Wi-Fi Hotspot News

Mum, do you want a cup of tea or coffee? Yes please, I'd love a tea please. You head over to the kettle, fill it up with water, turn it on, wait a minute or so for it to boil, pour it into a cup with a tea bag. To be honest with you, I'm bored writing this and I'm sure you are too. Little old mum gets her cuppa so she's happy.

Anyway, this is fine when you're making drinks at home you wouldn't buy a buy a kettle if you owned a cafe would you? You'll agree that it would be totally ridiculous to try and make 500 coffees a day with one! Services you rely on to operate as a business shouldn't be done on the cheap. You wouldn't want to jeopardise your business for the sake of a couple of quid would you?

Out of all the calls we get everyday, I bet about 60% of the callers ask at some point why our Wi-Fi hotspots are more expensive that a router from PC World. Or why there is a monthly service charge? The answer's always the same. "You're not buying an off-the-shelf product when you choose a PolkaSpots Supafly Wi-Fi Hotspot. You're choosing a service; something to rely on; someone to call when things go wrong; something to attract customers and generate an income for your business."

We know there are cheaper companies out there doing Wi-Fi Hotspots but we don't really care. PolkaSpots Supafly Wi-Fi Hotspots are about quality not price. We're not competing in the budget Wi-Fi arena, nor do we give things away. Having said that, £14.99 per months's not a lot is it? You can buy your PolkaSpots Wi-Fi Hotspot here...

Back by popular demand, the first photo of Simon setting up PolkaSpots aged 3.

He was working on a Wren personal computer which he still has in his house! Sadly it doesn't have a wireless card installed and we doubt there's much chance of getting one for it...

You can click to see a larger version and admire the trousers he's wearing.

Then there's a good chance that there's a PolkaSpots Supafly Wireless Hotspot in the box.

Everyone knows that we've made our name over the last 4 years by giving our customers an honest and well supported system. We have a couple of hundred nationwide Wireless Hotspots to prove this. A couple of hundred is enough for us - too many more and all we're doing is providing a generic service. By keeping it small, we can provide all our customers with the best possible service. Simon (the big scary boss) still knows the first name of every single customer...

Very few people know however that there are lots of other companies around the UK (and outside the UK) that use our system to set up their own wireless hotspots. We have a staggering Hotspot Management system from a company called Pronto Networks. We've used it for years and know it inside out. All our customers can reap the benefits of such a system without the worry of hosting it themselves. That's what we do.

We might only have a couple of hundred PolkaSpots Supafly Wi-Fi Hotspots, but soon there will be a lot more out there for you to use! And, just like our ones, they'll be reliable, simple to use and probably free.

Burt

Burt was sitting in his favourite West London pub last night, enjoying a beer with a friend. They were watching a YouTube video of a horse jumping competition on his fancy iPhone (we didn't know he was into it either until this morning). He was apparently testing out one of newest Supafly Wi-Fi Hotspots.

Hungry, he headed to the bar for some crisps, only to discover Burt's Chips! Never before has he been so happy - beer, friends, iPhone, horse jumping, Supafly Wi-Fi and his own chips...

No kidding (excuse the pun), one of our favourite Wireless Hotspots, Progreso on the Portobello Road in Notting Hill, is offering you a goat if you fill in 24 of their loyalty cards!

You don't even need to complete them yourself, you can chose a chunk of a goat, pin it on, then watch the number tot up on the Kidometer.

Of course, you can collect ten stamps to get a coffee for your greedy self. Or, why not donate your loyalty card to Oxfam Unwrapped and help them buy a goat for a family in Africa that actually needs one.

We can't promise any goats in the shop, but you could check some goats in trees using our Supafly Wi-Fi Hotspot Service.

From 8am until about 7pm (or when Simon leaves for the day).

Just like ASDA:



ADSA have clearly not understood the concept of plain English here. It strikes me that they're open from 8:00am until 10:00pm however I don't think that's what they mean.

We tend to leave the Internet on all day just in case you were wondering (apart from when it's sunny).

If any of you remember Community Wi-Fi, a project we started about six months ago, you'll notice that it no longer exists on our website or as part of the things we do. We were wrong, it didn't work.

Community Wi-Fi was there to fill a gap between our enterprise Wi-Fi Hotspot offerings and the budget boxes you buy from Dixons that sit under so many shop counters.

We used off-the-shelf kit and an open source captive portal to block access. It was a DIY solution for those that understood how to fiddle with Wi-Fi boxes. In fact, it's the same system that many of our competitors use for their commercial hotspots.

Why did we stop the project? No-one wanted it, it was as simple as that. We're not unhappy though, we didn't want to sell cheap plastic boxes or a service that wasn't supported or easy to manage. We also learned a lot about Wi-Fi and our competition. There's a reason in this world of free internet and open source software that commercial companies exist. They might cost a little more, but do you care about a few pounds if it means you have lots of cheerful customers banging on your door?

You should be pleased therefore that we now only do our Supafly Wi-Fi Hotspots and don't sell any cheap and nasty plastic boxes! And we massage them before sending them out to make sure they're happy.

If you want a cheap and nasty box in your business, google "WiFi Hotspot Company". Ignore the PolkaSpots Supafly Website and call one of the other companies. There's tonnes of them out there.

All the best,

Burt

Four years ago, PolkaSpots was powered by a single server. Over the years we've added lots of machines to cope with the demand and make sure you don't suffer any downtime.

We've now replaced all of our machines with something that doesn't technically exist by embracing Virtualisation. This move has increased our redundancy (so your hotspots are always on) and we're saving electricity (and therefore the world's resources).

A system virtual machine provides a complete platform which supports the execution of an operating system (OS). In our case, Redhat Linux. The virtual machine runs on another machine and is completely independent from it's parent, i.e. it cannot break out of its virtual world.

We've upgraded to such a system for a number of reasons:

• Redundancy - our single machine sits in a cluster of 8 servers and the data is spread over multiple data centres.
• Energy saving - our virtual machine sits on a host with other (secure) virtual machines. Just like a bus, it's more economical to have lots of people on one bus a person per car!
• Space saving - data centres are getting full and the same analogy above applies.

At the PolkaSpots Factory, every Wireless Hotspot is lovingly massaged before it is sent out. We came upon the idea after eating a kobe burger at one of our Wireless Hotspots (The Prince Edward in W2).

Picture the scene, it's the busiest part of the day and your broadband line goes down. Who you going to call? I'd like to say Ghostbusters but that's not funny and they're unavailable, so you settle on your ISP and their £800 per minute support number. Lucky you, you can even talk to an exotic person in a far away land where the sun's shinning brighter than it is here.