According to Wikipedia, automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes. As the tongue-in-cheek section header implies, automation may very soon be the first thing on your priority to-do list. Much has been said about the merits of moving to the “Cloud” or “Digitization”. While shifting to the cloud or making business processes more digital will have some inherent productivity gains or even strategic advantages, we feel that automation is key to driving more impactful revenue and operational results.
Automation is critical to providing a consistent and satisfying customer experience, benefiting from expert decision-making, or ensuring a high level of service quality. These are attributes that are especially important for the service industry, including for Network Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Telcos, and the Hospitality industry.
1. As business activities pick up, MSPs that can scale up and down quickly and cost-effectively will be able to benefit from this trend. Venue owners and businesses who are facing uncertainty will prefer low start-up cost and pay-as-you-use subscription business models. MSPs who can provide flexibility to customers and tune their pricing models quickly will dominate the market. “Wi-Fi-as-a-service” (WiFi-aaS) is fast gaining popularity and increasingly preferred.
2. The demand for Enterprise managed Wi-Fi services should pick up as business owners and corporates want to outsource infrastructure investment or migrate from Capex to Opex spending model, while relying on MSPs to deliver reliable wireless connectivity for their operations. Centralized monitoring, with easy remote onboarding of customers while empowering them to self-help or administer basic functions are critical success factors.
3. It is important for MSPs to have deep understanding of their target customer segments and what is happening in their network, in order to spot business opportunities or respond quickly to operational issues respectively. In the past, many MSPs have built systems in silos to address different business opportunities which made data consolidation and analytics difficult or impossible. A good centralized system that incorporates data analytics with machine learning can help both Marketing, Business Development and Operations team to better address market segments and ensure service levels are met.
There are many ways that automation can be applied to allow companies to reap the benefits mentioned earlier. Here are some examples that ANTlabs has helped evolve our customer’s business processes with our product features or our ability to help customize to their requirements.
With our ASP managed service platform or ASP Cloud service, configuration and recovery data can be backed up centrally. During system failures at a local site, high availability on our gateways automatically kicks in, preventing service downtime. Alerts are sent out automatically. In the event of a full local system failure, the MSP can quickly send in a replacement unit and restore the service fast with the backups that are stored in the cloud. With simple instructions, a non-IT staff can power up a gateway and allow both the gateway and ASP to automatically self-configure and restore optimized settings finetuned by IT group corporate. All these can be monitored remotely by an administrator(s) from our ASP platform.
The IT Administrator of a MICE venue can predefine and configure new login portal pages to be shown at a specific location at a specific date and time so that they don’t have to remember to change or rush to make last-minute changes before a new event starts. Our Event Manager module helps save time, while potentially allowing non-IT staff to help in times of manpower crunch with the easy-to-use, and intuitive user interface.
A customer satisfaction survey can be sent automatically after a guest has checked out of a hotel or finished a meal at a restaurant. Instead of relying on staff to remember to do this mundane step and collate the results, such a simple form of automation can alert management if service standards have been exemplary or degraded.
During government-mandated lockdowns, ANTlabs Tru’AUTH AAA and Tru’IP DHCP/DNS systems have aided Telcos and MSPs to respond rapidly to shifting consumption spikes of bandwidth in the network. AAA authentication, DHCP, and DNS service are important network services for a Telco. With automation, a much leaner network team could bring up new network coverage quickly and shift the required network resources to multiple sites without sacrificing quality. Coupled with the use of telemetry data, automated expert rules can help Operations teams during maintenance windows to ensure that pre-established operational procedures set up by experienced operators can be faithfully executed by less experienced staff. Real-time visibility on our systems, help provide human engineers or managers with speedy confirmation of service recovery and relevant reports for audit.
The above examples illustrate the wide range that automation can enhance service quality in small steps for individual customers or create a huge impact on an operator’s network affecting millions.
