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Free Wi-Fi setup guide for dummies

Cape Town - With the apparent inevitable march toward public access Wi-Fi, it is important that vendors, whether they be corporate or municipal ensure that the deployment is accessible for users.

The City of Tshwane leads the country with a mammoth public access Wi-Fi network rollout, but smaller projects are underway all over SA.

The Western Cape Provincial Government has also launched a project aimed at connecting 50 000 people with Wi-Fi as part of its R1.3bn broadband plan.

Demand for data in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to see a significant jump.

According to data from Ericsson's Mobile Data Traffic Growth report for 2013 to 2019, the region's data consumption was at 37 000 terabytes (TB) per month in 2013, and that will jump to 76 000TB by the end of 2014, on its way to a mammoth 764 000TB by the end of 2019.

Most of that data growth will be on mobile devices while cable broadband services remain locked into urban areas with wealthy users.

But Wi-Fi projects can go awry when planners don't anticipate demand or make the login process complicated.

How to:

Here are Ctrlroom's eight best practice facts for Wi-Fi in a public space:

- There are four broad requirements for the deployment of a Wi-Fi network: Technology, design, management and support, and reporting/analytics. It needs to be an end-to-end solution.

- The operational cost of Wi-Fi network deployments is costly therefore budget needs to be allocated for the enablement, support and security of the network.

- It is important to identify viable revenue streams, such as targeted advertising to cover the cost of setting up a public Wi-Fi network.

- User interface needs to be simplified and easy to use. If a user finds it complicated and unintuitive to register or login to the network, he/she will not use it.

- Consumer awareness and marketing are pivotal to the success of a public Wi-Fi network. The users need to know it is available and what it entails.

- Public Wi-Fi needs to offer value and enrich the user experience. Offering 10MB, for example, is not going to allow the user to do much, nor will it provide any interesting insights of his/her browsing trends.

- Free Wi-Fi needs to be free, not free by a technical definition.

- It needs to meet the business's objective. Ultimately, the business needs to decide what it wants to gain from a Wi-Fi network before deployment.

This YouTube infomercial gives an example of how a company installed a Wi-Fi network efficiently:


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