Tag: WiFi

How can the hotel industry recover after COVID-19?

Your Post-COVID Fresh Start Kit.

The epidemic is expected to cast a serious and lasting impact on the hospitality industry in the short term and is likely to recover in six months’ time. Due to the suppression of customer demand during the epidemic, the industry is expected to face a period of concentrated demand release after the epidemic. How to quickly and accurately capture the change in customer demand, how to turn crisis into opportunity and how to seize the opportunity for development? These have become the key challenges for hoteliers to ponder. This is a fabulous time for hotels to reinvent themselves and infuse their operations with fresh thinking.

Here are some tips to help hospitality overcome the difficulties that COVID-19 brings.

Adopt cloud technologies

Remote working becomes the norm for today. Thanks to innovations and technology, even such a people-centric industry as hospitality experiences an increase in telecommuting. In fact, hoteliers can manage all the hotel processes without even being there. With cloud-based Property Management Systems, they are able to control all operations at anytime from anywhere.

Products like Udaya offer a fully cloud managed experience for hotels and restaurants, allows hoteliers to use a mobile app and control everything about their Wi-Fi experience. The Udaya series of products are all managed centrally from a public cloud including configuration, monitoring, captive portals, SMS sign-on, payment gateway interfaces and analytics.

Udaya Architecture

Use this time for hotel maintenance and renovation

Coronavirus outbreak doesn’t mean hoteliers are closing doors and are just waiting for this period to end. It’s a perfect time to catch up and improve. Whether it is a spontaneous renovation or completing your Property Improvement Plan, there’s no better time to do this. To begin, you can make a list of items, things, and everything that needs to be repaired.

It’s time to invest in Guest Wi-Fi. Guest Wi-Fi is a brilliant solution to the common problem hoteliers face – how to make Wi-Fi pay for itself. With Guest Wi-Fi each person who uses your Wi-Fi becomes a marketing opportunity from the moment they first log on and give your business a ‘Like’. From that point onwards you have almost unlimited opportunities to communicate with them through email and social media to promote your business.

udaya is a scalable and cost effective solution suitable for any hospitality deployment. It controls user Internet access, sets limits, engages users, provides powerful analytics and helps hoteliers run different marketing strategies to maximize revenue from their Wi-Fi.

Sure, PMS systems are not something new. Hoteliers have been using them for years. But in these times, this system can bring even greater benefits. For example, if the PMS goes with mobile concierge apps, which can help engage with the guests without personal contact, starting from check-in to meal and service orders. Products like Inventum’s MSG gateways supports leading PMS systems for seamless access for in-room guests using room number and guest name. Free or upgraded speed plans can be offered against payment to both guests and hotel visitors.


All-in-One Solution for Broadband and Wi-Fi Hotspot

Focus on meal delivery from the hotel restaurant

Hoteliers can take steps to increase restaurant sales during the COVID-19. Remember about aggregator, delivery and concierge apps that can help provide both hotel guests and non-guests with the option of meal delivery right to their rooms without even talking to someone.

Reconsider existing health and safety techniques

Plot the guests’ journey from front door to guestroom, and then to check-out. Can you simplify and reduce staff interactions so as to better a more contactless environment? It is crucial to have appropriate health and safety policies in place, especially for hotel business that relies on in-person interactions. In these contexts, hoteliers should promote proper health and safety measures, which may include self-service pay systems and orders through mobile apps.

Cut down on discretionary spends

The next 6 months are going to be extremely tough for business and only the ones who have operated with a tight leash on their finances and guest experience might survive. Independent operators who manage to survive and continue on this journey, should analyze their expenses and cut down on discretionary spends. Instead, spend this money on improving the client experience whenever business resumes, this would include ensuring top-quality linen and house-keeping, strict hygiene standards & better Wi-Fi experience.

Hotels/Resorts/Restaurant can also consider zero capex UNIFY™ cloud solution to get started immediately. The offering includes virtual routers as part of the subscription allowing any server (PC) on facility to be used as a gateway router for the hotspot(s). All other elements are managed via the UNIFY™ Cloud platform with no additional on-site hardware required. All you need are Wi-Fi access points to get started!

Give it a go. Now’s the time to make the change.

Inventum receives WiFi Leadership Awards 2019

Inventum Technologies has been conferred with the 3nd My India WiFi India Leadership Award 2019 for  “Best WiFi OSS/BSS  Solution” at the recently concluded My India WiFi Summit & Awards 2019 at The Imperial Hotel, New Delhi on Aug. 20, 2019 organised by DigiAnalysys.

This award recognizes Inventum as one of the top most OSS/BSS Solution provider in India. This is Inventum second year in a row. Inventum had received  My India WiFi India Leadership Award 2018 for “Best Cloud WiFi Solution”.

