Real-time network monitoring of every device and every client

Swift Fox is the only WISP management software that monitors every single customer, every minute of every day. Why is this important?  Because this enables you to know, from the customer’s point of view, every outage or slow period on your network — no matter how small. Collecting all this data and presenting it in an easy-to-understand way means you can identify network problems quickly and solve them before customers even notice. Network performance data is stored forever on our secure cloud servers, so you can watch the impact all of your infrastructure improvements over time.

Monitoring is done by the Swift Fox Pingbox, which is a small device provided free of charge that plugs into your network near your core router. This device sends tests directly to client devices and network equipment, as well as logs into your APs, backhauls, and routers to obtain information on all aspects of your network operations. If you run Mikrotik, it can also update queues to shape bandwidth for customers and ensure fair network access with our proprietary Dynamic Adaptive Throttling.

Pinglogs make it all easy to see

The pinglog graph makes it easy to see, at a glance, the quality of any network device over time. Bright green means perfect, yellow means it’s on the edge, red means it’s bad, and black means it’s down. Look at a single client’s connection for the past month on one screen and your phone techs can spot an outage in a glance. Or compare all the customers on a single AP for the last day, sort them by signal — and see if there are trends that point towards infrastructure changes. Make a channel change? Know within minutes if you’re on a better channel than you were before. Pinglogs make running WISP infrastructure easy.

All your network information in one place, no more spreadsheets to update

No matter the size of your network, Swift Fox can map your devices. Know how everything connects together with an easy-to-read logical network diagram. Each device is colour-coded with it’s actual connection quality, so at a glance you can tell where a failure has occurred, rather than having to run pings and traceroutes to identify the issue. Complex arrangements such as customer point-to-point and custom customer networks can also be added and tracked. Each site can be assigned a coordinate so that it is visible on a physical street map as well.

Swift Fox also easily and automatically keeps track of all the IP addresses for your infrastructure, DHCP scopes, CPEs, and static IPs. At a glance you can tell whether a subnet is in use or not, which makes routing and setting up new tower sites much easier. Much of this information is automatically obtained from your network devices, so you don’t even need to enter it. Setting up a new ISP in Swift Fox is a quick process, and even poorly documented networks can be “discovered” and set up quickly.

Dynamic Adaptive Throttling gets the most consistent service out of legacy equipment

If you are forced to support old legacy 802.11b or Canopy equipment, you will know the pains associated with users that abuse peer-to-peer services. Instead of trying to shut down these services entirely, Swift Fox uses a net-neutral mechanism to ensure that users on legacy equipment get fair access to the network. By continually watching the average connection quality on each sector, Swift Fox identifies when a sector has dropped below an acceptable quality threshold. If this happens, and a single user is using the majority of the bandwidth — that user can be automatically traffic-shaped until the sector returns to an acceptable average quality. If a single client is shaped too often, it will trigger a warning for the support techs to call the client and offer an upgrade to a newer technology.

Built-in frequency planner helps avoid channel conflicts

Keeping track of which channel each AP is on can be difficult work — but Swift Fox makes it easy by automatically discovering the channel of all your wireless equipment on an ongoing basis. If a conflict is detected between two devices on the same site, it notifies you immediately. Setting up a new backhaul? Swift Fox lets you coordinate the frequencies between up to four sites at once to make sure you are not conflicting with any of your equipment.

Robust emergency on-call and SMS paging

Whether you have a single on-call technician, or several working on a rotation, Swift Fox supports automatically paging your technicians in the event of a network emergency. Configure the level of emergency to page out on, from large infrastructure outages to individual commercial customers. Paging can have different sensitivities based on the time of day — so that your techs won’t be woken up at 3am for a thirty second outage, but your NOC manager might be notified in the middle of the day for the same issue.