Why is WiFi Internet so essential for travelers in airports?
It is hard to find an airport that does not provide WiFi Internet for travelers. People want to see flight schedules, book hotels, reserve taxis, advise those waiting what time they will arrive and advice friends about delays. Plus hundreds more reasons.
An airport may have a high speed fiber connection to the Internet and may have thousands of people who want to use the Internet daily. Many airports implement strategies to share the Internet service between many people, a popular strategy is listed below.
- Provide 30 minutes of free access every 24 hours at a slow speed to avoid network congestion, usually 1MB/s or less but sufficient to open an airline website or post a message to social media. Too slow however to stream videos.For people who have used the 30 minutes of free service, a charge for Internet access in hourly increments is done, accepting credit card or Paypal payments. The data speed may be faster than the free access speed.
- Provide a subscription gateway for customers of service such as Boingo that charge their subscriber a monthly fee and pay the airport on a per use basis.
In addition several airlines now offer a WiFi Internet service during the flight that is charged using a credit card payment on a per flight basis.
An airport is a large building, or several large buildings. WiFi wireless access points have a limited range so a number of wireless access points have to be installed. Depending on the model and performance of the wireless access point, there may be a limit of between 30 and 300 users per wireless access point.
The connection strategy that the airport wishes to use is implemented with a Guest Internet controller. The Guest Internet GIS-R40 is very popular in airports around the world and is suitable for an Internet fiber connection of 1Gb/s and has no limit on the number of people that can connect to the Internet.
The GIS-R40 provides a customizable login page that can display the connection options that the airport wishes to provide to travelers. The wireless access points are connected back to the GIS-R40 through PoE switches. In addition to the login connection options the GIS-R40 has a long list of valuable features, some of these are listed below.
- Cloud service that can be accessed from any location, and can manage multiple Guest Internet controllers for airport installations that have several terminal buildings.
- Customized login pages that can provide information and also sell advertising for travelers.
- Several reports that show the use and performance of the Internet service in tables and graphically making it easy to identify congestion of the fiber internet connection and adjust the sharing algorithm.
- Credit card billing report to crosscheck with the credit card company statement.
- Failure monitoring of the ISP service, the Guest Internet controller and all wireless access points connected to the Guest Internet controller. An alert message is sent out in the event of a failure to initiate a fast repair response.
- Prevention of sharing of copyright files that use the Torrent protocol and other methods.
- PCI compliant firewall to block access from the traveler WiFi to the back office network.
- A VLAN service that permits the wireless access points to be configured with dual SSID, with one open SSID for travelers and an encrypted SSID for staff, with isolation between the two circuits, reducing installation cost.
The Guest Internet controllers have been chosen by many airports to manage the WiFi Internet service for travelers. For help with a project design and implementation please contact our engineers.
For more information, please get in touch with us:
info@wispzone.com