Mr. Anil Walia (extreme left), CSMO, Inventum, receiving the award from Mr. TR Dua (centre), Director General, TAIPA  accompanied by Mr. Pradeep Kushwah (extreme right), Marketing Manager, Inventum 

The awards ceremony was attended by imminent industry leaders including Dinesh Tyagi, CEO, CSC SPV; Sarvesh Singh, CMD, BBNL; A Seshagiri Rao, CMD, TCIL; Vipin Tyagi, Executive Director, C-DOT; K Alagesan, CMD, ITI and many other dignitary.

Mr. Sachin Mehra (extreme left), CEO Inventum, receiving the award for “Best Cloud WiFi Solution” from Mr. Anuj Jain   (centre), President, Reliance Jio accompanied by Mr. Anil Walia (extreme right), CSMO, Inventum

 Speaking on the event, Mr. Anil Walia, Chief Sales Officer, Inventum, says “We are delighted to receive the My India WiFi India Leadership Award 2019 for Best WiFi OSS/BSS Solution category. This coveted award is result of our continous efforts of improving  ISPs & WISPs customers experience and  providing them a end-to-end solution.”

Inventum’s UNIFY is a complete stack of billing & operations management (B/OSS) software. The key modules for the stack includes AAA, Subscriber CRM, Financial Accounting, Prepay & Postpaid Billing, Reseller Management, Electronic Wallet System and many more.

Inventum is a leading provider of fixed & wireless data networks technology with a strong made in India portfolio. Inventum builds routers, cloud solution, security and software systems that power some of the world’s largest communication networks. Inventum products are used by mobile operators, FTTH providers, ISP, Wi-Fi hotspots, Airports, Hospitality, Convention Centres and Smart Cities.

My India WiFi India Awards were instituted by DigiAnalysys Media in 2017 to recognise and celebrate visionary enterprises across industry segments and to focus on highlighting key trends and technologies in the WiFi segment.

Why Free Basics & Airtel Zero are bad for India

Free-Basics
“Free Basics is the new colonialism, its the new East India Company…”, said someone on television the other night about Facebook’s charitable initiative. I’m thinking to myself, there are no free lunches, so why is this even a debate?

Free Basics is an old debate about Net Neutrality. Its been defeated by regulation in the West, but in India we like debate. Facebook has made it so easy to sign a petition supporting Free Basics that hovering over the banner in your FB feed is enough! Many have accidentally succumbed.

Policy makers, telecoms, COAI & even TRAI are favouring a trial. They cite Delhi’s odd even car trial to reduce pollution as a precedent. Exactly how toxic pollution that is killing people compares with Free Basics eludes me.

To understand Free Basics, its first important to understand the Internet eco-system.

First The Basics

I see the Internet as a large reservoir of water. There are the content providers (Facebook & Google) who pump water into the reservoir and then us, the consumers, who tap in with little pipes drawing what water we need. The plumbing is owned by the telecom operators who charge both the content providers and subscribers for their respective pipes. The content companies make money from the subscribers who receive a service that they value and life comes a full circle.

Neutrality is in the fact that everyone gets the same water, just more or less, faster or slower. Everyone pays and none of us get champagne even if we can afford it!

Strange Bed Fellows

Circa 2000, the new new content companies were fighting tooth and nail with telecom operators. They wanted lower bandwidth prices, fatter pipes, unlimited always on Internet. The underlying motive was to drive faster Internet penetration leading to greater valuations which were based on unique user visits. Slow growth in Internet connectivity directly impacted their future.

AOL’s merger with Time Warner was an attempt to solve the slow growth problem and create a behemoth that built its own pipes and content. It has since become a corporate disaster case study.

Is Free Basics a similar attempt? Of course it is, just that the theatre is the third world. India still needs to connect billions and Facebook doesn’t have the patience to wait for our telecom providers and government to deliver connectivity. It wants to guarantee it’s market dominance in India’s future. Not charity, just plain old profit motive.

What is different this time is that Indian telecom providers want to join forces with Free Basics. Let’s try and understand their game.

How Internet Providers Makes Money

The provider game is simple. Lay a big fat pipe to the reservoir, say 1 gigabit (1,000 megabits). Then we split this pipe between a 1,000 paying subscribers, each sold a 10 megabit connection. Hold on, 1,000 x 10 is 10,000 megabits or 10 gigabits, so how do we fit all of them into the original 1 gigabit reservoir pipe? By betting on the fact that not all 1,000 subscribers will download at the same time. This is what we call oversubscription and this is how we make money.

Subscribers only see the ill effects of oversubscription during peak hours when everyone starts downloading and consequently everything slows down. Oversubscription to my mind is fair game, so long as it doesn’t mess with the end deliverable.