Automation is the next step to realize the benefits of shifting to the cloud and digitization of business processes. For more than 20 years, ANTlabs has built robust networking solutions for Telcos, MSPs, large venues, and the hospitality industry. With our unique insight into the needs of small venue owners to large-scale network operators, we continually apply automation through product innovation and customize for our customers. The ability to customize to our customers’ environment is one of many unique advantages offered by ANTlabs.
Automation is key to driving more impactful revenue and operational results. It will allow the MSPs, Telcos, and hospitality industry to provide a consistently high-quality customer experience, respond faster to a dynamic business environment and ensure a high level of operational efficiency.
As the new Lunar Year of the Tiger is upon us, we are hopeful that 2022 will be a year of opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs) providing Managed Wi-Fi services. For the past 2 years, there have been unpredictable drops in customer demand and business activity, as well as sudden surges after lull periods. Shortage of labour and supply chain disruptions have also created unforeseen issues which require innovative solutions and change in mindset and paradigms to ride through the challenges. Technology and innovation are often cited as catalysts to help businesses transform to overcome these disruptions and emerge more agile and competitive. So how can MSPs position themselves to win in 2022?
1. As business activities pick up, MSPs that can scale up and down quickly and cost-effectively will be able to benefit from this trend. Venue owners and businesses who are facing uncertainty will prefer low start-up cost and pay-as-you-use subscription business models. MSPs who can provide flexibility to customers and tune their pricing models quickly will dominate the market. “Wi-Fi-as-a-service” (WiFi-aaS) is fast gaining popularity and increasingly preferred.
2. The demand for Enterprise managed Wi-Fi services should pick up as business owners and corporates want to outsource infrastructure investment or migrate from Capex to Opex spending model, while relying on MSPs to deliver reliable wireless connectivity for their operations. Centralized monitoring, with easy remote onboarding of customers while empowering them to self-help or administer basic functions are critical success factors.
3. It is important for MSPs to have deep understanding of their target customer segments and what is happening in their network, in order to spot business opportunities or respond quickly to operational issues respectively. In the past, many MSPs have built systems in silos to address different business opportunities which made data consolidation and analytics difficult or impossible. A good centralized system that incorporates data analytics with machine learning can help both Marketing, Business Development and Operations team to better address market segments and ensure service levels are met.
With more than 2 decades of experience working with Telcos, service providers and hospitality players, ANTlabs has developed a centralized managed service platform called ASP (ANTlabs Service Platform) that can help MSPs address the opportunities outlined here. For customers with small number of sites, ANTlabs also provides ASP Cloud – a pay-as-you-use subscription service based on the same ASP platform to help them get started and realize the benefits that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.
4. While wireless connectivity is indispensable, it is also fast becoming a commodity. Yet delivering good quality high-speed internet access (HSIA) service can make or break the success of WiFi-aaS for MSPs. Consistently high quality of service (QoS) requires end to end effort: from the edge devices providing differentiated network QoS control for different user groups, to controlling what kinds of application traffic has priority so that overall user experience is enhanced.
Besides HSIA as a service, MSPs should allow other network services to easily launched and subscribed by end customers. ANTlabs ASP platform has the unique ability to allow MSPs to launch user-aware, location-aware services that are customizable to fit different customer segments. Take for example, a web filtering service to protect network users from malware or undesirable content. MSPs can provide a different customer profile with a corresponding set of filtering criteria for corporate use, versus, hospitality customers.
5. Finally, with the trend to move business processes online and the shift towards Cloud operations, MSPs should leverage on the same WiFi-aaS platform to capture customers in other business verticals. ANTlabs ASP platform has multi-tenancy features that allow different end user organizations to subscribe and manage their own network, and flexible features that allow the MSPs to address different verticals like corporate, hospitality, retail, finance and even education. With small increment cost, MSPs can leverage on the ANTlabs ASP platform to expand their existing business by providing Managed WiFi business to new business verticals.
ANTlabs has built the ASP platform to be a robust centralized managed service platform for MSPs to realize a scalable, and cost-effective Managed WiFi Service model with the added benefit of launching new services quickly, and allowing them to expand beyond their traditional hospitality or corporate customer base. As WiFi-as-as-service (WiFi-aaS) becomes the norm with more businesses going online in 2022 and beyond, MSPs who can capitalize on these trends will have first-mover advantage and build a sustainable and profitable business.
