WiFi in the Healthcare Industry

With the advancement in technology, WiFi in healthcare has made quite an impact in having effective communication between doctors and their patients. The healthcare industry has gone through some significant changes with its technological advances in the past few years. WiFi has several benefits that are not just restricted to communication. It is also used for oxygen monitoring devices, accessing electronic medical records (EMRs), smart beds, and real-time access to X-rays and MRI scans. The demand for staying ahead in tech has been felt in every industry, and it is necessary.
The optimal WiFi network in the healthcare industry is of utmost importance as it leads to connectivity throughout the hospital. There is a dire need for WiFi in the healthcare industry that provides users with access throughout the hospital to get accurate and timely monitoring of the patient’s vitals. There is an increase in the number of wireless medical devices in hospitals that focus on the best quality of patient care. WiFi has made improvements in the flexibility and efficiency of clinical services in the healthcare industry.

5 Benefits of providing WiFi in healthcare centers

Revolutionize the patient experience

The WiFi in the healthcare industry has truly revolutionized the patient’s experience by providing large numbers of users access to the hospital’s WiFi network without compromising its speed and signal strength. WiFi technology has helped a lot by improving communication with patients. Some patients in the hospitals are isolated, so the doctors contact them virtually. Doctors can share health information with patients by keeping them updated about the important things. They can set them a reminder regarding their upcoming check-ups, new clinical services, promotions regarding healthcare initiatives, or offer any medical advice.

Classic Hotspot provides you with the captive portal that includes a login page that is highly customizable on which network admins can add any information, announcements, videos, banners, etc. The captive portal is known by different names such as splash page, login page, or landing page.

You can customize captive portals accordingly, and patients can easily search on them about treatments and general information. It can provide fast access to less tech-savvy users. The splash pages act as a perfect marketing tool to collect user’s data and segment it. With Classic Hotspot, you can use your captive portal to communicate to your guest WiFi users promotions, insert audio-video ads, and display any message that users will see during the authentication process.

Create a Customized WiFi experience for patients

Apart from providing good connectivity and better communication between patients and doctors, an optimal WiFi connection will also provide patients with a feature to access their medical records via an online portal. You can provide your patients with a personalized experience from the beginning by making a splash page.

Classic Hotspot allows you to make an easy login page that will provide distinguished authentication through forms or link it with social login. With Classic Hotspot, you will create different SSIDs with different authentication methods. For instance, you can create a password-protected SSID for the medical officials or hospital staff. You can create another SSID for visitors that can register through the captive portal. You can make the third SSID hidden and can only be accessed by the authorized person who has its credentials. You can make up to 8 SSIDs on one access point and can configure each SSID separately.

The Classic Hotspot platform provides a variety of customization features from which you can choose according to your needs. The splash page editor by Classic Hotspot by Tanaza does wonders as there are many customization options to choose from. You can create a splash page from scratch or choose the one from the templates. The ‘Remember me’ feature by this platform lets users connect to the WiFi automatically once they return to the WiFi area they have already been in.

Gather the right information for parents

Having a secure browsing experience is all that a user needs. To avoid any data breaches, Classic Hotspot aims towards providing a safe and secure browsing experience for the patients. We know that many people visit healthcare facilities daily, so there must be no compromise on their data. The authentication method by Classic Hotspot allows the users to set up a guest WiFi network. They can be granted guest WiFi access through open access, password-based, and captive portals for paid or free WiFi. The authentication methods will allow hospitals to control networks and guest WiFi users while making your WiFi hotspots profitable.

The Classic Hotspot platform allows you to generate new contacts and data in different ways. You can opt for email marketing in which by using the Classic hotspot Mailchimp connector, you will be able to send opted-in email addresses directly to your Mailchimp account. You can collect user’s data to run high ROI marketing campaigns on your contacts list by exporting them to CRM or any third-party marketing platform. With the different Integration and APIs, you will access WiFi client’s data from anywhere and use it in valuable ways.

