Wifi-soft Solutions Unibox, User Manual, Page: 3 / 260

Unibox Overview
UniBox is a network access controller and a hotspot gateway that helps network administrators
secure and control access to wired or wireless networks. It is used as hotspot controller, network
controller and Internet gateway in variety of businesses, hospitality venues, shopping malls,
hospitals, schools and colleges, transport venues, enterprises and any place where networks need
to be managed. UniBox provides various functions like access control, user management, AAA server,
billing system, multi-WAN router, firewall, URL logging, VPN server, AP controller, bandwidth control,
reporting/analytics and advertisement.
UniBox can be used for managing public wireless (or wired) networks at Wi-Fi hotspots/ hotzones,
campus and public-access networks. It can be used by private enterprises for controlling access to
their private networks, isolating and authenticating guest traffic via a splash page, enforce time and
usage policies and to allow secure and limited access to BYODs by employing self-registering /
requesting for IT approval of their BYOD devices and.
UniBox is an all-in-one gateway controller i.e. it functions both as a firewall and an access controller
as well as an authentication and billing server. It implements a captive portal that restricts
unauthenticated users from getting access to the network resources e.g. Internet. In addition, it also
provides an on-board authentication and billing server to verify the user’s credentials and charge
the user for using the network.
UniBox can be also deployed with a central authentication and billing (OSS/BSS) server. In this case,
UniBox will function in controller-only mode and will use the services offered by the central server.
If the hotspot / hospitality operator wants to manage multiple hotspots centrally then UniBox is
deployed in the controller mode. It works seamlessly with Wifi-soft’s cloud-based management
platform – WiFiLAN.
UniBox comes in different models based on number of concurrent users it can handle. The models
range from 50 concurrent users to 5000 concurrent users.
UniBox comes with built-in access point controller and NMS system. The AP controller is responsible
for controlling and configuring UniMax access points. It also provides a comprehensive NMS system
that provides the real-time status and health of each access point.
In addition, UniBox can be deployed to work with wide range of industry standard wireless access
points like Cisco, Ruckus, Aruba, DLink, Ubiquiti to name a few and can easily be overlaid in any
existing wired or wireless network in a small to large sized networks. The software stack is installed
on standard x86 hardware running Linux variant. This makes UniBox very versatile and is capable of
scaling to support thousands of users on the network.