Tatara targets public Wi-Fi subscriber management

Tatara Systems, developer of a new Wi-Fi service delivery solution that debuts this week, is trying to help carriers make sense of an increasingly confusing and commoditized public hot spot landscape by showing them how to add distinct value and continue to manage hot spot users even after they log in to their corporate VPNs.

The highly nomadic nature of Wi-Fi end users--whom may conduct as much as 80% of their Wi-Fi transactions away from their home carriers’ hot spots--as well as wildly fluctuating access prices, and a nebulous array of Wi-Fi access point and security switch deployment options, have made it difficult for carriers to find a business case that makes sense, said Kevin Jackson, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Tatara Systems.

There also has been a dearth of OSS options for carriers wanting to improve on the shaky business case by offering end users value-added services and special offers. Some traditional options for Wi-Fi subscriber management, such as Radius servers or home location registers outfitted like service support nodes, authenticate users but offer no other support features, said Jackson. Elements such as service support nodes also require costly backhaul.

Tatara’s new hardware/software product suite, the Wi-Fi Service Delivery Platform, includes a subscriber gateway for centralized network deployment that encompasses the authentication functions of a Radius server, along with many other support features from billing and mediation databases, application servers, OSS reporting tools and other network elements. The SDP also includes a service manager client software piece which reports important quality-of-service information back to the subscriber gateway.

“The gateway maintains on ongoing connection and communication with the end user,” said Jackson. “The retail service provider can provide notification of location-specific services presence awareness, SLA auditing and other applications even if users log in to their enterprise VPNs,” said Jackson. These applications could include ‘local’ applications, such as a printing service offered by the owner of a specific hot spot, or ‘global’ applications like gaming and multimedia messaging provider by the retail service provider.

“The only reason a service provider will get into this business is to create incremental added value for its end users,” said Steve Nicolle, president and CEO of Tatara Systems.

The SDP product family also includes an optional partner gateway for managing billing and settlement between retail and wholesale Wi-Fi partners or aggregators.

The company currently has a lab trial with a Tier 1 network operator, and commercial availability is expected later this year.