Happy New Year

To all our customers, suppliers and friends, wishing you happy and prosperous 2008!

Thank-you for your support

At RedButton we are looking forward to a year in which we bring even more value to our customers, not only in terms of the quality and convenience of our offering, but also in terms of an exciting new product line. Thank-you for your support in 2007 and we are looking forward to serving you in 2008.

New trends?

When it comes to Wi-Fi in 2008, we'll no doubt continue to see it becoming more ubiquitous. For example have you heard of the Toyota A-Bat? It's a hybrid concept vehicle that appears to sport an internal Wi-Fi access point, all you'd need is some backbone technology (e.g. 3G, WiMAX) to turn your A-Bat into your private local area network or mobile hotspot. Lets see if 2008 will see such vehicles going into production.

Special mention

In particular we would like to extend our best wishes to all WAPA members with regards to the license conversion process at ICASA. WAPA is an a set of backbone (technically called wide area network) wireless Internet service providers who have for many years provided Internet services to end-users and service providers such as ourselves. In a nutshell, 2008 should be the year in which most WAPA members will know whether they will be licensed to provide backbone Internet connections.

To delve into further detail, WAPA members, who all have VANS licenses, have been informed that their licenses are to be converted to a type of license (ECS) that is not sufficient for providing backbone Internet connections, an ECNS license will be required. ICASA, the communications authority of South Africa, recently announced that it

has decided that VANs will in the first instance be converted to ECS and that a competitive process will be followed in respect of granting VANS the right to acquire ECNS as per the Ministerial Directive. An Invitation To Apply (ITA) to this effect will be issued in January 2008. Consequently a separate matrix for VANS (ECNS applications) will be published once interested parties have responded to the ITA and submissions have been evaluated. The Authority will hold public hearings in March 2008 in order to fast track this process

View From The Top - Marking 2 Years of Service at The Tudor Hotel

The Tudor Hotel, primely situated in Cape Town's historic Greenmarket Square, is the oldest hotel in Cape Town and probably one of the oldest in South Africa. It is also RedButton's first client with the initial installation having taken place two years ago in December 2005.

The photo below is a great view of Greenmarket square, taken from the top of The Tudor Hotel. Credit for the photo goes to Neal Tosefsky, outbound logistics manager at RedButton.



As an aside, with the hotel having been built in 1870, that means we've had it covered for 2 years of its 137 year life span. Since we're on history and since 2 out of 137 doesn't sound that great let's try to put the 2 year span in context.

The Internet became commercially available in South Africa in the mid 90s with the Internet Service Providers' Association being formed in 1996. Although WiFi was born in 1991, broadband only truly became available in South Africa in early 2003 with Telkom releasing ADSL. So effectively we've had the Tudor Hotel covered for 2 out of 5 years possible years, a statement that tells a different story.

To this day the Tudor continues to enjoy the high service levels, competent customer support and ongoing system improvements that have established RedButton as the leading hotspot service provider in South Africa.

WiFi loses out to 3G/HSDPA? Not Quite.

In a recent article on the popular South African myadsl.co.za website, WiFi loses out to 3G/HSDPA, the author states that "Commercial WiFi hotspots face a dim future in South Africa unless prices are reduced to compete with 3G/HSDPA rates." In this post we comment on this article.

The article is based on research done by World Wide Worx and we believe this research has significant shortcomings. In addition, the article fails to point out the types of users commercial hotspots in hotels may be serving, that is tourists who may only be in a location for a limited time period. When it comes to corporate use of commercial hotspots, it is no doubt correct that South African corporates are increasingly using 3G / HSDPA rather than hotspots, with this use-case however, the cited research is comparing apples with pears.

