I have a few questions about the Wireless Captive Portal feature in Sophos ASG and it's ability to handle dense usage environments.
What options are their to control bandwidth usage?
Can you have multiple SSIDs with different allocations?
In their a payment portal to charge users for additional usage past a quota and/or provide them an option to upgrade their bandwidth?
I have worked in the hospitality industry quite a bit and in a myriad of different settings. The biggest challenge that I have encountered is fair bandwidth distribution. From what I have seen and read, it appears that Sophos ASG is well equipped to handle that problem. The introduction of the Wireless Captive Portal brings the potential for additional ways of handling this problem. I'm a firm believer that wireless access should be free when possible. Monetizing a hotspot is often done for reasons other than profit. Sometimes in the the hospitality industry your location my be rural and remote and are forced to cope with a satellite or "radio link" connection. Charging for service may be the best way to cope with lake of bandwidth in those situations.
Is the Sophos product well equipped to handle highly dense usage areas. Such as meeting rooms, common spaces and hotel rooms?
There is a huge problem that has begun and will only get worse each year. People carry more and more devices when they travel. A family of 6 could have 3 laptops, 5 smart phones, an ipad and a kindle. Last summer I encountered a situation at a conference center where they were complaining about devices not connecting to their access points. Within 5 minutes it became clear that they had a router only capable of handing out 253 ip addresses. In addition the living suites each which could hold a family of 6 often had one access point for 20 rooms. Assuming 3 device on average per room, each access point had a load of 60 clients. All device will not be used simultaneously, but a guest will intermittently use many devices throughout a stay.
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