MetTel taps into the emerging managed Wi-Fi market

MetTel is serving up a new managed Wi-Fi service for its growing base of business customers that are increasingly adding mobile connectivity into their daily interactions with employees and customers.

For this service, the service provider has deployed Adtran's Bluesocket vWLAN solution. By using the Adtran device, MetTel said it will be able to extend other service offerings over the platforms access points to gain additional granular control of service quality.

While managed Wi-Fi services is still arguably a nascent trend, a recent IDC report revealed that more businesses are looking to offload additional functions including managing their Wi-Fi network to a third party like MetTel. According to the research group, the managed Wi-Fi market will reach $2.5 billion by 2018.

MetTel said that it has been seeing continual demand for a hosted and managed Wi-Fi service, particularly those businesses in the retail and health care verticals where it says "more and more daily business transactions and customer interactions are going mobile."

"Many of MetTel's customers have multiple locations and don't have the staff and/or time for continuous network maintenance and monitoring across disparate systems, particularly as their internal business units are pressing the IT departments for analytic applications that provide actionable business and customer insights," said Ed Fox, vice president of network services at MetTel, in a release. "Every installation is unique and Adtran's solution provides the flexibility and scalability needed to ensure we're able to modify and optimize on the fly to quickly meet each customer's needs."

With the Adtran Bluesocket vWLAN solution in place, MetTel can package the managed Wi-Fi offering with other data, mobility and telecom applications.

MetTel is hardly alone in its managed Wi-Fi desires. Traditional incumbent telcos such as Frontier and CLECs like Megapath offer similar services to their customers. 

For more:
- see the release

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