Chillifire Hotspot News

Happy 2012 to Everyone! Thank you for your ongoing support, feedback and interest in our service in 2011. We look forward to work with you in 2012 and beyond.

Today we are releasing an exciting new development, which brings our hotspot management again one step closer to a fully fledged Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) management system. We have released two new access plan types as they are typical in a WISP scenario:

1. Payment on invoice
   In this scenario the customer receives a certain data allowance per month, and is charged top-up fees, when access amounts of data are consumed. The system records the amount of data consumed within a certain month and calculates any overage and the resulting extra fees. Fees are invoiced after month end, taking into account any discounts granted and any unpaid amounts carried over from the previous month.
2. Prepaid billing of fixed amount with fixed data cap
   In this scenario the user creates a subscription online through our normal login screen; the subscription is for a certain amount and grants a defined of data the customer is allowed to consume per month. Once the data is consumed, the system will throttle the user to a lower download and upload speed. Both the original speed and the throttled speed can be defined by the hotspot owner. This usage scenario is popular in severely bandwidth constraint scenarios, which requires the enforcement of fair use policies.

To activate the WISP type pay acces and functions you need to go into the control panel under Configuration->Main Hotspot Options and activate the WISP functions specifically. That will enable you to create Paid Access controls called ‘Monthly repetitive plan, payment on invoice’ for scenario 1 and called ‘Monthly repetitive plan, pre-pay fixed amount’ for scenario 2. There is also a new ‘Activity’ menu item called ‘On Invoice Users’, where you can see their monthly usage, how much they owe per month including additional usage, record and see payments made by the customer and record discounts you may grant.
Note that particularly the ‘Billing on invoice’ is not a scenario where users are created online by the users themselves. They are typically created by the WISP provider on request as part of a back office function. We have therefore integrated a manual user creation web page into our control panel now as well. The manual user creation transaction can be used for all access plan types, not just the two new ones described above. This new manual user web page in the control panel addresses a login standing functionality request that was outstanding.

The WISP functions are currently accessible to all Chillifire account holders. We are seeking feedback and function requests, so we can make sure we develop according to your needs as opposed to our perception. The feature is targeted to become an exclusive partner feature at a later date, but we will leverage partner fees to such Chillifire account holders later, who start using the new feature today. In essence we want to reward early adopters and their feedback .

Stay tuned, there are a lot more functions to follow in the next few months, as we extend the capability of our system even further

We are responding to a common request we receive often to remove the current limitation of our free community service, which does not allow more than 10 users per month. As of midnight 20 September this limitation will be lifted.

The new free community service called Free-Access Splash will allow for an unlimited number of users and provide for an easy to use and simple to set up splash screen control with which you can share your broadband connection with your clients, friends or neighbours.

Free-Access Splash will allow you to:

-       choose your own colour scheme,

-       add your own logo and other content of your choice like images or text,

-       limit the speed of the connection to prevent abuse,

-       enforce the acceptance of your acceptable use policy and/or terms and conditions, and

-       redirect users to a website of your choice after logging, like your main business website or any other website of your choice marketing your products and services.

The user can register to use a Free-Access Splash hotspot online, not requiring manual intervention by you or your staff to hand out vouchers or access codes. The access is valid for 24 hours after registration; after 24 hours the user has to register for access again and again confirm your terms and conditions.

Premium features such as limitation of time spent online or data up and download restrictions, access control via vouchers or text messages are not available with Free-Access Splash and require a current subscription for this service.

Important: Those of you who enjoyed our Free Community Service previously, and who wish to retain functions like data volume or online time control, should use the next few days to establish a Chillifire subscription for their account. Thos who are happy to use the free service as it is will enjoy the fact that now the number of users per month are unlimited.

Subscription based Free-Access Hotspots will have an easier mechanism within the control panel’s account configuration screens to actually establish a subscription for an account or sub-account. Many of you may have noticed the improvements in the control panel we have established over the last month; we continue to be dedicated to extend the functions offered in our control panel.

Revenue share based Pay-per-Use Hotspots will continue as they were, with the exception that linking your own PayPal account has become a premium service. This facility is now bundled into the simple re-branding option, available for USD20, which also allows you to replace our logo, hotspot name and favicon with your own. We have been forced to implement this step due to legal requirements; the simple and cheap purchase forces you to acknowledge and confirm our Terms and Conditions. Note: Existing accounts will not have to retrospectively purchase the premium option package, if they have no outstanding fees with us.

