New Account Manager Features

A belated happy new year!

This is just a quick announcement, as an end user, in addition to being able to check your recent sessions using the Account Manager, you can now also check up on the status of a voucher and also see what privileges you have at various hotspots.

When you log into the Account Manager, you will see the links "Hotspot privileges" and "Voucher status" in the panel on the left hand side in the Reports section. This is shown in the image below, look in the bottom left hand corner:


The "Voucher status" functionality gives you the ability to check up on whether a voucher is valid, whether it has been used in any way and what type of voucher it is. We have two types of vouchers, Prepaid WiFi Vouchers with a Rand value, these are ordinarily sold by venues, and also Free WiFi Vouchers that give you an Internet allowance, or privilege, at a specific hotspot.

As hinted above, the "Hotspot privileges" functionality gives you a report on all the allowances you have across the RedButton network. These allowances can only be used at the specific hotspots indicated in the report.

As always, we'd appreciate your feedback, either here or by contacting us.

RedButton Free WiFi Revolution Continues

After a series of arduous night marches, we file this dispatch from our Cape Town HQ. Over the last few weeks, the advance of our Free WiFi network has continued unabated. Hard work has met its reward and our hearts stir with gratitude over every inch of ground liberated. This is however just the beginning, our noble cause is yet to reach its highest tide as the fighting spirits of our heroic comrades soar with each new client served.


By now you might be thinking that we're suffering from delusions of grandeur, its just WiFi we're talking about right? Well, we're quite passionate about what we do and in all seriousness we have been working hard on a number of projects over the last few weeks and are overjoyed at the results.

When it comes to our Free WiFi product, launched earlier in the year, we have been delighted to have a number of new restaurants join our network over the last few weeks, some of which have been in business for over a decade, no mean feat in the restaurant business!

One of the chains that have joined our network is the Saul's Group. Saul's is an icon in Cape Town, with the tasty, gigantic burgers available at Saul's Saloon & Grill in Sea Point stirring fond and often very recent memories for many Cape Townians. The Saul's group has variety in their chain of restaurants that is unbelievable, from Italian at Saul's Piccolo Mondo, to sushi at Saul's Sushi @ Vegas. Apart from enjoying the great food, you can also take your laptop along to any restaurant and enjoy 10MB free daily.


Besides new installation projects, we've also made significant updates to our system pertaining to Free WiFi as well as other enhancements. When it comes to the Account Manager, you can now view the Free WiFi allowances (or privileges) you have claimed at supporting RedButton hotspots. When you log in, click on 'Hotspot privileges' in the Reports section in the left hand panel. We'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have, so please let us know what your thoughts are.

The next dispatch will hopefully follow sooner rather than later, in the mean time, happy surfing!

Remote Network Monitoring @ RedButton

At RedButton remote network monitoring and on site management is a key part of the service we provide to our clients. We actively monitor every single managed router in our network and take action to resolve any technical issues.

What you might be interested in is how our technicians keep their eagle eyes on the network. Well we've got an internal interface for just that purpose, key information listed on it is the percentage of routers online and routers that are offline. When we see routers that are down we get on it like a company that gets paid by the Megabyte, pronto! The green icons below mean that all is well, the red icons with the doctors briefcase means help is needed.


As you can see we don't only monitor the central hotspot device but also all repeaters that have been set up behind it to increase the wireless signal coverage. What's more, as long as all these devices are online, we have dedicated remote access to the respective firmware web interfaces so that we can quickly and efficiently troubleshoot problems and undertake reconfigurations remotely. Without the need for complex port forwarding, dmz or any other hard to maintain workarounds.

Everything is automated and built-in - a technician (or even a customer in case of a self-install) plugs a preconfigured RedButton device into the network and it magically appears on our monitoring system once the orange light goes on, see previous post on our custom firmware. None of our competitors currently offer a similarly feature-rich, powerful and yet easy to maintain system.

The monitoring system as it stands is already quite advanced but we'll continue to add to it over time. Knowing whether a router is online or not, when we last saw it if online and so on is critical information yet its only the tip of the ice berg when it comes to ongoing high quality service. Watch this space!