Content Differentiation & Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)

So how does a service provider differentiate content? How does your ISP create differential pricing?

DPI technology has been widely used by ISPs and telecoms to look inside your Internet traffic. Most people don’t know that their ISP is already differentiating P2P & torrent content, throttling it down to improve oversubscription and pack in more paying customers.

Free Basics, Airtel Zero and other similar initiatives all use DPI to control ALL your flows, throttle & (eventually) charge depending on what you access.

Think of it like a new toll gate for every website you wish to go to. Its only a matter of time that premiums will be linked to peak hour traffic!

How Airtel Zero Would Make Money

Airtel Zero is simply a differential pricing game. Zero charge for curated content, delivered faster, regular charge for everything else. An express lane of sorts, for the wealthy content owners to expand their market share while telecom operators add to their profits by charging the content providers for delivery. Of course, the real game all along is control over the medium and eventually the customer.

Imagine if your electricity company could charge you on the basis of which appliance you used in your house? Large appliance makers would subsidise electricity giving them an unfair advantage in the marketplace, making it tougher  for smaller appliance companies to compete. And in time, the nexus of the appliance and electricity companies would monopolise the market, affecting all consumers.

 

How Facebook Would Make Money

If Facebook is the only channel you can watch on TV, what would advertisers be willing to pay? You do the math.

With nearly a billion people waiting to come online in India, Facebook wants to accelerate connectivity, while ensuring they become the de facto medium with a captive audience.

No thank you, but India is done with colonialism. We can pay for our citizens to come online in good time.

Conclusion

The Internet is a great leveller because you cannot differentiate upon the end use or user. Governments should focus on building affordable broadband services accessible to all citizens with a view to empower and provide a level playing field to all stakeholders. TRAI & COAI should stop pushing agendas that are less than charitable.

Telecom operators must focus on building capacity, improving service quality and ridding themselves of a monopolistic mindset. Data is growing rapidly and companies like Airtel have benefitted greatly from 3G growth. If anything, they are responsible for driving voice tariffs to global lows and now trying to slice and dice the Internet is poor strategy.

Facebook should realise that free Facebook, WhatsApp & Instagram ain’t making anyone smarter. And basics without its competitor Google is a dead give away!

 

 

Full disclosure – I work for Inventum, one of the only carrier-class Indian router manufacturers. The company provides Broadband Network Gateways (BNG), DPI appliances, Routers, Billing & Provisioning systems for telecoms and Internet Service Providers. The views expressed here are my personal experiences as an entrepreneur in the Indian high-technology space.

 

Why Most Public Wi-Fi Hotspots Fail

Public WiFi hotspots have been around for over 15 years. New ones are being created everyday… and are shut down everyday as well. Various state governments in India are in the process of setting up public hotspots as part of their smart cities initiative. The Delhi Government went one step ahead and promised 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi to everyone, everyday. It’s a noble undertaking, but unless they really think it through, it’s unlikely to be more than an election promise that was delivered, but didn’t do anyone any good. Sort of like the BRT.

To put it simply, the problem is a combination of the user experience and funding model.

Hotels that bundle the cost of Wi-Fi in the room rent or large coffee chains that simply write it off as a utility expense like electricity or air-conditioning have a very well defined business model. They know that the revenue earned from their core business (room rent, food and beverages) can be enhanced, or at least sustained by making their location more attractive to customers with free Wi-Fi. Because they know the number of rooms they have, they know the number of visitors they can expect and hence, know how much it will cost to provide a certain quality of Wi-Fi. So, if the cost vs revenue ratio is acceptable, the service is provided and everyone’s happy.

The situation with most other hotspots isn’t so straightforward. Where there’s no clear way to recover the cost of Wi-Fi from other sources, operators attempt to entice customers with a few minutes of free Wi-Fi and then pester them to make an online payment or watch an advertisement. Here’s where the problems start.

Unless we’re just hanging around an airport waiting for a flight to be called or killing time at a coffee shop, most of us don’t have more than a few minutes to spare to sync emails or search the web for a phone number or whatever.

But the experience of connecting, registering, paying, logging in and finally using most public hotspots is so cumbersome and time consuming, that most people don’t bother. Unless the Wi-Fi service is far superior (i.e. faster, cheaper, reliable and convenient), most of us would rather just use the data plan of our mobile phones and be done with it.

The customers don’t use the Wi-Fi beyond the free period and the operators don’t make any money. Everyone loses.

There are ways to make it all work and it has been done before successfully. This article mentioned that Vodafone India might be moving in the right direction. So far, nothing has been announced officially. I guess we’ll just have to wait and watch.

Food, Clothing, Shelter and Free Wi-Fi

With Wi-Fi being politicised by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the recent Delhi elections, it seems our politicians have found a new sop to entice the young voter. Free Wi-Fi is the catch phrase being canvassed across the country, synonymous with smart cities, real estate projects and even the railways.

