The Best-Connected Experience: A Pareteum Wi-Fi SmartConnect Profile

Quick Hitters:

• Product Name: Wi-Fi SmartConnect
• Product Suite: Mobility
• Sectors: Enterprise, Loyalty, etc.
• In Numbers: We secure nearly 3.5 million hours of Wi-Fi usage a quarter.

The Pareteum Wi-Fi SmartConnect solution provides Wi-Fi wherever your customers or employees need it – on the ground or in the air.

How does the solution work?

The Pareteum Wi-Fi SmartConnect solution delivers access to the world’s largest Wi-Fi footprint. This means connectivity in over 60,000 hotels, nearly 5,000 aircraft, nearly 700 airports, and tens of millions of business and leisure venues all over the world.

The solution comes as one unified user experience via our SmartConnect client and mobile app. This supplies our customers’ employees – and sometimes even their customers, if they’re going with a loyalty play – with seamless access to Wi-Fi at high demand locations and venues in over 200 countries and territories.

And, of course, when we say ‘connectivity’ and ‘access,’ what we’re really saying is ‘opportunity.’ Because, those words are a bit euphemistic. That is, when we say them, our customers are hearing ‘productivity and mobility cost savings.’

How do clients interact with the service?

Pareteum Wi-Fi SmartConnect works for smartphones, tablets, and laptops. It enables users to automatically connect to nearby Wi-Fi hotspots without being required to jump through hoops, like access portals, walled gardens, payment screens, and log-in screens.

And, because we offer the service at fixed, per-user, per-month rates, there’s no need for users to take out their credit cards and make payments on the go.

It’s also worth noting that we provide an SDK version of the Wi-Fi SmartConnect solution that makes it possible for folks to provide connectivity within an existing app or service.

Which features are most popular with clients?

For the standard enterprise use case, the fact that Wi-Fi SmartConnect can cut a company’s mobility spend by as much as one third is quite popular. We’ve had companies save upwards of $15,000 a month on their mobility costs just by offloading to Wi-Fi.

And even that doesn’t really tell the whole story, since not only are these companies cutting costs, they’re also getting more productivity from their workforce.

Additionally, enterprises really appreciate our Last Mile VPN, since all it takes is one employee connecting to one rogue hotspot for a company’s entire IT infrastructure to be put at risk. Leveraging a VPN goes a long way in mitigating the possibility of a nightmarish security breach.

However, from an end user’s perspective, the most popular aspect of Wi-Fi SmartConnect is certainly the inflight piece.

Here’s the dirty secret of the mobile technology world: even though laptops, smartphones, and tablets are perfectly suited to mobile workers’ seat-back-tray-table offices, there’s not a whole lot they can do with them if they can’t connect to the internet.

And, unfortunately, inflight Wi-Fi is still a pretty young technology. It’s available on only 25% of all commercial flights, there’s no ubiquity from a technology standpoint, and airlines generally deploy a hodgepodge of providers to cover their fleets.

This means mobile workers are often left to decide whether they want to take out their credit card and buy an expensive single-flight session or make up for lost productivity time once they land. Neither is a particularly great option.

At Pareteum, we’ve partnered with Gogo, Panasonic, ViaSat, Deutsche Telekom, Inmarsat, and United Airlines to bridge some of the gaps inherent to the inflight Wi-Fi landscape. This means Wi-Fi SmartConnect will get users online in nearly 60% of all Wi-Fi enabled aircraft around the world. This is by far the most extensive offering on the market

What’s coming up?

The most critical aspect to the success of Wi-Fi SmartConnect is that the Pareteum network is accessible wherever our users are going. We certainly want to build the largest possible footprint. But quite simply, one million hotspots dispersed in the northernmost territories of Greenland probably won’t help our customers too much.

So, keeping this in mind, we are focused on expanding our footprint in the venues that are critical to our customers – like inflight, airports, hotels, convention centers, restaurants, etc.

Additionally, we’re working with several of our inflight Wi-Fi partners to help them improve the overall user experience for travelers. For our customers this will mean better Wi-Fi connectivity on more aircraft, across more airlines.