The construction of the campus of WiFi in the country’s higher education institutions has a Chinese-specific phenomenon: three operators invest, network each, and eventually coexist on one campus. For students, this means that they can choose the operator package, and for the information sector of schools, it means coordinating three completely different certification and billing systems.
Let's figure out what each operator wants.
Before we can do the docking, one question has to be clear: three operators are against each other."Authentication"Mobile web services believe that certification should be the EAP-SIM/AKA, which goes straight to SIM cards, without user passwords and mobile phone automatic authentication. Telecommunications are more used to Web Portal+ SMS-code models, consistent with their mobile office certification logic. Connectivity is complex, different provincial strategies, some regions require RADIUS agents, and others support Web Portal.
That means your billing system isn't a one."Uniform authentication entrance"It's more like a translation layer: students turn on the browser and see the same Portal page, but he chooses to do it."Move"Then the backstage moves to a authentication protocol;"Telecommunications", the process of telecommunications. If the system can encrypt this variation in configuration rather than code, the cost of maintenance will be much lower later.
RADIUS is the foundation, but not just on RADIUS.
The technical bridge between most campus network WiFi’s network billing system and operators is the RADIFUS agreement.
The program is technically established, but there are several pits in the operation. The first one is time out. Operator RADIUS agents usually jump through several layers of network and respond more slowly than you think. If you set the overtime to five seconds by default, students will see it frequently."Authentication timeout", and then try again, and then over time, experience is very bad. The proposal is set at 15 seconds and it works out."Please wait while authentication is in progress."A friendly tip.
The second is attribute mapping. Different operators ' RADIUS servers return different property names and domains. Mobile returns may be marked as MSISDN (cell phone number), telecommunications may use Acaccount-Name, and connections may both. Once your billing system has these properties, it must be correctly mapped into a uniform home-school user identification system, otherwise there will be a mess when you do log queries and account reconciliations later.
Portal page design is very elaborate
The authentication page (Portal) that students see when they first connect to the campus WiFi is a central part of multi-operator interface with user experiences. This page addresses several issues: let users know which operators are selected, show packages of different operators and jump to the corresponding certification process after the user selects.
I've seen the worse Portal, where three operators have their own access to a page with a different number of characters and a different size for each operator. Students just ordered one, failed or misreading. The good Portal should be clean: a big title, three tabs or a framer, the user chooses a operator, and shows the operator's certification form immediately below.——Cell phone number, password or authentication code.——No excess interference.
There is another detail: Portal pages remember the last choice of users. Once a student has selected a operator and successfully certified, he should have chosen the previous operator by default when opening Portal, rather than re-electing him every time. This is not a technical problem, but many projects do not mention this need, which leads to poor student experience.
The bulk of the accounts and sales are just needed.
If every new student is to register, bind the operator and complete the certification on Portal’s page, his or her cell phone will be blown up. A web-based campus network WiFi billing system should support matching with the school pedagogic system, import a batch of freshman data and pre-open an account number.
It's not just a batch opening."Insert records into the database"So simple. When a new student opens up, he does these things simultaneously: create a campus network account, open the corresponding billing strategy (free or limited), synchronize user data with the operator side (some operators require schools to send their new phone numbers a week before school starts and they pre-registered them in their own certification system), assign initial passwords or trigger text messages. If one person handles a student manually, at least five minutes, 5,000 freshmen are more than 400 hours of work.
The bulk sellers are equally important during the graduation season. But the sales are more complicated than opening a bank.——Some graduates may still be in school, and their undergraduate accounts should not be deleted directly, but should be suspended or downgraded. This requires a billing system that recognizes changes in the user’s academic status and keeps pace with the teaching system’s data.
The reconciliations can't wait until something happens.
The reconciliation of accounts in a multi-operator environment is the most painful thing that many schools have to do since their end."There are 8,000 users on your campus this month who I certified."The school said"I've only counted 6,500 people."Where did the missing 1,500 people go? Could be the operator's statistical caliber containing duplicate certification (a person certified five times a day or once? ), possibly there was a loss of RADIFUS logs on the side of the school, or two systems were not time stamped.
The way to avoid this kind of decoupling is to agree on what the statistical calibre (by number of users or certified numbers), what the statistical cycle (natural month or fee month), the mode of transmission and verification mechanism for reconciliation data are. It would be better to run a reconciliation script automatically every day, with discrepancies above 5% calling the police automatically, rather than waiting until the end of the month to reconcile the figures.
Landing advice
If you are working on or about to do a multi-operator WiFi project, my proposal is to pull the three operators' technology pairs together and meet with a technical program that will go through all of the details of the authentication protocol, RADIFUS properties, Portal jump logic, reconciliation process, and form written confirmation."We're here to support standard RADIUS."This generality.——"Standards"The two words may mean different things to each operator. These differences are exposed at the start of the project, a hundred times more than patches after they're online.