Updated: 8 December 2021
Web content filtering is mostly used to keep inappropriate content out of kids’ hands and restrict timewasters in corporate networks. However, its primary advantage is not limited to preventing access to undesirable content. Reduced malware infections and access to phishing websites are among the lesser-known but probably equally important reasons web filtering is gaining favor in Enterprise WiFi networks.
As users become more IT savvy, they need the reassurance that they are connected to a secure network, especially when they are not in their own homes. Of course, establishments can explicitly say that users use their WiFi at their own risk in their Terms and Conditions. However, while that may potentially save them from legal troubles, it may not shield them from PR nightmares should malware infect the users’ devices while in their network.
ANTlabs Web Filtering Service can be used in organizations with various WiFi hotspots. For example, if you administer a school WiFi network, you may wish to keep pupils from mistakenly viewing harmful content such as gambling, pornography, or hate sites. Because these new sites constantly change and new ones appear every day, manually blocking them is not an option. Another situation when category filtering comes in handy is when your school or workplace disallows visiting time-wasting websites like YouTube is prohibited during specific hours. YouTube and related sites are classed as “Time Wasters > Entertainment” and are restricted when this category is selected. You also save time and effort by not having to type in the URLs of these websites manually.
ANTlabs Web Filtering protects users by giving operators the controls to block by category. It is based on DNS filtering—a type of content filtering using the DNS layer to filter based on IP addresses. The main difference is that this service gives blanket protection to sites you choose within your organization.
When users bring in multiple devices, the filtering works across these devices and filters websites into six major categories (Security, Adult-related, Bandwidth Hogs, Illegal Activity, Time Wasters, and General Sites) with more than 60 pre-defined subcategories and inspects encrypted sites. In addition, the URLs categorized in the security module’s database are constantly updated, so service providers who subscribe to this feature shall have peace of mind knowing they have protection from the latest threats.
ANTlabs’ built-in Anti-SPAM Protection and Anti-DOS Protection are two other ANTlabs product features that combine well with Web Filtering Service to secure your network further. Another ANTlabs gateway function that helps you secure your guest networks is Lawful Intercept, which helps your organization comply with numerous IT cyber regulations.
The ANTlabs Web Filtering Service was released in December 2021 with ASP Cloud. It benefits guest WiFi networks like hotels, schools, universities, enterprises, and other corporate networks that aren’t classified as guest WiFi.
Did you know that ANTlabs guest WiFi solutions are used by at least 2 of the 3 best airports in the world? Every year, passengers of more than 100 nationalities are asked in independently funded surveys to rate their experiences in international airports. For the longest time, Singapore’s Changi Airport was considered the best of […]
ANTlabs Pte. Ltd., a proven network technology product and solutions provider for the hospitality, telcos, ISP, and large venues, announces its partnership with Vastcom Technology Limited, the leading one-stop ICT solutions provider in Macau. Vastcom has over a decade of working experience in the hospitality and gaming industries, and its current mission is to assist […]
We’ve seen it in countless disaster movies: when world leaders initiate a lockdown, we always see frazzled tech support people and C-level executives in somber meetings. Outside, people scrambled to hunker down in their own homes; everyone got their eyes glued to their mobile phones and laptop for updates. All rely on staying online to continue working and to keep in touch with distant loved ones. It sounds like something out of an apocalyptic Hollywood film, right? But it did happen in real life at the height of the global lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The question of whether the Internet Service Provider or Carrier could handle the increased load arose as Internet demand grew at an unprecedented rate. Can we afford outages?
So, what happens if there is an outage, and you have few people in your support team to handle issues due to government-mandated restrictions? In our real-life scenario above, at least two things stood out: 1) the outage could be triggered by unprecedented events and possibly, human error, and 2) after the outage happened, recovery may not be as swift as expected due to human delay in diagnosis and troubleshooting.
