Hughes and Aruba Networks Partner to Provide Retail Wi-Fi Service

HughesON is designed for in store wireless use by both employees and customers. Photo: Wikimedia

[Via Satellite 01-09-2014] Hughes Network Systems has teamed with Aruba Networks to offer retailers a new managed Wi-Fi service that optimizes network traffic from the in-store wireless local area network (LAN) to the corporate wide area network (WAN).

“Shoppers often experience poor Wi-Fi performance due to traffic congestion during peak shopping periods,” said Ricardo Belmar, director of product marketing, Hughes. “Our new HughesON solution is delivering two to three times improvement in bandwidth and performance in actual retail stores.

In-store Wi-Fi networks often hobble critical business traffic such as point-of-sale (POS) transactions and VoIP conversations when sharing the same Wi-Fi network with guest Wi-Fi traffic. HughesON Mobility leverages Hughes ActiveQoS and ActiveCompression — the same performance optimization technologies that turbocharge broadband WAN networks — and applies them to the in-store wireless LAN through Aruba’s instant access points.