News and Press Releases

Meeting High Speed Internet Demands article in Hospitality Technology Magazine

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How are you managing your hotels bandwidth?

Do you know how Guests are using bandwidth or do you simply purchase more if Guests are complaining that their connection to the Internet is too slow?

One Guest running one bandwidth intensive application (BitTorrent, Kazaa. Gnutella or even a Hulu HD stream) can use quite a bit or all the bandwidth you have, creating a slow HSIA experience for all other Guests. Additionally, XRoads metrics reporting can tell you what applications, users and urls are consuming the most bandwidth.

Do you know when a wireless access point goes down or do you wait for the Guest to call to tell you about the problem?

Monitoring and Alerting features in XRoads will alert you by email or sms if a device on the network is down.

What happens if one of the internet connections fails in your hotel? Do you have a backup plan?

XRoads allows you to connect your main connection (typically a T-1) and multiple additional cost effective internet connections such as DSL or Cable. If any one connection fails, XRoads ensures that your Guest can still connect to the internet over the DSL or Cable circuit.

Do you know that you can utilize low cost Internet links such as DSL /SDSL and Cable to increase your bandwidth download speeds?

XRoads bandwidth link aggregation technology allows you bond multiple Internet links for web based traffic. For example, you may have a T-1 (1.5) and add a 3mb SDSL circuit, you download speeds would increase to 4.5mb or more for web-based traffic, very significant Guest and Administrative enhancement at a very low cost.

And what happens when you are ready to take advantage of hosted applications (such as PMS, POS, VOIP) in order to reduce capital costs and speed system and application deployments?

Will you be able to guarantee Quality of Service and VPN security for these hosted services?


Enter XRoads Networks Wan Appliance. XRoads addresses these business issues by helping your organization create a better HSIA experience for your Guest and give your Hotel or Enterprise full control to run your hosted applications in a secure99.999% uptime environment.

All of this at a price point that makes it easy to justify.

Contact The BITS Group for more information about how you can provide increased guest satisfaction, manage bandwidth and costs and know you are already prepared for increased Internet traffic and Cloud Computing.

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Check to see if a website is down.......

You receive the perverbial call that a user cannot access a website. May it's the users computer, maybe it's your internet connection, or perhaps the website is actually down.

Here is an easy to use tool to check if a site is actually down and it's simple for and end user to use.....

Is a website down for you too or just me? Try it now! Read more ...

Using your windows smartphone as a wireless access point!

WMWifiRouter - Your mobile phone just became more.....

Mobile Access Point - Internet Router - Emergency Internet Access

Let's say your working from home and your power fails, you need to send some documents but how? If you have a Windows Smartphone and WMWifiRouter software installed on your Smartphone you can turn your Smartphone into a wireless router and send the documents!

What if you are traveling and have voice and data access on your Smartphone, but need to send documents from your laptop, with WMWifiRouter installed on your Smartphone your Smartphone becomes a wireless access point, your laptop sees it and connects you to the internet!

Granted it may not be the same speed as home, the office or your local coffee shop but in a pinch it works very well....

Requirements are:

Windows Mobile 5 AKU 3.3 or newer or Windows Mobile 6
Both a wifi and a cellular data connection

An installed and working version of Internet Sharing**
15 MB of free device memory


I won't be leaving home without WMWifiRouter installed on my Smartphone.....

Learn more about WMWifiRouter



Note: please note that using your Smartphone as an access point for an extended length of time will cause your Smartphone to consume power very quickly and might cause overheating Read more ...

Spiceworks, your free IT Network Management Resource

What exactly is Spiceworks?
Spiceworks is a free application that helps you with the day to day management of your networks.

Think about what you as a Network Manager do in a day.
-Answer Support calls
-Check Server Event Logs
-Maintain Hardware/Software Inventories
-Verify the latest patches or anti-virus updates
-Check availability of resources servers/services/applications)
-etc, etc, etc

All in a days work, and a reactive process.

What Spiceworks does is automate many of these tasks and frees up time for you to be proactive about other things, like how else can I use technology to enhance business processes?

SpiceWorks features:
-Automatic PC and software inventory and IT asset reporting, you can add your own IT assets as well (discovers any IP device)

-Network monitoring and troubleshooting that watches the network so you dont have to (sends email alerts if a trouble occurs)

-An easy to use IT help desk to track troubles and view trends

How is it free?
Spiceworks is the Google of Network Monitoring Tools, i.e. Spiceworks integrates advertising into the application, advertising related to Information Technology as well as Help forums so you can ask questions of Spiceworks 190,000 other users in case you run into an issue thats difficult to solve.

What Spiceworks is not (yet)....
-It is not a enterprise network management tool. Up to 500devices/applications/services works great (can handle more, maybe 1000)

-It is not a tool that automatically makes decisions to reboot an application/restart a service or spawn another process

-It is not a tool that sends alerts via SMS

-It is not a tool that creates topology maps

That said, Spiceworks is a tool that will still work very well on a small to medium sized (about 300 users) Administrative Local Area Network and can help you proactively manage your network.

After using several Monitoring Tools, KS Host Monitor, Big Brother, Solar Winds, Nagios. Spiceworks has all the features one would need to monitor their Admin LAN.


Best of all it's free....

Download Spiceworks Free Network Management Software Read more ...

VPN:Something you have, Something you know... Cost effective two factor authentication using your Mobile Phone....

Historically, two-factor authentication has been addressed by issuing tokens/keys from RSA, Verisign or another vendor. This at price points of $50 to $300 per user, which has no doubt made this option very difficult to deploy in small and medium size businesses because of the high cost of entry, on-going maintenance and administration.

Enter PhoneFactor from Positive Networks. PhoneFactor is one of the products being positioned to take advantage of something every Corporate Employee has, a mobile phone.

PhoneFactor allows the phone to be used as the "something you have" instead of the employee having to carry another device that may get lost. PhoneFactor allows you to use "something you already have" and quickly deploy "Tokenless Two- Factor Authentication".

How does it work?
-Using a centralized or local Windows server, users are entered into the secure database with their mobile phone numbers(also works with regular telephones as well, for home based employees).

-When a user wants to open a VPN session they will login to the VPN client, the VPN passes this information to the PhoneFactor server which calls the users mobile phone. The user answers the call and presses the # key which verifies back to PhoneFactor and the VPN. The user is then allowed on the network.

Pretty straightforward, wouldn't you say.

Now for the best part! The PhoneFactor software is free! You can go it alone and install using the very comprehensive documentation or purchase annual support and a version that allows you to enter a pass code when a users mobile phone is called.

PhoneFactor works with the very robust Positive Networks VPN or any VPN that supports Radius Authentication.

Cost effective, easy to deploy and maintain, an excellent product to enhance your remote access policy and security solution.

For more information contact:

The BITS Group Inc
ph 215-876-7912
email leonard.vasquez@thebitsgroupinc.com Read more ...