To discuss the first point, there are now many hotspots available in South Africa that charge very reasonable rates, on a per Megabyte basis. As an example, at a recent hotel where we installed a hotspot we charge 60c per Megabyte on a 4Mbps ADSL connection, with a minimum purchase amount of R30 (i.e. 50MB), no contract, subscriptions, installation or activation fees are required - it's conveniently prepaid and a very good deal. Since billing is on a per Megabyte basis users can surf at their leisure. Also, there is no need to go out and buy an expensive (in the region of R2000 last time we checked) 3G / HSDPA modem or sign a 24 month contract.

About the article failing to point out the types of users hotspots may be targeting, this is an important point. If you are in the country for a limited time period, that is days to months, it is simply much more convenient to use a hotspot. It might not be cheaper if time billing is used, and to give credit where credit is due, the article does correctly point out that a large portion of hotspots in South Africa charge exorbitant rates. RedButton hotspots certainly do not fall into this category. We wrote a case study on the costs of hotspots in South Africa a couple of months ago, naturally the article assumes the user is at a RedButton hotspot.

Our final comment is on the cited research comparing corporate usage of commercial WiFi hotspots with that of 3G / HSDPA. The comparison is irrelevant for the simple reason that each technology serves a different purpose, WiFi is designed for local area networks, 3G is a technology designed for wide area networks. Regardless of pricing it is only natural that South African corporates with sales reps will use 3G because they need to be connected in most conceivable locations, 3G largely fulfills this requirement. When it comes to providing well priced, quality Internet in a local area for temporary overseas visitors, our commercial hotspots do and will continue to beat 3G hands down.

Bend Wireless Internet Any Way You Want It

At RedButton we believe in flexibility and have worked hard to make sure that our solution is just that, flexible. We also believe in making life easier and so have automated features that should be automated.

Our commitment to both aspects, flexibility and automation, is where our Bend Wireless Internet Any Way You Want It mantra stems from. Our ability to deliver on what we believe in comes from over a years worth of investment into research and development. This investment continues unabated today with 40% of our company's resources dedicated to R&D and fostering innovation.

So what's new? Well, in this post we'll be giving examples of how RedButton's flexible hotspot solution gives you the ability to attract and keep customers. We have made it particularly easy to:

• Run automated promotions – give away any amount of free Internet effortlessly
  


• Build your brand – prominent branding on hotspot portal page and vouchers
  

Since a picture tells a thousand words, lets go straight to the examples. The first is that of an automated promotion with a standard hotspot portal page. The hotspot with the portal page displayed below has been configured to give each user 5 Megabytes worth of Internet free on a daily basis.


With our solution a hotspot can be configured to give away any amount of free Internet on a once-off, daily, weekly or monthly basis. Naturally one can configure the hotspot to give each user unlimited free Internet too. The great thing about giving away only small amount as a promotion is that service levels remain high. With a 5MB promotion for example, a user can have a coffee, check their email and then move on. If they need to use more than their alloted free amount they can purchase prepaid credits using the online credit card or a voucher facility.

The second example is that of a branded hotspot portal page. It differs from the standard RedButton portal page in that it is entirely designed to build the brand of the establishment. The colour scheme, title, logo, end-user charge and set of pictures are all configurable. In addition to the portal page, vouchers can be branded with venue and reseller branding too.


Finally, if you are wondering who the You is in Bend Wireless Internet Any Way You Want It, it's our customers and affiliates. If you are interested in becoming either, don't hesitate to contact us.

RedButton's cutting edge hotspot firmware - making operations a cinch

Hotspot firmware - the software running on wireless routers driving your hotspot - means different things to different people. There are generally three stakeholders: first and foremost there are the end-users who expect and pay for a convenient, reliable service and don't care about what's under the hood. Then there are those who operate the establishment and finally the IT company providing the hotspot service. It is the latter's responsibility to make sure that the expectations of end-users and establishment are met, and that is where RedButton's hotspot firmware comes in.

