Chillifire Hotspot News

Free-Access hotspots have finally arrived at Chillifire. This now delivers a much requested functionality to our service subscribers. In particular in the US hotspot access is expected as a free service in hotels, and other locations. So why have hotspots at all then if access is free for the end user? Because there are still legal requirements to monitor and log network traffic and access. You also do not want to have the access monopolised by individual users, so you need to control bandwidth and data load. You may wish to block people using your connection, who are not actually patrons of your business. These are just some of the good reasons to still have a hotspot that can help you control all these aspects without having to hands-on manage it.

So how does this new Free-Access portal work? Hotspot users will be presented with the usual logon screen. If they have no valid login yet, they can register by pressing on a ‘Register’ button. The registration is configurable. It will always request the users email address, which has to be a valid email address – valid not just by format, but truly existing on a mail server. In addition you can request the entry against an existing physical address (checked against Google maps) and a codeword chosen by you (to be given to patrons of your business or your neighbours or anyone else you want to share your connection with to prevent passers-by using your connection randomly). Once the data is entered and validated the user receives a user, password and can log on.

You can see how these registration configuration options make this service equally as attractive for cafes with targeted patronage as well as communities who wish to provide general WIFI coverage. There are further scenarios enabled, for example the suppression of the registration ‘on-the-fly’ as described above. This is handy if you wish to hand out users individually (created manually in the console) to only agreed users, say in your private club or some of your neighbours.

But it gets even better: You can combine the two scenarios Free-Access and Pay-per-Use: You may choose to have one access plan with very tight access control restrictions (low data, low speed, short time) for everyone registering on the fly) that is just intended for folks to catch up with their email on the fly, but you sell longer access packages as vouchers. This way you can keep passing through guests in, say, your café facilities happy, while, say, your hotel guests go for the convenience of faster access and larger data caps at a price.

And yes, you can have Free-Access and Pay-per-Use hotspots in parallel with Chillifire. All you have to do is create a sub-account and assign free hotspots to the sub-account and pay-per-use to the main account (or vice versa).

There is a standard set-up in the system which limits each hotspot user to 100MB data usage, 2MB download and 512kB upload speed, all to be used within one week. Of course you can change that to anything you like for your hotspots through our flexible access plans. Just create a plan that is marked as ‘free’ as opposed to ‘fee’ and you have your own access control. If you need help with the configuration, just contact us through our support form.

We have structure the fees for this Free-Access hotspot service to suit different amounts of traffic per month. Fees are paid per subscription, in case of additional users are registered beyond your monthly allowance we will send you an additional invoice to cover those. You will find the plans are better priced than anything else you can find on the web.

There will be one FREE option which sized to provide more than enough new registrations per month for usual community uses such as hooking up your neighbours, your friends, your club, your church members, etc. This free community service is for non-commercial use only and will replace our previous free offering for non-commercial use.

Here a note for our partners: Yes, you can also resell this solution to your clients. To do so your account must have Chillifire partner status. If you wish to gain that status, please contact us via the support form.

And finally, please do not hesitate to contact us for suggestions, feedback or inquiries for different scenarios. Thank you

Our new pricing plans give you all the options you can wish for. They even allow for periodic access plans, so you can start your own ISP business. Add to that a new and improved hotspot login screen, the ability to control the speed and bandwidth per plan, and to redirect users to a specific page after they logged in. Here are the different types of plans:
 
Elapsed time packages
Users buy a straight ‘lump of time’. They either use it or loose it.
Example: Access for 20 minutes to the internet
 
Usage based packages
Users buy a certain data allowance or an amount of online time, which they can use as they see fit until their account expires.
Example 1: 60 minutes of actual online time (time connected to the internet), to be used within 24 hours
Example 2: 100MB of data to be used within one week
 
Period based packages
Users buy a certain data allowance or an amount of online time, which they can use within a certain time period (day, week or month). The agreed data allowance or online time resets at start of the next period. If the data allowance or online time is exhausted within the current period, access either seizes altogether or can be throttled to a lower than usual speed. These plans can be open ended, or optionally have an expiration period
Example 1: 1 GB data per month, speed throttled to 256kbps/64kbps downstream/upstream, once the 1GB has been exhausted within the current period. Normal speed resumes next month
Example 2: 1 hour online time per day. No further access once 1 hour has been used until the start of the next day. Access expires after 14 days.
 
For all the above plans you can specify a maximum download and upload speed (independent from the throttled download and upload speed mentioned above). You can also define a redirection URL the user will land on after successful login. You can add a tag line to give a brief marketing spin for the package, and you can define a sort order, to define the order in which the plans are presented (order is ascending on price, unless you override the sort order). Last but not least you can specify whether or not the price package is available only for online purchase, only as a voucher, or is available through both channels.
 
Of course you can give the package a price in the Chillifire account currency that you choose – as you are used to it from our old plans. In addition you can now indicate for periodic plans (see above), whether the price indicated is a one-off price, or a price per month, per week or per day.
 
Testing it all
An now the kicker: Even if you are not connected to your hotspot and make changes to your plan remotely, you can now test how the entire Hotspot pages will look like for the end-user, plans, logos, tag lines, Terms and Conditions – everything. You can even step through the payment process – PayPal and 2Checkout.com, whichever you have activated – and test the entire payment routine through to the creation of the user and password. Of course you cannot use them, as you are not connected, but then again you can easily refund yourself. This will give you peace of mind that the changes to your plan and to you site will look exactly as you have intended.
 
How good is all that? This gives you ultimate flexibility in designing your plans for your market, from the simple to the more complex, depending whether you are running just one hotspot, or whether you are running your own hotspot business.