Aussie hotspot provider awards contract to underpin expansion plans

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 15 March 2009 18:05

IT Industry - Deals

Australian hotspot provider WiFiZone has chosen eintellego to rollout new firmware and architecture for its Internet hotspot platform.

WiFiZone, which claims to have more than 500 hotels, motels and caravan parks across Australia and Fiji currently using its internet hotspot system, says eintellego was brought in to completely re'architecture the network and onsite devices and build new backend systems.   The systems are for monitoring, upgrades, reporting as well as a new voucher system.
 
WiFiZone director Darren Nolan, said the company had new sites increasing at a rate of 20% per month and the product was designed so that a hotel and WiFiZone shared in the revenue, with between 20% and 50% going to the hotel depending on what installation options was chosen.

Skeeve Stevens, Chief Executive Officer, and Technical Director, eintellego, said the rollout of the new firmware and features to all current sites was almost completed and the company was now working on providing new ‘cutting edge dynamic features’ that would support WiFiZone’s international expansion plans.

“The biggest challenge we’d had so far is how regional some of these locations are. There is Alice Springs, and Plantation Island in Fiji, which are not locations you want something to go wrong in. So we’ve designed the WiFiZone platform to be as fault tolerant and self'recoverable as possible,” added Stevens added.

WiFiZone’s Darren Nolan said it was planned to expand to New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and most of South East Asia over the next 12 months with the aim of achieving 900 locations by the end of 2009.
 
“Working with eintellego, a company who understands large scale infrastructure like what we’re building has been very positive. They’ve anticipated many issues and built redundancy that we’ve never been able to achieve before. The features that we will be rolling out in the next six months will make our Hotspot system the most attractive in the marketplace.”