Provide a better and safer connection

It is important to have an integrated web content filtering system. Classic Hotspot offers such a system that, while managing the WiFi networks of the health institutions, can block users from accessing inappropriate or unauthorized websites and applications. The network admins have access to limit the range of content and domains that people can access while having a connection. This platform provides security and prevents bandwidth wastage by preventing access to unwanted websites.

In the Classic dashboard, you can configure your access points that you want to use with the content filtering service. It also allows you to have bandwidth control per client to limit the bandwidth per user in a select SSID. This feature will help to avoid bandwidth wastage.

Improve WiFi Network Performance

Classic Hotspot can increase the WiFi network performance by continuously monitoring the number of users connected to a particular SSID and checking the bandwidth they are using. If users feel that they are not getting the required speed or signal strength, they can shift them to different access points or a new SSID with minimal user connectivity. When setting up an access point, it is important to consider client coverage.

You can keep your network safe by making it password protected or giving access only to a limited number of devices. With the Classic Hotspot platform, all these customizations are just one click away. By limiting the number of current devices, you will save bandwidth wastage.

Simple web browsing or texting requires less bandwidth, whereas streaming videos on Netflix or YouTube will require heavy usage. Different web applications require different bandwidth. You can limit bandwidth per device which will then restrict them to use more bandwidth. Limiting the upload and downloading data per device will also save bandwidth and improve the overall WiFi Network performance.

Classic Hotspot provides you with a customizable WiFi experience that redefines the user experience. There is a dire need for a WiFi hotspot management platform in the healthcare industry that can efficiently and effectively assist in making the tasks easier.

Juniper Networks has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Mist Systems, a wireless LAN vendor pioneering AI-driven WLAN, for $405 million.

With this acquisition, announced on March 4th, 2019, Juniper will combine Mist’s WLAN platform with its existing wired LAN, SD-Wan and security systems to provide enterprise customers with a complete solution.

Mist Systems manages its operations via a modern cloud microservices architecture, and its technology includes machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. In early 2018 Mist developed an AI-driven Virtual Network Assistant, Marvis, to simplify wireless operations, and provide insight into client and network behaviour. Mist has also leveraged patented virtual Bluetooth LE technology together with WiFi to deliver location-based wireless services to customers, such as proximity notifications and traffic analytics.

Mist’s acquisition will expand Juniper’s presence in the cloud-managed segment of the wireless networking market and will allow the company to offer a software-defined solution that simplifies operations, lowers operational costs and improves the user experience. Moreover, Juniper plans to leverage Mist’s AI capabilities by extending them across Juniper’s networking portfolio for software-defined architectures.

“With our planned acquisition of Mist Systems, we are not only expanding our enterprise portfolio into the wireless arena but also staking claim to AI-driven operations in the era of multi-cloud,” Juniper CEO Rami Rahim stated in a blog post. “Wireless is the most strategic place to start as we adopt AI for IT. It’s also more than just wireless. AI-driven operations must extend across the whole IT stack if it is to reach its full potential.”

The acquisition of Mist is expected to close during Juniper Networks’ second fiscal quarter, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

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WiFi Alliance announces Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6

https://www.classichotspot.com/blog/over-485000-ubiquiti-devices-exposed-to-ddos-attack/

According to an internet scan conducted by US cyber-security firm Rapid7, this vulnerability affects over 485,000 devices around the world. Most of the exposed devices are located in Brazil, followed by the US, Spain and Poland.

The vulnerability is not specific to one Ubiquiti device, and is found on a wide variety of the vendor’s high-grade WISP equipment. The majority of the exposed Ubiquiti devices are NanoStation, AirGrid, LiteBeam, PowerBeam and NanoBeam products, and 17,000 of these devices have already been defaced.

Jon Hart, senior security researcher for Rapid7, states in a security alert that attackers are exploiting a “discovery service” running on port 10,001. Ubiquiti included it on its devices so that the company and internet service providers (ISPs) can use it to find them on the internet and in closed networks. This service has been exploited by attackers to carry out DDoS amplification attacks.

