Once again, World WiFi Day is here to highlight the importance of innovation in connectivity as a tool for social development, closing gaps and generating equal opportunities.
A celebration organised annually by the Wireless Broadband Alliance and developed by the Connected City Advisory Board (CCAB) and involving all members of the WiFi ecosystem. From governments and municipalities, to operators, service and technology providers, integrators and distributors.
On a day like today, from Galgus we want to bring you part of our work with Telefónica to extend the connectivity of rural and remote areas of Spain through the European project WiFi4EU.
Galgus and Telefónica, together to connect Empty Spain
With our actions, we contribute to mitigating the effects of what is known as Empty Spain, which affects a significant number of municipalities, which have lost a large part of their population and their economic and employment weight.
To give an idea of the magnitude of the situation, in 1950 the provinces concerned accounted for 34.1% of the population, generated 26.7% of Gross Value Added (GVA) and 33.5% of total employment.
Today, they receive 18.1% of the population, produce 16.1% of GVA and provide 17% of employment (Data from the report “The depopulation of inland Spain”).
How we achieve this
Since 2019, Galgus and Telefónica have reached an agreement to incorporate the Galgus Wi-Fi solution into Telefónica’s connectivity proposal for SMEs and public administrations, the latter segment in which the WIFI4EU initiative is framed.
A solution based on our patented CHT (Cognitive Hotspot Technology). A hardware-independent, cross-platform software that can be installed on a wide variety of Wi-Fi access points, both outdoor and indoor.
It provides distributed intelligence to the network, optimising radio resources automatically and offering advanced services such as automatically and offering advanced services such as device location without distortion due to devices without distortions due to MAC address randomisation, heat map generation, hacker detection or cloud management.
All without the need for a central controller, avoiding delays and making the network much more robust and scalable.
In addition, the networks provided are Passpoint® and OpenRoaming™ compliant, resulting in seamless handover between WiFi networks and strong authentication and security measures.
What results are we getting
There are already dozens of Spanish localities that enjoy this joint solution of Galgus and Telefónica, which means that we provide services to more than one million people.
Localities, integrators and network owners benefit greatly from it. On the municipalities’ side, they enjoy economic development as a result of the development of new business models; social, by reducing the digital divide; and demographic by attracting professionals who want to work remotely in an environment away from the big cities.
For integrators, they provide a better user experience, while increasing their margins and making more efficient investments.
Network owners have more freedom to choose the access points that best suit their needs, have an infrastructure with a longer lifetime, reduce their operational costs and get contextual information about their users’ behaviour.
From Galgus, we never stop working so that the spirit of World WiFi Day extends throughout the year, bringing the best possible connectivity experience to all corners of the planet and making them grow with us. Happy World WiFi Day to everyone!
