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How Force 36 Use CT WiFi

Richard from Force 36 IT Consultants tells us why they use CT WiFi to manage wireless networks.

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Hi Richard, so who are Force 36?

We’re an IT service provider. We partner with all kinds of businesses, from local SME’s to government departments and retail stores. We don’t just consult on Wi-Fi, we do a full range of managed IT services.

What do you use CT WiFi for?

We run a Wi-Fi network in Saffron Walden town centre. At the moment it covers the public space outside the town hall. Take up has been so high we’re looking to expand across the town. We have our own fibre tail which we can utilise and give back to the community. The CT WiFi platform helps us manage the network and runs the captive portal to automate public access.

What were you looking to solve with CT WiFi?

Originally we built our own radius server to create a login page. We hacked this together using ChilliSpot and some other OpenWrt opensource options out there. They were free which was great but managing them was intense. You needed to be onsite to monitor or make a change.

After a while the project started to eat up hours of development time. We couldn’t afford to keep the project going or expand the network whilst running a radius server ourselves and monitoring performance without a remote interface.

We looked for an alternative captive portal service and found CT WiFi. It did the radius and captive portal set up out of the box and enabled us to manage the network off site. It saved us so many man hours we couldn’t not use it.

How have you set your network up using CT WiFi?

We utilised the wireless infrastructure we already had. We were already using a TP-Link access point which was compatible and I loaded the firmware on it remotely. It was installed high up on a building, if we’d had to take it down to load the firmware we would’ve needed the council’s permission and a cherry picker. It just wasn’t an option, everything had to be done remotely.

What’s your favourite feature?

Once the firmware was installed we got a complete overview of the network from the office. We love the usage reports you get. The visibility is a real eye opener. We had no idea how popular the network actually is until we looked at the stats. It’s helping us put forward a case to expand coverage throughout the town centre and get local businesses onboard.

For example the splash page that the public use to connect asks them to login using their Facebook credentials. From this we get a summary of the user profiles connecting which tells us if the network is mainly used by locals or tourists.

Anything else you’d like to add?

It’s a great product that saves us a lot of engineering time. We’re passionate about what we do and it’s great to be able to use a small British company with a great product. It means we don’t have to rely on the big boys all the time. There are some great, high end wireless products out there, but they’re expensive to buy and run. We’re now looking at offering Wi-Fi services to other clients which we couldn’t do without our CT WiFi platform.

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