Over the last few weeks we have been busy reorganising our back end control panel into an easier to manage set of screens. Here are some of the changes:
-       The huge account control screen has been broken down into smaller, more manageable screens;
-       Each screen includes online documentation, providing explanation about what certain fields and values are for;
-       Lists are supported consistently by our new data grid, which is a lot faster than the previous solution, even if your hotspots handle a lot of users; and
-       New lists like voucher transactions only based sales views are finally available.

In addition we have changed both our control panel as well as our login pages to use the jQuery CSS framework. Advantages for you:
-       With the jQuery Themeroler (http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/) you can create your own colour scheme to support your own Branding, and Look and Feel of your hotspot completely independent from us;
-       The pages look cleaner and crisper and download less images. Without any added or custom logos the login page is now less than 100kB download data on first load; and less than 5KB on any subsequent loads – keeping it light is appreciated especially by your mobile users.

You can test drive the new control panel and login pages on login11.chillifire.net/admin. ‘login11′ is a pre-production-server, meaning you get to test the new system, but the database is the actual live data. Therefore you will get a ‘real life’ experience if you choose to test the new look&feel system, if you perform any test transaction you wish to revert, let us know and we can do that for you. Community testing on login11.chillifire.net is open to any CF account holder as of immediately, and will go through to the 20^th July. On that day we will deploy the system to our general production system, so everybody gets to benefit from the new development.

We are looking forward to your feedback

What else is new?

-       We are currently busy linking in the Worldpay credit card payment gateway to our system, we expect that to be available for public use in August.
-       We are also working on a revamp of our subscription management, to make this easier to set up and to allow flat rate per router subscription for free-access hotspots.
-       At the same time, once all feedback on the new control panel has been collected, we will port the sub-account portal to the new control panel format, to provide a consistent and fresh look and feel to all partners with sub-account portals
-       Last but not least, as OpenWrt keeps maturing, we are working on new versions for our firmware, so your choice of routers becomes wider and stays up to date with new and exciting models that are out there.

We have published a new firmware version, now based on OpenWrt 10.03.1rc4 – based on OpenWRT revision 26143

The new version features a number of improvements, such as improved wireless drivers for the various Atheros chip-sets, but also full featured performance graphing with remote graphing storage on our control panel.

In addition we can now offer repeater firmware for Atheros chip-set based routers, such as the popular Ubiquiti, Fonera, D-Link DIR300A and Engenius routers.

Last but not least support for various models has been firmed up and fully tested. This includes the new Ubiquiti M series, but also such great routers as the Mikrotik 450G and other Mikrotik 4xx routers.

We also provide initial support for some new routers from TP-Link like the MR3220 and the MR3420. We have also experimental support for Ralink chip-set based routers like the D-Link DIR615D and D-Link DIR300B. Please contact us if you wish to try OpenWrt and ChilliWRT on these routers. We will assist you in getting in running.

All in all an exciting extension of the firmware’s capability to many new and interesting router models. Enjoy.

On popular request we started to offer ‘Hotspot out of the Box’ which can be ordered from our website. These Hotspots are routers preinstalled with our firmware and pre-configured to your specifications. Once we have received and order, we contact the purchaser and confirm the exact specifications, like whether you want to charge for access, or provide free access, how long people can access the Internet, and how much they have to pay (if anything). The configuration options are endless and whatever you can do with a normal account in terms of configuration you can do with the ‘Hotspot out of the Box’.  We then configure the hotspot to those specifications and send the router to you per mail.

Note that the Hotspot out of the box is capable of advanced functions like performance graphing, peer-to-peer traffic blocking, or throttling, traffic shaping, detailed recording of hotspot user’s internet traffic, if that is a requirement in your jurisdiction, etc. There really are a lot of options.

As for revenue share and subscriptions the same prices and fees applys published on this website here and here.

There are a number of routers to choose from, the classic Linksys WRT54GL, but also more modern routers suitable for outdoor and indoor use, like the Ubiquiti Picostation. We also offer avery fast and modern N band router, the Picostation 2M HP. These Ubiquiti routers have proven themselves as very reliable, with great antenna sensitivity (important for today’s mobile devices like iPhones and Android based devices), at low power consumption, and quite an impressive coverage area. And yes, all routers are shipped with compatible power plugs.

