Wi-Fi for hotels will be easier, with UniFi AC In-Wall
Tanaza now supports Ubiquiti UniFi AC In-Wall, a small and easily deployable device, suitable for hotel rooms.
The In-Wall comes with a sleek design and almost “disappears” once installed.
We suggest to install the devices right above the room’s desks, so that the access point can provide wireless connectivity with a good coverage and be used for wired connectivity as well.
Indeed, the UniFi AC In-Wall features an ethernet port, thanks to which users can connect their laptop through a cable.
By empowering this device with Tanaza’s firmware, you will get a full set of features to manage your Wi-Fi network and your social hotspot. Create an SSID for your hosts with the social login or the email authentication, collect data and insights about your clientele to run target marketing campaign. Control all your networks from one single pane of glass and configure each access point easily.
Tanaza continuously enhances its software accordingly to customer’s feedback and is now recognized as the best software for cloud management on the market.
After a lot of work and testing, Tanaza is proud to release its 2.14 firmware! The firmware main novelty is an update of our captive portal technology, that makes our captive portal faster than ever before.
All our test demonstrated that this captive portal is 4.5X faster in comparison to the previous versions and up to 3x faster than other commonly used captive portals.
Also, with the 2.14 release Tanaza announces new supported devices from Ubiquiti(UniFi AC In-Wall), TP-Link (TP-WA901ND v5), and Ligowave(Infinity series, NFT-1N, NFT-1NAF, NFT-2AC).
How to deploy an outside Wi-Fi network for camping
During holidays, campings are invaded by vacationers leaving the big cities to enjoy the sea or the mountains. During the last few years, comfort at camping places increased a lot, and now the biggest majority provides Wi-Fi for their hosts.
Wi-Fi is a good solution for campings to engage with guests and encourage them to come back for the next holidays. The main challenge when deploying a network for camping venues is the weather. You have to think that your hardware needs to resist the wind, sun, powder, and snow while having antennas that can cover long distances and provide internet to lots of concurrent users.
The first step is to determine the needed bandwidth. We can reasonably think that the number of concurrent users is higher in the evenings than during the day and that the level of usage is between medium and heavy (social networks, emails, VoIP calls, and video streaming). So the first thing is to find an ISP or WISP able to provide sufficient bandwidth to your place, at a reasonable price.
About the hotspot configuration, you can decide whether to protect the Wi-Fi access with a password or to create a login page and select one of the many authentication processes available. We suggest you opt for the second proposition because it’s better from a marketing point of view. In fact, when creating a login page, you can advertise your products and services to your customers and increase their engagement. Select the social login (Facebook, Instagram, and other social media authentication) or the email login to gather information and collect insights about customers. This data can be used then for marketing purposes, like creating a targeted newsletter campaign.
For example, encourage customers to book now their next holidays in your camping by offering a discount on your login page, promote activities nearby your camping. Tanaza also features a content filtering tool to keep control on the Wi-Fi usage and block access to inappropriate websites like violence, pornography, betting, etc. This tool also blocks malware internet pages and guarantees safe browsing on the Wi-Fi network.
To conclude, deploying a Wi-Fi network within a camping implies to select the right hardware for the outdoor deployment, and to keep in mind the number of concurrent users and the coverage needs. A Wi-Fi network brings additional comfort to the camping’s customers, but is also a marketing tool to boost their engagement and generate more revenues.
How to deploy WiFi network for outdoor summer events
Summer is coming, and many outdoor events are organized to enjoy the sun and the holidays: concerts, festivals, sport events… many opportunities to deploy a Wi-Fi network for the public.
If you are an event organizer, a marketing agency or a Wi-Fi solution provider, you already know that customers attending summer event consider Wi-Fi as a necessary service. They want and need Wi-Fi to share contents on social media, contact their friends when the mobile signal is low, find information about the event and so on. Wi-Fi is also fundamental for tourists that are coming on purpose to this kind of events.
About how many people are going to use the Wi-Fi network during an outdoor event like a festival, it is impossible to calculate an exact amount. Moreover, sometimes people are connected to the Wi-Fi but they are not effectively using it.
To calculate the number of concurrent users, let’s follow an example for a small music festival:
1.500 persons are coming and stay 3 hours
80% will connect to the Wi-Fi network so 1.200 persons
They will actively use the Wi-Fi network for one hour
The estimated number of concurrent users is in average 420 persons.
Multiply the bandwidth needs per client by the number of concurrent users in average, and you will know how to design your Wi-Fi network.
Choose the right hardware
Last but not least, choose the access points that fits the environment so in this case outdoor access points. The more wireless devices you have, the better is the coverage and the signal. Take into consideration the potential interferences and think about the best spots to position your access points.
Providing a free Wi-Fi connection is a great opportunity for you to get a higher visibility on social media, promote services and future events and to increase your database. It is also a very good opportunity for the festival’s sponsor to promote their own products!