The decision to develop custom firmware in-house was taken more than half a year ago and our primary motivation to do so was to enhance the reliability of our service. We found that the firmware we have been using until recently, called DD-WRT, was not as reliable as we wanted it to be. DD-WRT v23 (SP1-SP3) suffer from the following serious stability bugs:

• the embedded captive portal software (chillispot) would randomly crash several times a day, especially at high usage. While DD­-WRT would automatically restart it within 60 seconds this means that anybody who was logged in at the time is thrown off and would have to log in again
  


• the kernel (operating system) would randomly crash due to a bug in the driver for the wireless chip causing a reboot of the router a few times a day. Again the frequency of this occuring increases with hotspots usage and results in the same reconnection problems as above, though this time a reinstatement of the service can take 5-10 minutes
  


• at low usage locations where none of the above two bugs manifest themselves a memory leak would cause the firmware to run out of memory after a few weeks of uptime causing the captive portal to stop running. Nothing short of a manual power cycle or reboot was required to get the system back to working order

v24 of DD-WRT is hardly any better; while its new wireless driver takes care of at least the second point above it is generally bloated and consumes too much RAM for the captive portal software to run reliably.

Irrespective of that, all versions of DD-WRT (as well as all other firmware out there relying on nvram to store their configuration) deployed on the Linksys WRT54GL suffer from yet another serious bug, this time in the device's bootloader. During power cycles or spikes the firmware resets itself to factory defaults, rendering the router useless until it is manually reconfigured from scratch.

The Firmware that we have specifically adapted and developed for RedButton hotspots has been built with stability in mind and has solved all of the four problems mentioned above. At one of our largest and oldest hotspots we have thus been able to achieve 58 days of uptime since initial upgrade and counting.

In addition to that we have added the following enhancements:

• User friendly - The web interface of our firmware makes configuration, installation and maintenance of hotspots a breeze:
  
  
  
  • After having flashed our firmware to your WRT54GL configuration is a 3 step process: Set a password, configure your Internet connection and set up your hotspot with minimal effort
    
  
  
  • Advanced tasks such as the setup of additional repeater nodes, multiple SSID's, client mode etc. are possible with just a few clicks
    
  
  
• Ease of administration - unique and proprietary monitoring and management systems ensure that all routers on the RedButton hotspot network are
  
  
  
  • constantly accessible remotely 24/7 by RedButton technical staff and soon resellers too without requiring complex dynamic dns or other setups. Thus network troubleshooting and customer support is greatly simplified
    
  
  
  • remote system logging which provides a full history of each and every potentially troublesome activity or hardware failure at all hotspots
    
  
  
  • 24/7 monitoring of all network equipment resulting in an early warning system for outages which often kick in before customers call to complain about and report the problem
    


• Complete flexibility - thanks to uninterrupted remote access tasks such as firmware or security upgrades, configuration changes and system tuning for all customer premises equipment may be carried out quickly in an automated fashion without requiring very costly and time intensive site visits to each and every hotspot location
  


• Semi-automated conversions - converting your existing dd-wrt (v23) Linksys WRT54GL to the RedButton firmware is automated as long as remote ssh access is provided to the device

All of the benefits listed above ensures that the customer not only has constant access to the Internet but also that potential problems can be detected, diagnosed and resolved speedily. To our knowledge no competitor in the hotspot market has a hardware platform with such a low cost/(reliability,flexibility) ratio and nobody in the hotspot business employing the WRT54GL platform has such tight control over each and every wireless router on their network.

Finally, here is a screen-shot of our firmware, version 0.9.10:

RedButton Starter Kit Unveiled

RedButton has recently begun making our hotspot solution available to selected affiliates via the RedButton Starter Kit - couriered to their doorstep and pre-configured for a rapid plug and play deployment.

Appart from the benefits of the kit contents, these affiliates benefit from RedButton's automated revenue share payouts that fire on the first business day after the end of a billing month. Automated is in bold since as far we know this is a first in the hotspot industry and we are proud of it. Similarly we are also proud of firing off revenue payments for a billing month on the first day of the next month.

