The Short version

Creating and managing networks, making money in a hotspot, managing users, managing governance, offering good services, developing a hard market, avoiding competition, securing a network; All require different skills, competences and aspects of staff, technology and the location. AmazingPorts was purpusly bulit to target two specific issues and make them easier to deal with in computer networks:

Revenue in hotspots and control over networks.

These aspects are intrinsically linked together as revenue is based on what you can sell, and what you can sell is based on the services you can deliver, the services you can deliver are based on how much control you have...

By introducing a rules based approach to service provisioning, it becomes significantly easier to manage security and services in finegraned and precise way, effectively enabling you to make more money from your hotspot - or improve governance over your corporate network.

The Long version:

Rules vs Profiles

A fundamental difference between AmazingPorts and other "similar" software is how authorizations are transmitted from the LDS to the Access Controller. In a traditional access control system an authenticated user will be assigned a profile that contains information about what he can and cannot do. In AmazingPorts the authorization is transmitted in the form of a set of rules in XML format.

Compare:

Traditional system: User X can use service Y

with

AmazingPorts: User X can fetch email from pop.company.com and surf the internet using port 80 and 443

Clearly if we know that service Y is: Fetch email from pop.company.com and surf the internet using port 80 and 443, than the difference between the two approaches is irrelevant.

What if you want to provide multiple services in the same network?

The difference from other systems becomes clearer when you decide that one set of rules or a profile does not meet your requirements. Imagine that you have have four different services, for example email, surfing, a VoIP service and a gaming service. Any one user should be able to get any of the services, this means that you will have to build and maintain 15 different profiles so that for each combination of services there is a profile that matches.

Traditional system: Build and maintain 15 profiles

AmazingPorts: Build and maintain 4 rule sets

At this level the reduced amount of administration is clear, actually the relation between a traditional system and AmazingPorts in terms of administrative work can be expressed mathematically as:

2ⁿ-(n+1)

where "n" represents the number of services you wish to be able to offer your client.

What about individualised services?

Imagine that you run a mobile operator, and wish to charge your clients a fixed monthly fee for using e-mail. Every client will obviously have his own e-mail provider. We also know that some e-mail services are more popular than other. For the sake of this presentation we will assume that on any given market there are the 10 big known e-mail operators yahoo, google, hotmail etc.. and and at least another 100 smaller. On top of this every corporate customer will have their own e-mail service.

Let's just assume that there are 500 different e-mail providers in total.

Using the formula above we can then calculate the increased administration if you don't use AmazingPorts

2⁵⁰⁰-(500+1)= 3 273 390 607 896 140 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.00

This example makes it clear that AmazingPorts is significantly more efficient from an administrative perspective than the profiles based approach used by competing technologies.