Is this preventable? Yes. Could the problem have been fixed faster had there been a system in place that reduces human errors? Yes. How were they able to solve it the first time around? Telemetry data helped in more ways than one, and automation can potentially help prevent repeat scenarios.
Service providers require access to real-time and granular information about their networks. They require technologies that can assist them in gaining profound insights, correlating, and visualizing data at speeds and in ways that human brains can be easily overwhelmed. Big data-driven network intelligence and analytics technology can assist in obtaining real-time, extremely granular, accurate, multidimensional insights about the network, services, network flows, and usage patterns.
In recent years, ANTlabs has accelerated its telemetry and network automation capabilities, thus enabling service providers and mobile operators to improve productivity, scale up or scale down cost-effectively as needed, and offer more VAS (value-added services) to their customers. In networking, telemetry refers to how data from multiple sources is gathered and transferred to receiving equipment for analysis using a series of automated communication methods.
As networks become increasingly complex, these networks are beginning to produce massive amounts of telemetry data such as logs. In addition, more people now go online to perform daily tasks that used to be done offline (i.e., Zoom meetings, ordering groceries, e-learning, and streaming), especially after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to limit physical interactions. On top of that, there is an increase in smart devices and machines that also need to communicate through WiFi (e.g., IPTV cameras, tablets for takeaway orders, smart doorbells, security equipment). Given the traffic surge, data can accrue to considerable volumes quickly.
ANTlabs employ machine learning and trend analysis, along with telemetry systems, to intelligently audit what is required for Telcos and service providers who want to deliver high-quality connectivity in real-time. Because each network has its idiosyncrasies, ANTlabs can tailor the final solution to each service provider’s needs by using machine learning techniques and modeling. One of the critical success factors for achieving operational or productivity objectives is having an experienced system integrator and domain expert like ANTlabs to tailor the solution with the end customer team in an iterative manner.
At the height of the 2020 government-mandated lockdowns, ANTlabs Tru’Auth AAA and Tru’IP DDI have aided service providers in navigating the unpredictability of consumption trends. As a result, even with labor and location constraints, telcos and ISPs were able to respond rapidly to an increase in bandwidth demand. Even with a limited workforce due to pandemic restrictions, with the help of ANTlabs Tru’Auth AAA and Tru’IP DHCP/DNS, some carriers were able to shift capacity from one location to another and bring up new coverage quickly without sacrificing quality and no downtime.
Patterns develop as machine learning makes sense of all the data collected by ANTlabs carrier solutions, assisting decision-makers in determining when and how to conduct critical operations such as maintenance. This feature also aids service providers and network operators in creating automation rules that can be triggered when certain conditions are met. As a result, telemetry data and automation can significantly reduce human errors and ensure that pre-established operational procedures set up by experienced operators can be faithfully executed, even if the system’s operators have only recently been onboarded or the experts have yet to arrive on the scene. Furthermore, once the rectification procedures are executed, real-time visibility can also provide human engineers or managers with speedy confirmation of service recovery and relevant reports for audit.
In other use cases, automation deployed alongside the ANTlabs Tru’Auth AAA and Tru’IP DHCP/DNS can quickly spawn services such as speed tests in multiple locations dynamically and generate reports from telemetry data collected over time, customized to customers’ scenarios. In this use case, ANTlabs has helped give the edge to a customer who was using Tru’Auth AAA and Tru’IP DHCP/DNS by giving them ad-hoc visibility of their quality of service in specific areas with fast turnaround. In addition, such information on speed tests and network health data is retrieved easily and turned into reports when the customer needed to provide verified service data to strengthen their value proposition to potential customers.
Without the automation and telemetry capabilities, they would have to pay for costly third-party services that typically take much longer to complete. With the ANTlabs integrated solution, the usual turnaround time for third-party vendors to provide such reports that usually take a week or two is reduced to a few days.
