A typical retail enterprise, for example, will have several stores across various geographies, so it is preferable to have a centralized management/monitoring tool to control Wi-Fi access at all locations. This facilitates single-point rollout of access policies as well as collective surveillance of the ongoing Wi-Fi activity. A centralized structure also saves investments in full-time or part-time resources that might be required to individually manage the Wi-Fi access at store locations.

Traditional Wi-Fi solutions lack centralized control, while solutions are primarily designed for a campus environment with hundreds of access points. Moreover, the centralized control is often provided through a hierarchy of dedicated controllers adding to the overall complexity.

In contrast, retail will usually only require one, two or three APs at each store, but there can be a large number of stores across geographies. So a Wi-Fi access solution with centralized control should:

a) Handle a large number of geographically distributed Wi-Fi networks.

b) Be simple to use and not require dedicated administration or maintenance. An Internet -based central control system with no customer premises equipment would be invaluable.