Usually, people are enthusiast about the festival, and so they are highly motivated to share contents with their friends on social media. By providing free access to a Wi-Fi network, you are sure to answer the needs of hundreds of people and to take full advantage of this audience. The best option when deploying a WLAN for a festival is to enable the social login for users, to allow them to authenticate directly through their social media profile. Faster and easier than fulfilling a form, the social login will also allow you to collect a lot of data about Wi-Fi users such as name, surname, age, gender, location and so on. Moreover, if you enable the Facebook login, you will also collect verified email addresses.
You may also consider using the login page to promote services and products. For example, you could add a link to a taxi application and incentivize people to download and use it (Uber, Heetch, Taxi Blu…).
If it’s relevant to the event, you can also display advertisements before and/or during the login process from the festival itself or from its sponsors.. Ads can be images of videos, for example you could add rotating logos of the festival sponsors, names of the artists….possibilities are many, and results are huge!
If it’s a music event, you may even embed a Spotify widget within the login page, or a link to a music downloading platform like iTunes or Google music.
Increase your visibility on social media by asking a Like or a Check-in on the festival Facebook Page
Take advantage of the word of mouth thanks to shared contents on social media and get more and more visitors the next time and awareness about the event
Create targeted email campaign by sending newsletters about similar future events
You can analyze this data thanks to the Tanaza dashboard and its intuitive graphics. It allows you to segment and filter your contacts, create lists of contacts and export them to the Mailchimp connector integrated to Tanaza. With Mailchimp, you will be able to easily create newsletters and send automatic email to your lists.
If you are an event organizer, a marketing agency or a Wi-Fi solution provider, consider that customers attending summer event may consider Wi-Fi a needed facility in the venue. One example is the Coachella festival in the United-States that deployed a big Wi-Fi area for its visitors, offered by Netflix.
Top 3 liabilities for Wi-Fi hotspot providers offering free Wi-Fi
Let’s find out in this article the most common liabilities public hotspot providers face on their open Wi-Fi networks and how to prevent them effectively.
Nowadays, an increasing number of businesses located in public areas, such as restaurants, hotels, coffee shops and shopping centers, provide free Wi-Fi as a way to attract more customers and increase their revenues. In doing so, it is important to be aware of the legal risks network admins run when operating open networks, and how to limit or prevent them.
1. Copyright infringement
Till not long ago, copyright violations have been the most frequent issues Wi-Fi hotspot providers could face. Indeed, it is very common for users to download movies, videos, music and other copyrighted material on their personal devices, violating in this way the online copyright laws. Until recently, as it is in general very hard to detect the person responsible for an infringement, it was much more likely that copyright holders tracked and took actions directly against the Wi-Fi hotspot provider offering internet connection to customers. Nevertheless, things changed at least at European level, following the 2010 German case that saw Tobias Mc Fadden, who provided public Wi-Fi in his shop, being sued by Sony for a copyright infringement committed on his free Wi-Fi network. In the end, the Federal Court of Justice agreed that Wi-Fi hotspot providers are not liable for copyright infringements run on their open networks by third parties. A valuable strategy to prevent copyright infringements is to deploy a web content filter, a software tool that screens content and restricts the range of websites and domains users can access while browsing the internet. The cloud-based content filter provided by Tanaza, for instance, allows Wi-Fi hotspot providers to easily block inappropriate content by selecting a list of blocked websites or customizing their own one. In this way, the risk of copyright violations can be successfully reduced.
2. Cybercrimes
Many are the illegal activities that nowadays expose Wi-Fi hotspot providers to more severe legal risks than copyright infringement. For instance, hackers could leak information about systems while connected to your network, at the same time, malicious users could use your network to access prohibited materials, such as child pornography, to purchase illegal drugs online or to sell items of contraband. Even in this case, you can effectively protect your open Wi-Fi network by setting up the Tanaza’s content filtering tool. In fact, the Tanaza built-in web content filter not only monitors and controls user traffic in local public areas with Wi-Fi, but it also blocks countries at risk of viruses and hacker threats to ensure a better protection. Furthermore, it avoids access to prohibited sites and blocks illegal as well as unwanted websites. In this way, for instance, users won’t be able to access pornography nor violent content from Google search results.
3. Personal data disclosure
Wi-Fi hotspot providers collect personal data for statistics or to run personalized marketing campaigns every time users connect to their networks. In general, indeed, it is necessary to provide some information in order to access a public network, i.e. email address, telephone number, birthday, etc. In doing so, public hotspot providers are required to use user personal information in compliance with the law, respecting the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998 regarding privacy and data disclosure. For this purpose, in order to operate their open networks respecting the law, Wi-Fi hotspot providers in EU should include terms and conditions on their login page, which explain what data will be collected and how it will be used. For instance, Tanaza features flexible terms and conditions on its built-in captive portal, by allowing network admins to make the acceptance of some parts compulsory – i.e. terms and conditions related to Wi-Fi usage – and other optional – i.e. terms and conditions to agree on receiving promotional materials or newsletters. If you want to know how to configure the flexible terms and conditions provided by Tanaza appropriately, read these instructions.
We are using technical and profiling cookies to give you the best experience on our Website. By continuing to use our Website without changing the settings, you consent to our use of cookies. Read More about Cookies
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.