What's Enterprise Grade Wi-Fi

If you answer yes to any of the following questions then you need enterprise grade Wi-Fi.

• Do you have children or younger family members who suffer from withdrawal symptoms if they cannot get online?
• Despite your need for a relaxing break, is it vital that you can still communicate during your holiday due to running your own business or the requirements of your type of work?
• Do you like to share photos and video with family and friends during your holiday, but usually resort to sharing once you get home due to connectivity problems or insufficient bandwidth?
• Do you like to plan daily activities or make changes to your itinerary during your holiday but often find that a lack of connectivity lets you down?
• Are you concerned about the security of the Wi-Fi networks available in hospitality venues where children are accessing these un-trusted networks?

The difference Enterprise Wi-Fi makes

Speed

Whilst the consumer adverts talk about speed, professionals talk about latency, bandwidth and contention.

Latency is a measure of how quickly you get a response to your request. A perfect illustration is watching the news reporter answer questions from the newsroom over a satellite link. The delay for the reporter to respond is often a couple of seconds. Clearly, the lower the latency the better - we typically get 5 milliseconds (5, one thousandths of a second). In terms of video conferencing, there is no noticeable delay.

Bandwidth is a measure of how much data can be transferred in specific amount of time. This is complicated by the fact that the services that we connect to (websites, social media etc) do not have unlimited bandwidth, in reality it is often very limited. So really, bandwidth is a measure of how many people can use the internet at the same time without being adversely affected by their fellow users. A good analogy is the consumption of milkshakes - the milkshake being the service to be consumed. Of course, milkshakes can only be consumed through a straw (the network). Whilst you cannot drink faster than the straw will allow, you can use more than one straw at the same time. So bandwidth is like the number of straws you have available for consumption at the same time. As a comparison, the average guest network will provide 10 straws which may limit usage if you have a few devices. Do you think 10,000 straws would be sufficient?

Contention is a ratio indicating how your allocated bandwidth is shared. Domestic, and the vast majority of business broadband services are shared connections. At peak times your perceived speed may take a nose-dive. We have a leased internet connection which is not shared with anyone so you will never notice any degradation in performance at peak times.

Symmetry is important

Broadband is generally asymmetric, that is to say the available bandwidth available in download (internet to you) is many times greater than upload (you to the internet). This may be OK for streaming movies, but for communications which of course are bidirectional, upload is often the limiting factor in perceived speed.

Our enterprise connections are symmetric - the same bandwidth is available download as upload. You will really notice this if you share on social media or use cloud services.

A professional service can only be delivered by Enterprise hardware

At StayGB we are Cisco through and through. All our network hardware is manufactured by Cisco and if applicable, is under current Cisco service contract. This ensures our equipment is regularly patched and is capable of providing the best possible protection for all connected devices. We regularly audit and test our IT systems to ensure they meet the requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Your data needs to be locked down

All connections to our Members or Guest networks are isolated. This means that no wireless device can make a connection with another wireless device on the same SSID or indeed any of our other SSIDs.

Protecting users from inappropriate content

All wireless networks feature industry standard content filtering configured to block adult related content and other topics inappropriate for a family audience. Whilst we are all aware that no content filtering system will block 100 percent of inappropriate content and there is no substitute for adult supervision when young persons have internet access, it does go a long way.

Author: Ollie Brown