Will these projects be delivered? And is Wi-Fi even the right technology for smarter cities and an enlightened population? In the case of the former, let’s just say most projects will remain election promises; the suitability of Wi-Fi as a technology to reach Indian masses however, requires more thought.

Wi-Fi Basics

Wi-Fi was invented to take your Internet wire at home or office and make it airborne. For the uninitiated and puritans do forgive me, but this analogy works every time – Wi-Fi does to your home Internet connection what the cordless telephone did to your landline. The idea had always been to deliver fast data over short distances, freeing us from our desks.

The Achilles heel for Wi-Fi is its range and radio interference, dictated by physics more than government regulation. The typical range of your Wi-Fi home router is that of a yesteryear digital cordless telephone. They do of course use similar frequencies (2.4 & 5.8Ghz) and have the same issues penetrating brick and concrete walls in average Indian homes. With Wi-Fi operating on an “open to all” radio frequency, it pre-disposes the technology to lots of interference. Just think of it like rush hour in Delhi, everyone coming at you from all direction, zero lane discipline, and a free for all.

If you have a large enough home to need two routers, you most likely have experienced the limitations of range and interference. Most people I know will have different SSIDs “Ground Floor” and “First Floor” jumping between the two as they walk around the house. Each time you hop, your web page or video stalls.

So I ask the question, is Wi-Fi the right technology to deliver a quality user experience to the populous in a cost effective (since nothing is free) manner?

Experts, mostly expensive Wi-Fi equipment vendors, will argue that their gear has evolved to provide better range and deal with the hopping issue. Many cite examples of successful city-wide projects like Wireless@SG in Singapore. US & European service providers are using Wi-Fi Offload to divert subscriber 3G data traffic over to hotspots in an effort to decongest their mobile networks.

And while these innovations may work very well in other countries, the real question in my mind remains – is it right for Delhi, is it right for India?

Having been part of a company that has contributed to building some of the largest Wi-Fi networks in the world, here are my arguments & learning:

  1. Wi-Fi access points including the outdoor expensive type have an average range of 500 meters or less. Range falls sharply with obstructions such as walls, trees and of course other devices on the same frequency including your 2.4Ghz microwave oven and your existing home Wi-Fi router;

  2. Each access point will need an Internet wire connection to take the airborne signals and switch them back to the ISP. If you live in Delhi, you probably already know how difficult it is to get a quality DSL connection, so getting a reliable wire to each (almost) access point will be a serious challenge;

  3. To cover 1 square kilometer you would need dozens of Wi-Fi access points, each requiring a pole to be mounted, uninterrupted power, Internet backhaul wire, protection from the elements and vandals; One look at the condition of our public CCTV surveillance systems and it will be a wonder if the access point survives the first week;

  4. And then there is the issue of reliable power for each of these access points, sprinkled all over the city. One of our customers (who had installed several outdoor power systems to fuel their Wi-Fi business) summarized the situation quite well “our biggest challenge was protecting the UPS batteries from being stolen from the pole…” ;

  5. Right-of-way from civic authorities to use the poles and permission from homeowners to install and then service the access points is another huge challenge. Unlike mobile towers, you need equipment every 100 meters or so and with prevailing health concerns, fancy getting those;

  6. And then there is the user experience. I have tried and mostly failed to login to the hotspots that exist. It works well in hotels and some airports, but tried a coffee shop recently? No wonder India’s 75 million broadband connections are really 60 million USB data dongles (TRAI Sep 2014).

So seriously, our government wants to do all this for free?

Let’s call the Singaporeans

Singapore recently revamped its decade old Wireless@SG Wi-Fi network, free for citizens & visitors. It was built almost entirely through government grants and operated by a chosen few small service providers. Ask any Singaporean and they will tell you how poor the network used to be.

The Singapore government has now turned to mobile operators (such as M1) to build and manage Wireless@SG. Are the people being served? Time will tell, but Singapore doesn’t have the answer yet.
So will Delhi succeed where Singapore failed?

I think the people would be better served by:

  1. Increasing landline broadband connectivity – believe it or not, India has only 15 million wire based broadband connections serving 304 million broadband users; With bigger bang for their buck in mobile, operators are simply not investing in wires. Wikipedia says 13 million wires against China’s 175 million

  2. Give every citizen of Delhi free 30 minutes worth of 3G data instead. Everyone already has a cellphone and USB data dongles are cheap for those wanting to connect their laptops. The mobile infra is in place and reliable.

  3. Develop every government office as a free hotspot for citizens

  4. Partner local businesses to develop small Wi-Fi zones & hotspots in public private partnership by incentivizing local businesses