Of course, if you have a specific requirement, do let us know and we will make you a special offer to support the router of your choice.

It has never been easier to install your own professional Hotspot. So order a ‘Hotspot out of the Box’ today.

We are proudly announcing the release of our new Chillifire firmware version, which gives access to a lot more functions and provides a lot more stability on a variety of new router models. As previously the firmware is based on OpenWRT, this time using release 10.03.1rc3 (r24009) and the trunk release r24010. So we retained our approach to distribute ChilliWRT as an optimised and preconfigured version of OpenWRT.

What new models do you support?

• Using the new OpenWrt versions as base for the new firmware we can now offer ChilliWRT on many new router models from
• D-Link: new DIR615 hw revision D, new DIR300 hw revision B, DIR600 and DIR825;
• Engenius: EOC 1650, EOC 2611P, EAP3660 and others;
• Linksys/Cisco: WRT150N, WRT160NL, WRT300, WRT350N, WRT400 and WRT610N;
• Mikrotik: 1xx, 4xx and 5xx series;
• TP-LINK: TL-WR741ND, TL-WR841N, TL-WR814ND, TL-WR901ND, TL-WR1043ND;
• Trendnet: TEW-632-BRP, TEW-652-BRP; and
• Ubiquity: Entire M-Series (Nano, Loco, Bullet, Pico, Rocket), and SL-SR71.

What new functions do you offer?

• Remote performance graphing as an option of CPU, Load, Processes, Memory and Wireless;
• Automatic determination on reboot of optimal Chillifire server to connect the router to;
• Improved tracking of hotspot users surfing behaviour on IP address level as required in some jurisdictions (EU Guideline enacted in France and Italy so far – aka. Pisano Law);
• Inclusion of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic filter to prevent hotspot abuse;
• Inclusion of Firewall manipulation scripts;
• Improved stability of WDS Repeater heartbeats, and enabling of heartbeats for n-level WDS repeaters (i.e. repeaters connected via other repeaters);
• Fixed heartbeats for routers without wireless network (no WLAN, LAN only);
• SMTP redirection to local ISP SMTP server to allow sending of emails from clients like MS Outlook without configuration change;
• Completed de-branding of firmware to the eye of the hotspot user, particular of interest to partners; and
• Upgraded Coova-Chilli hotspot daemon to latest version 1.2.5.

Will the system upgrade itself?

Since the underlying revision of OpenWRT is changing an automatic update from 10.02.8 – the latest release of the previous software version – is not possible.

Should I upgrade my router(s) to the new version?

If you are not located in Europe, you should definitely upgrade to the new version to make sure you get the best performance due to the fastest connection to the nearest server. We now have servers in the US, in the UK and Australasia.
If you have repeaters, we definitely recommend and upgrade, so do we if you live in a country that imposes traffic tracking requirements on providers of internet access. Equally if you want to use the performance graphing for routers in marginal locations, an upgrade makes sense. If you are a partner an upgrade makes sense to protect your own brand experience from intrusion by the Chillifire brand.
And yes, if you are on a firmware version other than 10.02.x, then it is definitely time for you to upgrade.

What is next?

We are working on a firmware version for the popular Linux router from Netgear WNR3500L and WNR3500U, as well as the Linksys/Cisco E2100L.
We also want to extend the de-branding of the firmware to a rebranding to partner brands, with logos and colours pulled from the main account.

As always we are interested in your feedback and comments. As always, if you want us to have a look at your router and help you address a question or a configuration challenge, please make sure you leave your router switched on and connected to the internet. Please address any questions to our logging system on http://support.chillifire.net.

Thank you for your interest and patronage.

The Chillifire hotspot management system has now been upgraded around the world. The new system has a more professional look and feel, provides a lot more configuration options, has been translated into 3 more languages, 10 now overall, and is significantly faster and responsive.

We will provide more details of the new system over time. We will also move our main website to match our new color scheme – the registration pages have already been transferred. There are of course tutorials and documentation to update – a lot of work for us we look forward to.

If you come to try our Chillifire hotspot management but cannot find the required documentation yet, please contact us for guidance through our support form.

We look forward to your feedback to our new system.