Boingo Wireless Enables S.M.A.R.T. Networks and Venue Analytics With Unified Data in Snowflake

Boingo Wireless is focused on simplifying complex wireless challenges to connect people, business and things. Airports, stadiums, military bases, healthcare facilities, enterprises, commercial properties and other venues rely on Boingo to enable cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity. To efficiently design, build and manage converged, neutral host public and private networks around the world, Boingo ingests and analyzes large amounts of network and customer data.

For Boingo, reaching more than 1 billion people per year with connectivity solutions is a data-centric endeavor. “We stand behind our goal of building efficient, effective and fast networks to connect people, places and things. Without data, that’s just an impossible task,” says Bill Marino, vice president of data engineering at Boingo Wireless.

To support continued business growth, meet skyrocketing data demands and align with its cutting-edge network AI strategy, Boingo needed to scale its on-premises data environment. It was paramount that the expansion happened in a manner that didn’t inhibit end-user access to data and insights. According to Marino, “We wanted a continual data stream and a near real-time experience for accessing the data.”

Seeking to elevate its data stack and accelerate business transformation with data, Boingo began planning its cloud migration initiative.

After evaluating several solutions, Boingo turned to Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Snowflake’s elastic performance engine and optimized storage solved Boingo’s scalability challenges and made it easier to leverage data. “When I came across Snowflake, I realized the platform’s flexibility would be a catalyst for moving faster,” Marino says.

Snowpipe, Tasks and Streams helped Boingo engineer a highly efficient data pipeline. According to Marino, “Data flows from the edge to the storage or compute layer within an interval of one and a half minutes. That’s enabled by some of the specific infrastructure that Snowflake provides, pipes and streams in particular.” 

Ingesting massive amounts of near real-time network utilization, speed, interference and circuit data into Snowflake bolstered Boingo’s customer reporting capabilities. “After transitioning to Snowflake, we successfully introduced an upgraded version of our Insights 2.0 analytics platform across all venues,” Marino says. 

Snowpark allowed Boingo’s Python developers to code with less complexity and data movement.

Boingo’s Insights 2.0 analytics platform helps venues monitor network performance and identify upgrade opportunities for distributed antenna systems (DAS), small cell networks and private networks. Self-service dashboards surface insights for understanding connected user behavior. For example, airports use Boingo’s analytics platform to visualize passenger movement across gates, hotspots, lounges and other locations. “I’ve met with many of our venues’ CIOs and CTOs, and Boingo’s comprehensive, intelligent dashboards set us apart and are one of the many features they love about us,” Marino says. “Our ability to analyze and present real-time data in an actionable format is a huge differentiator.” 

Democratized network analytics for venues keep Boingo’s customer care team focused on resolving issues instead of answering basic questions. Boingo’s network engineers analyze network KPIs, develop thresholds and work with data engineers to implement proactive alerting strategies.

Snowflake serves as the foundational data layer for Boingo’s S.M.A.R.T. networks, which stands for Secure, Multi-Platform, Analytics-Driven, Responsive and Tiered. AI models detect network anomalies and support self-healing actions to remedy a variety of issues, such as radio frequency interference and network congestion. “We’re predicting and prescriptively assigning self-healing strategies—without human intervention—to ensure networks are running within a balanced threshold of KPIs,” Marino says.

Boingo’s customer care agents rely on S.M.A.R.T. networks and internal-facing data applications to troubleshoot complex network issues in less time. According to Marino, “We’ve co-located information into one spot and built analytical platforms and S.M.A.R.T. networks that are empowering customer care agents.”

Boingo’s data-centric approach helps it continually optimize service delivery and ensure seamless experiences for customers. “Our Snowflake features have gone up, but mean time to action and mean time to fix have gone down due to the rapid data accessibility that Snowflake provides,” Marino says.

Boingo will continue to turn to the Data Cloud as an enabler for future business transformation. According to Marino, “The flexibility inherent in Snowflake’s architecture aligns perfectly with our data objectives. It serves as a tool to help us achieve our aspirations for an agile, dynamic and S.M.A.R.T. network ecosystem.”

Migrating Boingo’s AI and machine learning models to Snowpark could also be on Boingo’s roadmap. “I see Snowflake—and specifically Snowpark—helping us orchestrate AI in a way that’s faster, better and smarter,” Marino says.