PoLo System and Technical Specifications

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WHAT THE FI. BY POWEREDLOCAL

8 min readFeb 12, 2018

The Hardware

PoweredLocal use a blend of off-the-shelf hardware and custom manufactured hardware. What we supply to you may be any of the below, usually based on circumstance. We operate on two groups of hardware, we call it Non-Native and Native.

Non-Native

Non-Native is used where a business has existing commercial grade wireless infrastructure and we can provide some additional network configuration settings. These settings are used in conjunction with your existing settings. I.e if you have a corporate wireless network then this will remain and your wireless routers will output an additional wireless network for Guest users. We’ve written software to work as configuration settings with all major commercial brands and are constantly writing more… these include;

Cisco/Meraki
Ruckus
Ubiquiti
MikroTik
Netgear
Linksys
D-Link
Aruba
Xirrus

Native

This is our most common option and the hardware we can configure the most. These are the ones we take off the shelf or OEM manufacture that natively run the PoweredLocal operating system, which we call Rama-Rama. Our CTO named the software, it translates from Malay to butterfly. In marketing materials and setup guides, we refer to Native hardware as a PoLo Router.

It’s by far our favourite method, as the hardware and software are designed to perfectly match and it means we can do more for you.

As mentioned, we use a mix of hardware types to suit different use cases. These can be simply about cosmetics, but generally the differences include options for how a device is powered (wall, PoE, USB) and other input/output ports for networking or 4G Modems.

The minimum hardware specifications we tend to allow for are;

2.4Ghz & 5Ghz wireless cards
Multi-zoned power (100v-250v)
16MB Flash memory
128MB RAM
1 x WAN port
2 x LAN 10/100/1000 ports
580MHZ CPU

FWIW

We currently ship four types of hardware running our native operating system. All have the same Wi-Fi range, but the one that is the smallest and looks the least powerful is in fact the most powerful and feature-rich. And you guessed it, the one that looks the best and most powerful is in-fact not.

+----------+-------+-----+--------+---------+---------+---------+
|  Model   | Speed | PoE | Mounts | 4G Data | Battery | Eth out |
+==========+=======+=====+========+=========+=========+=========+
| AR750    | 22.60 | Yes | Yes    | Yes     | Yes     |       2 |
| Xiaomi   | 20.89 | No  | No     | Yes     | No      |       2 |
| Ubiquiti | 12.72 | Yes | Yes    | No      | No      |       0 |
| TP-LINK  | 20.62 | No  | Yes    | Yes     | No      |       4 |
+----------+-------+-----+--------+---------+---------+---------+

Software & Management Portal

The key to our hardware is not the physical properties, but the software running on it. This is where the magic happens. We continuously write and improve custom firmware for our native wireless networking routers, along with our cloud hosted settings for management and use of the data.

On the native hardware, we focus on two underlying operating system platforms, OpenWrt or its newer counterpart, LEDE. The two of which have now unified under the OpenWrt brand.

“PoweredLocal is like my company, Apple. Everything works beautifully” — Steve Jobs, Apple Inc.

Steve didn’t really say that, but using OpenWRT is the equivalent of Linux for routers. We are more the Apple, in that OpenWrt is like Linux in a similar way the Apple Mac is.

The reason we use this Operating System is for speed and plugins, there are thousands of developers knowledgable in this open and user friendly base operating system, which means we can hire great developer talent.

Our software operates partially on device and partially in the cloud. The device base software controls the hardware settings and the cloud-hosted software operate the configuration settings as well as data storage.

Management Portal

From a user side, you’ll have access to our configuration and management portal — hosted at https://my.poweredlocal.com

Aside from the marketing and data exploration tools, the management portal allows you to control the following settings:

Light & Dark theme
Your logo
Introduction welcome text
Login option types — Intelligent (predictive) form, Facebook Login
Business operating hours (allow access to wi-fi only during defined hours)
Post login redirect URL —e.g. this might be your website, an app download page or an events listing
Additional Terms & Conditions for Wi-Fi users
Custom Wi-Fi network name in addition to the Mesh Network (PoweredLocal Free Wi-Fi)
Wireless Channel — our our intelligent scan and allocate tool
Transmission power of wireless antenna
Maximum bandwidth of the internet connection to share with Guest users
Maximum download quota for each guest login session
A time limit for each guest Wi-Fi session
A lock-out time to disallow access to Wi-Fi if a user has reached their time or download limit.
White-listing and Black-listing — allowing you to add devices to be permanently given access without the need for authentication — can be great for a TV, point of sale system or a third-party tablet that receives orders.
Native language translations — all default fields and messages are automatically served to the user in their default device or browser language

The API, Apps & Integrations

This is a constantly updating list of integrations, but we have built tools to allow you to connect your wi-fi user data to hundreds of third party services.

