COVER STORY 18 01732 759725 Superfast Wi Fi As TP-Link’s leading solutions partner in the UK, 2Connect has established a thriving business providing enterprisegrade Wi-Fi 6 technology to developers and landlords of multi-tenanted buildings in city centres across the UK, with a particular focus on the north of England where there is a growing requirement for large-scale developments to address the needs of urban professionals and to alleviate the shortage of student accommodation. Through a strategic partnership with one of its customers, a Top 5, multi-millionpound property developer, 2Connect already provides Wi-Fi connectivity to more than 5,000 apartments across 40 developments. Growth & Strategy Director Ali Mohsin says that with a successful track record in delivering Wi-Fi 6 technology alongside leased lines, 2Connect is now ready to leverage its experience and in-house capabilities to simplify Wi-Fi procurement for reseller partners so that they too can explore business opportunities beyond the comms room. “Having served a significant number of buildings in various parts of the country, we believe that we are now at a stage where we can take on any Wi-Fi deployment and deliver it with very high, enterprise-grade SLAs via a fully productised, wholesale-ready Wi-Fi capability that our channel partners can take to their end customers.” Mohsin points out that 2Connect’s Wi-Fi offering has two big selling points for resellers: it is a true end-to-end solution, covering network design & configuration, hardware installation and IT infrastructure management; and it has been developed and proven in the most demanding environments. “2Connect has had Wi-Fi capabilities for four or five years, but to start with we leant on third parties to deliver different parts of the proposition. This had its drawbacks, so two years ago, faced with customers’ growing demands, we realised it would be much better to upskill our existing staff, fill any knowledge gaps through recruitment, forge our own relationships with vendors and create a competitive, enterprise-grade Wi Fi proposition that we can deliver seamlessly through standardised process automation tools, with monitoring and reporting on every device for peace of mind.” Unlike most providers, 2Connect is now able to manage all aspects of a Wi-Fi deployment itself. “We take care of the entire installation for a company or a customer, and then provide proactive monitoring, data analytics and reporting, and a dashboard where they can remotely view user behaviour, bandwidth utilisation, data packets, right down to the device level,” explains Mohsin. He adds that the end-to-end journey also includes support. “If a partner has first line capabilities, we are more than happy to give them the tools they need to build the entire first line. Equally, if they are a pure resell partner and don’t have the infrastructure or people to be able to take first line calls or out of hours calls, we can take those for them and provide 24/7/365 SLAs to their customers.” Tried and tested As an example of the demanding environments in which 2Connect’s Wi-Fi solution has been tried and tested, Mohsin cites an installation for an 18-storey student accommodation building with more than 300 separate apartments. “We had to ensure, first, that every person in every one of those apartments has secure connectivity to the internet and, second, that anyone who is in contravention of the fair internet usage policy can be identified. Because students require uninterrupted service for their university coursework and bandwidthhungry recreational purposes, such as gaming, the installation is more demanding than a normal business-grade internet connectivity solution delivered via a leased line with a firewall on-site. Effectively, we are having to provide the A little over a year ago, in November 2022, 2Connect Digital Solutions, the fast-growing connectivity and unified communications provider, made a splash with its plans to supercharge business connectivity through a partnership with BT Wholesale and open up the cloud contact centre market by bringing the inovo CCaaS solution to UK resellers. These two announcements accelerated the company’s evolution from a leased lines specialist into a multi-product, solutions company with an expanded offering for end-user customers and channel partners, including connectivity, unified communications and contact centre-as-a-service solutions. Together with a new management team, new branding and new partner portal, these additions kick-started a period of rapid growth for the company that has seen revenues rise by 150% in the last 12 months alone and 2Connect win a string of industry awards and recognitions. As an award-winning MSP, 2Connect is now building on this momentum with the launch of two new end-to-end packages that make it easy for resellers to provide new and existing customers with superfast, enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 6 technology throughout their premises and, secondly, to convert customers’ boardrooms into Microsoft Teams Room for seamless collaboration and content-sharing (see box copy). 2Connect helps reseller partners address Wi-Fi 6 and Microsoft Teams Room opportunities with new end-to-end solutions Winning business ‘beyond the doorstep’ Ali Moshin
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