So why is automation important? Well we believe it contributes to superior customer service. The more operationally efficient we are the more time we have to spend attending to the needs of our affiliates, end-users and other customers. It's all about service.

So lets go through the contents of the kit. Firstly to mention that the most important aspects are what you don't see, it's in the associated services we provide. We have been operating our own network of hotspots for what is fast approaching two years and this kit and our associated services represents the wealth of experience we have gained. The kit contains:

• A Linksys WRT54GL router flashed with RedButton's cutting edge firmware - firmware is the software that runs on the router and RedButton's firmware has been designed for stability and to set up a RedButton hotspot in a few clicks


• Two 9dBi antennas - optional but in the long run these are a sound investment, the stock antennas on the WRT54GL are not always sufficient


• A batch of seventy flyers and two Wi-Fi Zone stickers - essential marketing material

Finally, here is some feedback we got after we recently couriered a kit to Johannesburg:

Thank you for your help and assistance with the HotSpot.

I’m always very skeptical when implementing new stuff unless I’ve seen it working, but I have to admit, your product is really a breeze to setup and use.

I’m very relieved to see it works so well and are looking forward in setting up as many as possible.

Live From Futurex

This is the RedButton stand at 11:00am 27 September 2007 with Nico de Wet exhibiting. Futurex will be running here at the CTICC untill tomorrow, come join us and enjoy the free Internet on offer.

Corporate social responsibility not only for big cheeses

In cheese terms RedButton is not the biggest around. There are plenty of local ICT companies who could out-cheese us by showing you their monthly spend on paper cups for the water fountain. At the recent Cape IT Initiative (CITI) AGM we were glad to hear that with our recent and upcoming efforts we are increasingly doing what is reserved for le grande fromage. We are giving back not only to shamelessly promote it on our blog, but also because we feel its an obligation to give back to our roots.

Our roots are at the University of Cape Town and collectively we have spent over two decades at the institution, most of that time was spent in the Computer Science department. Those were good times, but they also cost the tax payer a lot of money, as does all tertiary education as the government sponsors a significant portion of the cost. The mentioned cost is not our only reason for a desire to give back, its because its good for the local ICT industry and hence good for everybody. We believe the interaction between academia and industry is shockingly limited in the ICT field and bucking this trend should be a priority for SMEs as well as the larger corporates.

Life is naturally not easy for SMEs and as a startup mere survival is on the top of the agenda. There is little or no time for activities outside of core business. This was evidenced in the Frost & Sullivan presentation at the recent CITI AGM where their research has shown that the larger the company size, the greater the degree of interaction between academia and industry. One might think that is obvious, but it is not necessarily the case, for example there are plenty of universities that incubate high-tech startups. So what have we done? Nothing that will make headlines anywhere else but this blog. We have simply given a colloquium and promoted the virtues of post graduate studies. If those talks contribute to just one student starting or being involved in local companies like Thawte or Mosaic Software (now Postilion) its mission accomplished as far as we are concerned.

WiFi on the Samsung SGH-i600 Smartphone - First Impressions

Having recently looked into WiFi on smartphones, and having noticed that entry level business contracts now include phones such as the Samsung SGH-i600, we just had to get our hands on one of these and try it out using a RedButton hotspot. Overall its been a fantastic experience. Naturally its not as easy to surf the web on such a small screen as it is on larger device, but it still is quite a thrill and in our line of business very usefull. The picture below, hastily taken while writing this post, shows the i600 sporting a RedButton hotspot portal page.



The i600 ships with Internet Explorer Mobile Edition, which has its merits but at RedButton we have a bias towards Firefox, sadly there is no Firefox Mobile (an outdated project, called Minomo, does exist though) but Opera has released Opera Mobile. To our knowledge IE Mobile does not support javascript, so we loaded Opera Mobile 8.65 Beta for Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone, wow thats quite a mouthfull. The combination of Opera and IE has proved to be usefull, we would log in to the RedButton hotspot using Opera, then browse using both browsers. Overall Opera is more advanced but it does have the drawback of having a licensing fee, whereas IE ships with the device.

