Student hotspot management for 43 Air School
43 Air School, a flight training academy in the Eastern Cape, needed managed student WiFi across its hostel and on the vehicles that carry students between its sites, on one platform.
Challenge 1: one platform, two environments
43 Air School needed managed WiFi that could serve students in a hostel environment and serve vehicles moving between sites, without replacing the network infrastructure it already had.
Solution 1: drop-in integration
43 Air School took a cloud-managed router from us with the hotspot service configured on its own network segment, running over the existing fibre uplink. Student traffic sits apart from staff and administrative devices, and we manage the router, the access tiers and the portal from our side.
Challenge 2: a paid tier without charging for the basics
The academy wanted every student to have a free everyday allowance, and a way for students who had used theirs up to buy more.
Solution 2: a captive portal with two tiers
We set up a captive portal with tiered access:
- Free access: a daily allowance per student, sized for coursework, messaging and casual browsing.
- Voucher access: vouchers the academy sells on site, valid on hostel WiFi and on the vehicles.
When a student connects to the academy's guest SSID, the captive portal opens automatically on their laptop or phone. They browse on the free daily allowance, or sign in with a voucher for more. Per-user throughput is throttled so that no single student can saturate the fibre or LTE uplink.
The result
One network across the site and the vehicles, a fair-use free tier that covers everyday student needs, and a voucher tier that offsets the academy's connectivity costs.