These attacks were first spotted by Jim Troutman, co-founder of NNENIX (Northern New England Neutral Internet Exchange). According to Troutman, attackers are sending small packets of 56 bytes to port 10,001 on Ubiquiti devices, that are reflecting and relaying the packets to a target IP address amplified to a size of 206 bytes.

The exploitation attempts are still in an initial stage but, according to Rapid7, the amplification factor – that is currently 3.67 – can go up to 30-35. Attackers could find a way to carry out DDoS attacks in excess of 1Tbps, which is described by Rapid7 as “a crippling amount of traffic to all but the most fortified infrastructure”.

At the moment this discovery protocol “does not appear to suffer from multi-packet responses”, as we read in Rapid7’s security alert. This makes exploitation extremely hard as attackers can only “reflect” small amounts of DDoS traffic.

Ubiquiti already announced that it was preparing a security patch even if, in its current form, the protocol does not seem to be particularly harmful.

“To our current knowledge, this issue cannot be used to gain control of network devices or to create a DDoS attack,” Ubiquiti Networks said. “As a temporary workaround for this issue while it is being investigated and resolved by the development team, network operators can block port 10,001 at the network perimeter,” the hardware maker added.

Even though the biggest exploitation attempts have only been discovered recently, Rapid7 said that the first attacks attempting to exploit Ubiquiti’s discovery service were detected last July, when several Ubiquiti users reported problems related to the access of SSH services on their Ubiquiti equipment.

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WiFi Alliance announces Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6

https://www.classichotspot.com/blog/update-2019-the-list-of-supported-openwrt-wireless-access-points-vendors/

Wi-Fi Alliance announced WIFi CERTIFIED 6 as part of their WiFi certification program. This latest industry certification program is based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard and will be coming online in Q3 2019.

The goal of WiFi CERTIFIED 6

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, WiFi CERTIFIED 6 will ensure that devices based on IEEE 802.11ax technology meet industry agreed standards for interoperability and security. This certification program supporting next generation WiFi is aimed at guaranteeing optimal capacity, coverage and performance required by users for activities such as streaming ultra-HD movies and mission-critical business applications.

“WiFi continues to be a predominant technology for accessing the internet, with a strong history of success” states Andrew Zignani, senior research analyst at ABI research. “WiFi CERTIFIED 6 will further escalate WiFi’s role, with more than one billion WiFi 6 chipsets expected to be shipped annually in 2022”.

The main benefits of WiFi 6

WiFi 6 delivers improvements and new features that enable wireless devices to operate efficiently, bringing enhanced performance to users in demanding environments that involve a large variety of device types, from IoT and smart home appliances to business running large-scale deployments.

By virtue of WiFi 6, virtual and augmented reality applications, such as healthcare monitoring systems, e-learning and telepresence will become more attainable. WiFi 6 will also provide carriers and WiFi operators with more capabilities to support next-generation connectivity services, such as location-based and bandwidth-intensive applications in public settings, such as retailers, stadiums and transportation hubs.

The main benefits of WiFi 6 include higher data rates, increased performance in congested environments, improved power efficiency and battery life for the devices and increased network capacity with lower latency.

WiFi 6 certification requirements

The latest certification program will ensure that devices are WiFi 6 compatible and support specific features. Wi-Fi Alliance expects manufacturers who already released routers and other wireless devices with WiFi 6 compatibility to certify those devices once the program launches. WiFi 6 certified devices are required to deliver good performance even in dense environments with many devices connected simultaneously.

WiFi 6 includes a variety of technologies, and the support of some of them is mandatory for WiFi 6 devices to be certified: for example, devices must support WPA3 encryption, as well as specific features, such as OFDMA, MU-MIMO and Target Wake Time (TWT).

We expect to see a great number of WiFi CERTIFIED 6 devices being released starting mid-2019. During the CES 2019 event, many manufacturers showcased various WiFi 6 devices, including wireless routers, mesh networking solutions and computers.

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