Although the phone is great to have, its noteworthy that it is worth more than an entry level laptop, thats quite a bit of value to be carrying in one's pocket, not to mention occasionally dropping! After two days of use we'd have to conclude that this device ranks high up in terms of its ease of use. When it comes to logging into hotspots with the device, a web based hotspot login may be cumbersome. There are certainly other options to a web based login, and as devices such as the i600 become more common expect to see RedButton come up with a solution.

WiFi phones ready for prime time

Although old news to tech savvy early adopters, the consumers with the latest gadgets, it is becoming increasingly clear that WiFi phones have not only arrived but, thanks to bold moves by manufacturers, are ready for prime time. So what exactly is prime time and moreover, why should you care?



In a nutshell, prime time is when the true power of a connectivity technology is not only made available but readily usable. A connectivity technology is usable when there are no restrictions placed on its use to protect the interests of phone service providers (e.g. Vodacom, MTN, Cell-C). The traditional main interest of phone service providers is naturally voice revenue, and since one can make phone calls via private WiFi networks, this revenue stream is no longer as protected as it used to be. Phone service providers might have tried to use their influence on phone manufacturers to restrict the use of WiFi to data applications only. This has not happened. The fact that you have the power to use your mobile phone to make calls on a WiFi network, such as the one you might find in your home, corporation or hotspot, is why you should care. You have the freedom to do whatever you want to do with your device. Thats right, freedom, think Braveheart. If that was too technical an explanation, just remember this, you can make much cheaper phone calls from your cell phone.

While WiFi phones are ready for prime time, current models are "tailored for business", i.e. expensive. WiFi is generally being offered on smartphones, these are phones that come with their own operating system such as Windows or Symbian, essentially micro-PCs. With WiFi phones being expensive they are out of reach for the average consumer, however once the target market moves from the business user to the main stream consumer one may see call prices dropping significantly as phone service providers respond to their revenue stream being increasingly threatened.

Bring in the professionals

Anybody that is responsible for a patch of grass, from the tiniest of patches, to the sprawling greens of a hotel, will know that they have two options: do-it-yourself (buy a lawn-mower and start greasing those elbows) OR get a gardening service to do it for you. Each approach has its benefits and the choice taken ultimately depends on what you want to spend your time on, your core business or sweating it out in the little spare time you have. This analogy applies to hotspots, you can get a professional service provider to do it for you or you can do it yourself. In this post we investigate both options.

The first option, getting a professional service provider in to take care of your hotspot service provisioning, has obvious benefits. To start off with, if you thought getting out the manual to programme your VCR or television was painfull, getting to grips with the innards of Internet is no easier. The service provider should know all the gory details and moreover know how to keep the service operational reliably. This reliability comes from knowing which bandwidth technologies (e.g. ADSL, iBurst, 3G) and bandwidth suppliers to use in which areas. It also comes from having adequate network monitoring technologies in place so that they know when things go wrong before you do. Naturally professional expertise does not normally come free of charge, however in the long run you are likely to save money if you select the appropriate professionals. Finding the right company may require some effort, but it is likely to be less than time spent becoming the proverbial techie.

The second option, the do-it-yourself option, is one which you could consider and with enough time probably will accomplish. It would be difficult to match the breadth of expertise of the professional, but you could get your hotspot up and running. The problem comes in when things go wrong, and they will. These problems can be as simple as someone pulling the plug on the hotspot equipment while you are on holiday (and unable to do anything about it) or as complex as faults in the hotspot software itself. Another problem would come in when you start calculating how much it costs you to run the hotspot and how much you are actually getting out of it (we'll address this topic in a future post).

Ultimately we believe that the do-it-yourself option is not the best route unless you have the time and patience to spent a significant amount of time on it. The same goes for mowing the lawn, you may be better off getting the professionals in. Knowing that mowing the lawn is technologically a simpler exercise and not a 24/7 operation, as a hotspot is, should be further reason to bring in the professionals.

