info@socialtelecoms.org.uk
Community Wi-Fi
It pays to get your communities online. With free or low cost internet, residents can access your self service portals and applications saving you and them money and time. It also helps to regenerate communities and improve sustainability by facilitating job searches, enabling benefit applications and promoting communications with friends and relatives.
Our secure WiFi with full separation of public and private networks extends the reach of your staff back to head office resources at no additional cost offering further value for money and leveraging channel shift savings to support corporate goals.
Our self-sustaining networks offer built in resiliency, routing data and signals around any problems on the network automatically thus ensuring high availability while sending notifications for any remedial action required.
Utilising cloud technology to remotely manage all aspects of the network, websites available for browsing can be allowed or blocked at a moments notice in accordance with corporate or community policies.
A Managed Digital Inclusion Solution
- Competitively priced Mesh based access points
- Intelligent Mesh routing algorithms in case of unit failure
- Bandwidth and MAC control features
- Additional private network available for organisation’s staff use
- Free hosted website admin system can be operated from anywhere
- You choose free or paid authenticated access
- PayPal integration and your own branded splash page
- Upgrade options for higher bandwidth
- Installation carried out by highly trained, friendly engineers
- Housing Estates
- Sheltered Schemes
- Tower Blocks
The use of cloud technology allows the public WiFi to be accessed on a Pay As You Go basis through a Paypal payment point, through pre generated vouchers, passwords or free of charge. In fact you can mix free and paid access for different websites, for example your own service portals, .gov, job centre plus and so on can be accessed free of charge whilst general internet access is on a chargeable access.
Comprehensive reporting allows full understanding of network performance and infrastructure, customer utilisation, identification of devices, data usage by category and so on.
By providing this channel shift service to their residents, one housing associations queue times reduced by 31% allowing them to devote more time dealing with more complicated inquiries such as Council Tax and Benefits.
Our Wi-Fi networks can be easily surveyed, priced and deployed additionally providing data infrastructure for other services such as CCTV and smart buildings. We are NIC/EIC approved, CHAS approved and hold quality standards 9001 and 14001. We are also framework holders with procurement for housing eliminating the need to tender.
How It Works
Survey
We can visit a site to carry out a survey - testing signal penetration through walls and gauging any impact on the placement and quantity of access points. This will lead to a no-obligation proposal from Social Telecoms for the installation of residents' Wi-Fi. We can deploy entire projects within 3 weeks.
Install
Reliable, high performance wireless Access Points, switches, and security appliances are deployed into your remote sheltered schemes or tower blocks. We have Premium and Value Wi-Fi hardware options; both provide self-provisioning, self optimising networks with coverage provided in every apartment and communal area.
Access
Implement your own payment terms - gift free of charge to residents, recoup your capital costs or charge to cover ongoing costs; it's up to you. Authentication to the system is provided through your own bespoke Splash Landing page, complete with terms & conditions of usage, company images, advertising, and pay buttons. We can even provide access to "Walled-Gardens" - websites you'd like residents to see and explore without restriction
Manage
Our cloud based network controller helps us build, manage and monitor your wireless networks from anywhere. We can set multiple SSIDs (for residents and staff), control bandwidth for individual users, charge for access, design custom splash pages, monitor network health, and much more. And because it's cloud based, a Network Status portal is provided to you to gauge popularity, usage and performance.