These include CRMs, Messaging Platforms and Advertising Platforms.

If we don’t have a direct integration, you can use the Zapier app to connect with just about every platform there is. Really powerful stuff.

Security

One of the most under-appreciated features of the PoweredLocal service has been the native security measures in our hardware and software settings. Consumers presume security and business owners think a password is enough security, so we follow a security by design approach.

Network Security

Starting with consumer expectations, we isolate each device on the network from one-another. While this means a group of gamers can’t start a LAN party in your business, it also means a malicious virus can’t spread from one person’s computer to any other device on the network. This mostly happens unintentionally, where a virus uses a network to spread on other unprotected (by default) computers. We isolate that.

More maliciously, most business networks have other computers on them as well as point-of-sale systems and other business essential devices. Things you don’t want a casual customer to access, tamper with or quite easily delete.

The amount of businesses that we see that have a network that allows guest access and does not change default passwords on their routers is astonishing. Consider what would happen if your point-of-sale system configurations were deleted. Or even more common, someone logs into your wifi router and changes the settings and locks access to the internet from your own business.

Close to 95% of routers are configured with the default settings. Want to test it?

Right now, go type 192.168.1.1 into a new page in your browser.
Login: admin
Password: password

We handle this by running a firewall to block access to the IP range of the your existing network.

For example, if your network runs on the 192.168.1.0/24 range, the PoLo router runs it’s own DHCP server with a different IP subnet, and all access from the guest subnet to 192.168.1.0/24 is blocked. Internet is accessed through NAT.

For situations where you have additional subnets on your local network, you can (and should) setup a firewall to isolate the traffic between our router and the rest of your broader network.

PII and WiFi User Security

Personally identifiable information along with other data around the user’s wifi login are securely collected, databased and sent to your dashboard and other third-party integrations. The login is (predominantly) performed in a captive portal (which inherently adds layers of security), encrypted and transmitted via HTTPS to our servers and processing engines for publishing to apps and integrations.

The process of data transmission flow can be seen below.

Setup

If you are using the native solution, configuration is pre-done by our tech team and we’ll ship you some routers. You simply need to plug in power and a LAN cable from your DHCP enabled network or internet modem to the WAN port on the PoLo router. We’ll take that DHCP internet connection and create a new DHCP network for Guest users.

And…. we include some window stickers to let customers know that there is a Wi-Fi network. Put these up in strategic places and then customers wont ask staff for details on how to access the network. You can let staff know there are no passwords, the networks will appear at the top of the list when someone checks available wireless networks on their phone, tablet or laptop.

Dog-Fooding

We’re so confident in our system that we use it ourselves, in both a corporate environment and also in our homes.

Eating your own dog food is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which an organisation uses its own product. The idea is that if the organisation truly believes its own product to be superior, it would use the product itself.

Yes, it is superior. The corporate use, in a shared office space, allows the landlord to manage the data-use of tenants as well as quickly onboard new tenants and guests. They used to have a complicated hardware and software solution that they had on a managed services agreement, that cost $2,200 a month and was hard to use. PoweredLocal replaced it.

At home, the founders and developers all have PoweredLocal running on their home routers. While this seems strange, which it is, it allows us to constantly make sure the service is working while dreaming of a world in which consumers have a giant mesh network of internet rather than each house in a street having its own discreet internet service.

Data cost is a non issue these days and the portal allows guest networking for friends and family, easy time-limit controls for kids and the whitelisting and blacklisting is used for our connected devices. Like my smart-fridge and blocking Alex who lives in the apartment above our CTO, because he has not been friendly in the elevator :)