A case-study into the cost of hotspots in South Africa

In this post we shine light on hotspot pricing, that is, we consider whether hotspots are expensive in South Africa and in particular whether one would be better off getting one's own broadband connection. In order for this post to have any value, we have to supply some definitions and make some assumptions. These include defining what a hotspot is and making assumptions about the average hotspot user and the typical hotspot location.

Before we go any further we'll qualify the use of the word expensive. By this we mean pricing relative to other options within South Africa. It is well known that bandwidth is orders of magnitude more expensive in South Africa than in the majority of the rest of the world. In a nutshell broadband is expensive in South Africa relative to the rest of the world due to the effects of a telecommunications monopoly by Telkom. This monopoly has been dismantled on paper but is for all intents and purposes still in effect.

The first assertion we'll make is that hotspots are locations where people are given the option of sharing a broadband Internet connection using WiFi. In order to use the hotspot users are expected to authenticate themselves in some way and are granted Internet access for free or in return for some form of payment. We assume that the typical hotspot user is someone who is in a given location (or residence) on a temporary basis with the period of stay ranging from minutes to months. We also assume that the average hotspot user values convenience. Lastly we'll assume that a hotspot location is one which accommodates users fitting the description listed above. Such locations include restaurants, airports, hotels and other forms of residences.

Since we have mentioned that users are in a location on a temporary basis, lets consider a user, called Jane, a tourist who will be in South Africa for 3 months. Broadband access is important to Jane and upon arrival she notices that she'll have access to a hotspot charging 40c per Megabyte for the duration of her stay. Jane has a laptop with a built-in WiFi card and so she has the option of using the hotspot. Jane's time is also important to her but at the same time she is a savvy consumer and so spends some time investigating alternative options. Since she will only be in South Africa for 3 months a 24 month contract is not an option for her. She notices that most broadband packages are priced based on the the amount of Megabytes purchased and also require the purchase of some form of modem. She determines that approximately 2000 Megabytes per month would suffice for her needs. Her research reveals the following options:

• an iBurst laptop modem at R 1820 and a pro novice month-2-month contract at
  R 529 per month. Total cost over 3 months: R 3407
  
• a Sentech MyWireless flexi1000 plus 31 day notice contract at R 449 per month and a Sentech modem at R 1500. Total cost over 3 months: R 2847
  
• a Vodacom 3G My GIG Two Prepaid at R 389 for 2GB and a compatible modem at R 2000. Total cost over 3 months: R 3167

With the above mentioned costs she determines that she would pay 45c, 46c and 53c per Megabyte respectively when factoring in the cost of the modem. The least expensive price is 12% more than the hotspot price which has the added convenience factor.

Given the above mentioned costs not to mention time and hassle involved in getting connected (and disconnected in the case of a contract), she opts to use the hotspot instead where she is not forced to spend R1500 or more just to get a compatible device. She spends R30 to instantly get connected to the hotspot with the WiFi adapter already built into the her laptop.

With this example we hope to have made a strong case for hotspots being less expensive than other offerings. Appart from pricing, the convenience factor is an intangible benefit that adds significant value and it is of varying importance to the man on the street but in general of high importance to the average hotspot user. For the sake of simplicity we have not compared hotspots and alternative offerings based on the quality of the underlying connecting in the given location, this is clearly an important factor and one which would be included in a more comprehensive price comparison.

RedButton starts blogging

After one year of operations, sans blog, RedButton has started blogging. We may be a small company operating in the turbulent waters of the South African Internet industry, but we like to think that we are big on knowledge when it comes to hotspots. This is where we'll be doing some sharing and also looking for feedback from you. Topics we'll be discussing include running hotspots on open source platforms, linux, software development, the South African Internet industry, hotspot hardware, WiFi and more. Some of our posts would even be useful to our competitors, thats okay, we like to think we'll stay ahead.