Databricks and iPass Team Up for Real-Time Wi-Fi Monitoring

Unified Analytics Platform provider Databricks announced that mobile connectivity provider iPass has chosen the company’s platform and machine learning capabilities to help it monitor WiFi hotspots in real time. It will also use the technology to ensure mobile devices are connected to the most accessible and best hot spot in terms of speed, security, and performance. iPass said thanks to its adoption of the Unified Analytics Platform, it has been able to speed up its release of its Veri-Fi suite of services for mobile device analytics and big data.

iPass offers its customers access to the world’s largest WiFi network. It is made up of over 60 million hotspots in over 160 countries around the world. The company said in order to keep up with the challenges managing such a massive network presented, they would have to move from Hadoop to a cloud-based Apache Spark service.

“With more than 100 million hotspots to maintain, we were experiencing scalability, maintenance and complexity challenges with our old Hadoop infrastructure that distracted our small data engineering team from reaching their goals with real-time analytics,” said Tomasz Magdanski, director of Big Data and Analytics at iPass.

See also: Why intelligent networks need global Wi-Fi

“Databricks was the obvious solution as it’s equipped to collect and scale massive amounts of Wi-Fi data. We have been using Databricks in development through to production, which has allowed our data engineers to focus less on building infrastructure and more on creating new data products and providing the best Wi-Fi recommendations to mobile devices – ultimately improving the user experience,” he added.

iPass says it has seen big benefits from choosing Databricks, including increased revenue and simplified research and development. The company also looks to Databrick’s team of engineers for assistance when they build and deploy new machine learning models as part of their analytics.