Hotspot Billing
Hotspot operators require a reliable automated platform for managing customers and provisioning access services. The Emerald Management suite meets the needs of a wide range of organizations from the small regional provider to larger national or world wide providers by enabling network roaming, reseller billing and effective management of multiple hotspot operations from a single platform.
Automation
- Utilizing Emeralds automated new customer signup process customers begin by choosing the service offering that interests them. Next relevant personal information is collected and finally a payment method such as a pre-paid access card or credit card is chosen. The customer's new account is funded and activated for immediate use in real-time.
- At any time customers may login to the Emerald customer center to review the status of their accounts, purchase additional one time or recurring access offerings, review billing and usage history, make payments, upgrade or downgrade service or open support tickets.
- Automated email & SMS notices provide a pro-active approach to managing the customer relationship by providing warnings of upcoming account expiration or approaching usage limits, credit card expiration warnings and support notifications automatically updating customers on the status of pending support requests.
- Lights out automation of invoice and statement generation, customer credit card or EFT auto pay of recurring services and online end-user account management minimize administrative overhead.
Hotspot Software Features
- Includes RadiusNT/X - Our RADIUS AAA solution seamlessly integrates with Emerald providing authentication and accounting services for wireless hotspots, secure WiFi and WiMax networks.
- Includes Air Marshal - Our Captive Portal gateway controller solution included with hotspot and enterprise editions of Emerald enables secure web based authentication and redirect services.
- Flexible service options - Charge for anywhere from minutes to years of service. Enforcement of concurrent access restrictions, session time, data and bandwidth usage limits. One time and recurring billing options, introductory pricing, discounts, usage billing based on time of day, day of week and holidays. Included session management server ensures access restrictions are enforced for active sessions in dynamic environments.
- Prepaid Cards - Emeralds integrated prepaid card generation and management system allows customers to signup for new service using a prepaid card, recharge an existing account or directly access services without an initial signup process.
- Themes - Themes enable you to provide a branded interface unique to each venue or reseller. Based on industry standard CSS technology themes are defined based on many conditions such as client IP address, hostname, operator, group and device type.
- Reseller billing - Emerald enterprise enables multiple organizations to manage their own customers through Emerald while each organization is billed automatically for the usage of their customers. Organizations are free to set their own pricing and manage their own accounts.
- Roaming - Enables other organizations to share your investment in network infrastructure while automatically billing the external organization for their usage.
Security and Reliability
- Security Features - Operator group based IP access restrictions require specific operators to login from specific IP address or subnets. AES secret key data encryption stores sensitive information such as account numbers and passwords in encrypted form on disk. Granular group based access controls, detailed client access logging, two-factor certificate based authentication and TLS encryption.
- Reliability Features - Emerald supports read-only backup database connections should access to the primary database server fail. Emerald supports database replication. RadiusNT/X internally maintains Emerald account information and is able to respond to authentication requests and spool accounting data in the event that primary and backup database servers are unavailable. Multiple RadiusNT/X servers can be installed throughout your network for redundancy.
Please see the Emerald product page for a complete list of features.