As part of its plan to expand and strengthen its managed services offerings, communications solutions provider MetTel has teamed up with ADTRAN. The company has added the ADTRAN Bluesocket virtual WLAN (vWLAN) offering to its roster as the core of its managed Wi-Fi service.
The addition will help MetTel expand its service offerings by using the platform’s access points and the service provider will also gain greater control over quality of service. The announcement builds on the companies’ existing 11-year relationship, encompassing a variety of communications and networking products and services. A benefit of using ADTRAN’s offering is that MetTel can package Wi-Fi services with other managed offerings related to mobility, data and telecom.
"As a leading provider of customized, integrated and managed communications solutions for enterprise customers, MetTel is keenly aware of the role Wi-Fi will play as a technology enabler to higher level applications as well as a business enabler via real-time user information in retail environments,” said Ed Fox, vice president of network services at MetTel.
Fox added that many of the company’s customers have multiple locations, but lack the resources to conduct network maintenance and monitoring on a regular basis. The company has experienced a demand for managed Wi-Fi services across a variety of industries with branch offices/multiple locations, including the retail and healthcare sectors. The increased demand is directly related to the trend of business transactions and customer interactions becoming more mobile.
“By helping them rapidly deploy multiple customers across their entire footprint, our [service provider] partners are monetizing Wi-Fi and leveraging new revenue streams from their vWLAN infrastructure," said Todd Lattanzi, director of product management for ADTRAN's Enterprise Networks Division. "With a centralized, highly available platform providing the foundation for managed Wi-Fi, service providers can also deliver additional, unique over-the-top Wi-Fi services like user and network analytics that enable businesses to more richly understand their customers."
Features of the Bluesocket vWLAN solution include the scalability and flexibility to make customer-specific changes on the fly. The product is plug-and-play and provides cloud-based, virtualized and centralized management of wireless LANs. Because it is controller-less, the offering is managed either in the data center through a hypervisor or via the cloud. Intelligent access points enforce policies at the edge of the network, preventing bottlenecks and scalability issues that may arise with hardware-based offerings.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
