Two-year-old Boston startup Tatara Systems Inc. this month takes the wraps off a new device it says will enable service providers that wholesale Wi-Fi hotspot access or resell such service from other providers to more economically and efficiently manage their wireless LAN businesses.
The company in the third quarter will begin selling what it says is a service delivery platform called the Tatara Wireless Services Gateway and related client software for laptops, PDAs and other end user devices.
In both retail and wholesale Wi-Fi applications, the gateway is designed to sit in a telco central office or other centralized location to provider service provider with a higher level of intelligence than is available today via RADIUS servers, says Kevin Jackson, Tatara’s vice president of marketing. Because it is a single, centralized box, the Tatara solution is also less expensive to purchase and operate than competing solutions that address the problem by managing Wi-Fi hotspots as if they’re additional nodes on a cellular GPRS network.
While RADIUS servers can be used to authenticate users, they lack additional functionality that service providers are looking for and that Tatara delivers, he says. Specifically, Tatara’s gateway provides service providers visibility to their customers; allows service providers to support and charge for various applications as part of a Wi-Fi account; and offers the control to support roaming partners, he says. The Tatara gateway does include a RADIUS server and can work with a service provider’s existing RADIUS or other servers.
On the visibility front, the Tatara solution is fully session state aware, meaning the service provider has a handle on what kind of service performance its customers are receiving. And because the boxes collect quality of service information for each session, the retail service provider could offer special billing features, such as not charging for service if a particular customer’s service didn’t meet a certain level of quality.
Regarding applications, the gateway ties in with applications so if a carrier has a location-based platform on its cellular network, it could use that same infrastructure to support location-based services via Wi-Fi, says Jackson.
Venue-specific applications expected for Wi-Fi in the future include the ability for subscribers to output files on airport priters, view DVD movie catalogs of airport-based rental businesses and online ordering forms for Starbucks. Of course, non-venue-specific applications include messaging, location-based services and more.
The Tatara solution ties in to billing systems. It can also append to a billing record data such as the location and address at which a customer received Wi-Fi access or Wi-Fi access to a particular application, or information on quality of service metrics.
The wholesale version of Tatara’s solution also enables wholesale service providers to support multiple retail service provider customers. The wholesale and retail gateways are basically the same box, but the wholesale version is more focused on settlements and service delivery and doesn’t include the applications software component.
Tatara expects many companies deploying Wi-Fi hotspots to wholesale service on those hotspots to other providers in an effort to realize economies of scale for their investments. As of early April, Tatara was in one trial with a “tier one player” says CEO Stephen Nicolle, who declined to name the company. Nicolle was formerly president and CEO of Sigma Systems Group, which sold service management solutions to cable TV companies and is now part of Liberate Technologies.
Tatara has raised $9 million from venture capital firms Highland Capital and North Bridge Venture Partners. The vendor’s core team includes individuals from Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies Inc./Bell Labs Research, Openwave systems, Kenan Systems, Sycamore Networks, Xedia, Sonus Networks, Sigma Systems and Tahoe Networks.
