Co-working spaces have now become the growth hub of the startup ecosystem and it has now become clear that these spaces have tremendous potential to provide a network much needed for the growth of businesses.

One of the most critical parts of a co-working space is its “Internet infrastructure” which consists of Hi-speed broadband/lease-line Internet, Wi-Fi Hardware, Firewall or central authentication system. The problems are bound to come in terms of internet speed, Wi-Fi connectivity and other IT issues with variety of co-workers having range of internet usages requirements.

“Workloft” is one of the largest successful co-working spaces in Mumbai with a capacity of 320 members. While at one end, they had developed an amazing co-working environment for startups, young entrepreneurs and freelancers, but at the other end, they were struggling with frequent issues with Wi-Fi connectivity and internet speed.

To begin with, they were using a well-known firewall system for Wi-Fi authentication and internet security, but unlike corporate offices, their requirements were different and they were facing the problems like:

Members needed to authenticate and login on daily basis to use Wi-Fi (quite cumbersome for co-workers to remember another userid and credential).

Wi-Fi speed issues and frequent disconnection from internet on account of uncontrolled usages from few selected customers – they wanted to avoid data abuse but at the same time, they can’t block heavy data seeking websites for all users.

There was a backup internet line but they had to replace it manually every time main line goes down. No failover or load balancing features were available with the firewall system.

They wanted “Easy-to-use” Dashboard control features to check the speed/data usage by individual members and optimize the internet cost (i.e. bandwidth control, time/data limits, and block unwanted users/websites) without affecting Wi-Fi experience for co-workers.

This is where they called us and sought our assistance. We suggested them a simplified setup including one controller device (Mikrotik CCR 1009) connected with all their access points centrally and add multiple internet lines as inputs which can be configured with load balancing and failover operations both. For authentication, we offered our enterprise-grade Wi-Fi hotspot authentication system along with custom firewall to provide a user-friendly yet feature rich dashboard to manage the setup. With our systems, the co-workers need to login just once with their unique credentials (user Id and password) and will be automatically logged-in every time they enter into the space. For guests, either the Workloft management can pre-print coupons for selective access or can opt for OTP based authentication system to provide easy login features.

Additionally, we provided them an easy to use dashboard where they could:

Create user credentials for their co-workers and set speed/data limits for individual users to optimize the internet speed

Check their logged-in users and how much speed and data they are using in the real time so that they can control the users with high speed/data usages

Block unwanted users/website from accessing internet to prevent any data abuse

Centralized dashboard to maintain user access management (users will be automatically disconnected if they haven't renewed their membership plan)

Firewall security to protect their internet connections from any malware/hacking practices

We also consulted them with selection of internet service providers and provided in-depth analysis to identify speed plans and service providers. It took them 4 months before they agreed to switch from their existing system to our suggested setup and even asked for references before they went ahead with our solution.

For us, it was a great learning experience in terms of such a large user capacity and network setup. While installation took hardly few hours to get them live on our setup, providing on-going support was also a concern for them as they didn’t any of their 300+ co-workers to suffer on new platform. Workloft team was quite sceptical about support system and had multiple rounds of testing before going live on our system. To gain customers’ confidence, we even offered them to pay on a monthly basis for initial few months and offered “money-back guarantee” in case they don’t find our support services satisfactory.

Nothing was more joyful for us to see another satisfied customer who showed trust in our product/team and agreed to go for long-term contract instead of monthly payments.

If you want to know more details about this case study or any particular thing about the project, you can email us at support@freegwifi.com. And if you are running a co-working space and want to explore our Wi-Fi co-working system, email us at sales@freegwifi.com with your requirements.