ANTlabs carrier solutions help network operators and service providers effectively react to sudden surges or decreases in network capacity. On top of that, ANTlabs Tru’Auth AAA and Tru’IP DHCP/DNS increase productivity, improve customer retention, and potentially boost ARPU through their telemetry and network automation capabilities. The telemetry data accrued from different sources can be processed into valuable insights to help maintain a high quality of services, and as a result, increase customer retention. This data can also provide better visibility of their massive network, thus improving productivity for service providers and mobile network operators.
As machine learning gradually turns all the data that ANTlabs carrier solutions accumulate into something potentially useful, patterns emerge and help decision-makers decide when to implement crucial maintenance activities. This capability also helps network operators develop automation rules that can be triggered when set parameters are met. As a result, telemetry data and automation can substantially reduce human errors and help to retain expert knowledge within the organizations.
Customer experience shall be the fundamental differentiator for the operator’s ecosystem to flourish, and the recent pandemic has magnified the need for better connectivity regardless of where the consumer may be. Backed by valuable data, service providers who can build new services can potentially provide even better experiences, putting them in the strongest position to succeed while growing revenue.
With the flexibility, interoperability capabilities, and numerous interfaces that ANTlabs Tru’Auth AAA and Tru’IP DHCP/DNS have, the possibilities for turning customer insights into something of value can only be limited by imagination.
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Without the automation and telemetry capabilities, they would have to pay for costly third-party services that typically take much longer to complete. With the ANTlabs integrated solution, the usual turnaround time for third-party vendors to provide such reports that usually take a week or two is reduced to a few days.
ANTlabs carrier solutions help network operators and service providers effectively react to sudden surges or decreases in network capacity. On top of that, ANTlabs Tru’Auth AAA and Tru’IP DHCP/DNS increase productivity, improve customer retention, and potentially boost ARPU through their telemetry and network automation capabilities. The telemetry data accrued from different sources can be processed into valuable insights to help maintain a high quality of services, and as a result, increase customer retention. This data can also provide better visibility of their massive network, thus improving productivity for service providers and mobile network operators.
As machine learning gradually turns all the data that ANTlabs carrier solutions accumulate into something potentially useful, patterns emerge and help decision-makers decide when to implement crucial maintenance activities. This capability also helps network operators develop automation rules that can be triggered when set parameters are met. As a result, telemetry data and automation can substantially reduce human errors and help to retain expert knowledge within the organizations.
Customer experience shall be the fundamental differentiator for the operator’s ecosystem to flourish, and the recent pandemic has magnified the need for better connectivity regardless of where the consumer may be. Backed by valuable data, service providers who can build new services can potentially provide even better experiences, putting them in the strongest position to succeed while growing revenue.
With the flexibility, interoperability capabilities, and numerous interfaces that ANTlabs Tru’Auth AAA and Tru’IP DHCP/DNS have, the possibilities for turning customer insights into something of value can only be limited by imagination.
Related Posts
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SINGAPORE, 22 JULY 2021 – ANTlabs Pte. Ltd., an established network technology product and solutions provider for the hospitality industry, announces its partnership with Brantas Ltd., the leading integrator of hospitality technology in New Zealand and The Pacific. Both companies have been in the industry for more than two decades, thus combining long experience and […]
What makes ANTlabs Multi-WAN load balancing module better than the competitor’s multi-WAN? Here’s a familiar scenario: networks going down in the middle of critical business processes and eventually costing businesses much money. Huge companies fork out millions of dollars to keep their networks in the green by having dedicated high-bandwidth backup links and various devices […]
ANTlabs products and solutions help you ensure that there is smooth, zero-config connectivity in your network. Like everything in life, we must prepare so that our businesses go on without hiccups. If we do encounter said hiccups, we need reliable help. This is why, with every purchase of ANTlabs products, you get the proper product […]
ANTlabs and Wi-Fi Now forge partnership to spread the word about WiFi innovations to a broader audience, worldwide SINGAPORE – ANTlabs announces its partnership with Denmark-based Wi-Fi Now (Hetting Global ApS) to bring network innovations to a broader audience. To jumpstart this partnership, Kwang Tat Ang, ANTlabs VP for Customer Solutions, will be speaking at […]