At the recent CeBIT, Deutsche Telekom (DT) announced the "HotSpot Plug'n'Play", a comprehensive program to enable small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), including owners of cafes, hotels, or shops, to easily offer high quality Wi-Fi services for their visitors/guests. The service, which will leverage Cisco's Meraki and the Cisco Intercloud technology, will be launched in the coming quarter, said the company.
According to Cisco, SMB customers can order Cisco Meraki Wi-Fi access points from DT with the condition that they have an existing Internet connection with a data transmission rate of at least 16 Mbit /s. SMBs are charged a one time payment of 99 Euros for the access point, and a monthly fee of 39.95 Euros on a contract that extends to two years.
Once the WiFi access point is powered on and connected to a broadband connection, it will automatically configure itself via Cisco's Meraki cloud and will start operating as a regular DT hot spot, allowing users to log on to the service seamlessly. While providing the Wi-Fi service for SMBs, the solution allows DT to extend its nationwide hot spot coverage.
Cisco said that the Cisco Meraki offers cloud-managed IT solutions spanning the entire IT infrastructure (wireless access points, Ethernet switches, security appliances and enterprise mobility management), as well as users, end devices and applications from a single central dashboard.
Cisco Meraki helped us develop HotSpot Plug'n'Play very fast. We can manage thousands of access points through one cloud dashboard, which makes this widespread infrastructure easy to handle. Our customers can set up a quality hot spot in seconds and don't need technical skills to do so.
Martin Wiegmann, Managing Director Deutsche Telekom and Service Provider at Cisco Germany
By 2019, 58 percent of Germany's mobile data traffic will be offloaded to femtocells and Wi-Fi, according to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index. This illustrates the importance of extended Wi-Fi coverage. Together with Deutsche Telekom, we are aiming to bring more Wi-Fi to Germany.
