used. This provides the operator with a lot of information to start its public deployment. Getting a better picture requires a further look into any competing access points, exposing information related to other BSSIDs, channels, power levels and signal strengths.
This is where you can start to get a clear picture of whether there is a potential problem and how to avoid it.
Deploy in the right spectrum
This challenge is usually quite simple, right? Just bind to the channel with the least interference. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy – particularly in built-up areas where there are multiple competing Wi-Fi and other signals. So how can you gain visibility into neighboring conditions for that moment in time?
Earlier it was mentioned that modern access points provide a great deal of intelligence at the edge; some can even provide a neighborhood site survey, listing all the surrounding access points, the channel, the signal strength, etc. This data is often used by the gateway itself to choose an optimal setting (auto), but this is typically only determined during the bootup of the gateway. How often are gateways restarted and is there a better way to gain this information?
Looking at TR-069, you can see the spectrum congestion remotely and even dynamically adjust the channel the AP is operating on without requiring a reboot. This intelligence can be extended into self-care options, which would use this business intelligence to automatically optimize the settings in the Wi-Fi network. If competing public hot spots are operating only in a 2.4 gigahertz space and the spectrum is heavily congested, it might be worthwhile to deploy a dual-band AP to improve customers’ experiences, examine the physical installation or deploy Wi-Fi extenders. For complex environments, this data can be used during the installation to best determine locations for gateways and repeaters.
Making intelligent decisions with gateway analysis
Dive deep into the public gateway to get a wealth of data that identifies usage patterns and monitors quality of experience, critical data for customer service representatives when fielding a support call related to slow connections over Wi-Fi. There are many other attributes that can be gleaned from vendor-specific extensions to improve the granularity of the Wi-Fi picture and topology at the public hot spot. Taking this ephemeral data and putting it in a data warehouse enables the operator to actively mine key statistics for proactive care purposes and networkwide key performance indicator metrics with trended patterns. These are essential tools for the operator to deliver optimal service and to take that data and determine where there are areas of oversubscription, low negotiated speeds and gateways that are power cycling or are routinely offline.
Maintain a healthy network
Insight at the network edge is one contributor to the overall QoE, however, if the uplink between the access point and the service provider is poor, it’s akin to taking a photocopy of a photocopy. You can never get better than the original. TR-069 can be used to manage the device settings, but importantly, it can also be used to monitor and report on the uplink to the service provider.
TR-069 covers more than just Wi-Fi-related settings. In a DSL environment a gateway typically can share a wealth of information for troubleshooting or proactive care scenarios. For example, the TR-181 data model exposes many attributes for the DSL quality-management suite, specifically for delivering higher speeds and enhancing service delivery including current upstream and downstream rate, link retrain and errors. The DQM suite incorporates techniques to help service providers measure line performance, status and test data, in addition to other data to measure throughput and diagnose line functions. This can then provide steps that the service provider can take to curtail new problems or improve performance.
Similarly in the cable world, attributes such as micro-reflections, QAM settings and radio frequency to receive and transmit signal strength can easily be accessed via SNMP or vendor specific extensions in TR-069.
Imagine being able to not only share this data to an advanced CSR, but also report networkwide on outliers experiencing a high percentage of network errors, then taking action on any errors or outliers by setting up automated business rules to programatically or manually address issues before they affect subscriber service quality.
Leverage self-organizing Wi-Fi networks
Beyond signal quality and CSR insight, the data available through TR-069 provides an operator with valuable business intelligence that can be leveraged to programmatically adjust channel settings and radio power levels to provide optimal settings over a shared spectrum. With automated business rules in an auto configuration server you can improve customer experiences and maintain your brand. Some of these rules may be as simple as ensuring the AP password is strong and changed every 12 months or enforcing not open/unprotected networks.
In a recent report by Incognito, 40% of respondents felt better hot spot coverage would be the most appreciated service option to add to their existing plans – proving that public Wi-Fi is one of the most valuable service add-ons you can give subscribers.
The question is — are you making sure that your public hot spots are optimized?
Editor’s Note: The RCR Wireless News Reality Check section is where C-level executives and advisory firms from across the mobile industry share unique insights and experiences.
