Responding from the digest list, so hopefully this thread won't break, but I've added responses inline also:
On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 10:00 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Jerry Richardson <[email protected]> > Ralph, > Answers inline > > - Jerry > > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Ralph > Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 6:51 AM > To: 'WISPA General List' > Subject: Re: [WISPA] SilverLining > > That is interesting, but I'm really having trouble figuring out the business > model of this particular captive portal implementation. > > >From what I see, it is centered on Batman/Robin based radios > Don't look at the website. that is no longer the model. The captive portal is > network agnostic. In our case we drive all WiFi traffic to our head end over > VLANs. We can also tunnel over anyone's ISP making every HotSpot an extension > of our network and use the same Captive Portal That is correct, we have end of lifed our wifi repeater based service. This open source captive portal we have released runs on any Linux device. We have some additional services that will be listed on our website in due time. > , requires a hefty monthly fee, and plays ads. The feedback that we got from customers, and our comparisons with similar products, showed that our solution was very much less expensive than competitive products. We were offering a $9/month service at the low end, and the closest competition required you to buy a $30k rack mounted appliance which (in my humble opinion) did not come close to the performance of our service. > It's now Open Source, no fees. The ad revenue is yours. That's correct, the captive portal is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, which gives you a great deal of flexibility on how you can deploy and modify the code (much more so than the GPL). > Unless I am reading wrong, you can't connect your legacy network if you > choose not to use that type of mesh, or even a mesh at all. > See above That's correct - this captive portal can be installed as a gateway on any layer2 network. > The ads seem to be chosen by the "Silverlining People" for lack of a better > term. Is that correct? > No, you are 100% in control of the Ads. You can sell display advertising to > local businesses or use the space to promote your company's products and > services, or use Ad Exchanges, or....whatever suits you. OpenX is an > ad-service appliance that will allow you to deliver ads on a rotating basis > so that each time a user logs onto the network, they see a different ad. You have 100% control of the ads. We can provide you with advertisements specifically geared towards wifi networks, and deliver revenue share from those ads. We understand the nuances of what advertisers want on wifi networks very much after going at this for several years. But you can run whatever content you want in that space. > I don't see any support for Authorize.net , iPay, or any other system other > than PayPal. > It's Open Source so I would expect to see support for alternate services > developed. We chose PayPal because we were in a hurry. PayPal offered several advantages over the other options. Having used Authorize.Net for several years, I can say they have a reliable merchant service. But it didn't turn out to be a good fit for a pay per use option on visitor based wifi networks. The fees were always increasing (up 30% so far in 2010), there was a significant amount of paperwork that had to be managed, and dealing with multiple entities (i.e. Cybersource and other vendors they required you to report to) became a non starter over the long term. PayPal is a well known brand that consumers trust for the most part, and their payment API fit well into the captive portal design. Best of all, you can get going with just a paypal address - no monthly fees whatsoever. We may add iPay support at some point depending on the details of that interface. > What if you don't want to have ads? > You are in control of the pages. If you don't want to have ads, SilverSplash is probably not a good choice for your visitor based captive portal. It was designed specifically with advertising in mind. Other general purpose captive portals do not work well with advertising, which is why we designed SilverSplash. > What/where is the open source part? Is it just the Batman/Robin stuff? > > Blog page here: > http://blog.silverliningnetworks.com/2010/08/announcing-the-silversplash-open-source-captive-portal.html Batman is an open source mesh implementation which is available at open-mesh.org. ROBIN is a visible source firmware distribution which is available at robin.forumup.it. The SilverSplash captive portal is separate from both of those; it is only a captive portal. The development for SilverSplash can be tracked at github - http://github.com/redhotpenguin/App-SilverSplash > Discussion here: http://groups.google.com/group/silversplash > > Please give us more information about how this portal could be used for any > other thing than serving ads on these Meraki-ish radios, which are by no > means carrier class. > The attached drawing is the flowchart that was the template for development. SilverSplash was developed for the visitor based segment of your wifi network. It was not designed to be a solution for the subscriber based portion of your business; there are several other excellent software packages out there to solve that problem. As an aside, I've used both the Open-Mesh and Meraki equipment extensively, and found both of them to be excellent choices depending on your budget. You get what you pay for there mostly, but I haven't evaluated any of their devices which claim to be carrier class. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
