Burger King
Summary
Burger King began life in a single location in Miami Florida in 1954. Since then it has grown into a juggernaut with 11,200 locations spd across 61 countries. The first Burger King franchise in Canada opened in 1969. Since then Burger King has grown to 340 Canadian locations from coast to coast. Burger King Canada decided they wanted to provide free Internet service at their locations. This would serve as a value addition to existing customers while attracting new customers to their stores. Burger King needed to devise a strict wireless policy that would be enforced to ensure the security and privacy of company data and network resources while enabling their guests to easily use the Internet.
Challenge
Burger King faced several obstacles to their plan. They lacked the IT staff and know-how to deploy such a large scale deployment. Since most Burger King locations are franchised and the technical knowhow and network layout of each franchisee varied, there was no consistent nationwide IT support network in place. In addition to the logistical hurdles, Burger King faced several steep goals for their wireless network. It needed to be kept isolated from in-store network resources. Offensive sites would need to be blocked to maintain the family friendly atmosphere. Finally Burger King needed a way to make sure the wireless Internet was made available only to their customers without worrying about non-customers clogging the bandwidth and reducing performance for BK customers.Solution
MultiTrends, a managed IT solution provider with locations in every time zone in Canada, offers onsite and remote technical services, network monitoring, infrastructure design and implementation, amongst other services. To solve their logistic hurdles, Burger King turned to MultiTrends, whose nationwide support network, plus vast network installation and support experience made them a perfect fit for Burger King. By working with MultiTrends, Burger King now had a nationwide IT and support department.
MultiTrends then began to investigate the best solution for the Burger King deployment. After looking into offerings by Cisco and D-Link, MultiTrends firmly decided on a ZyXEL solution. Rather than add a second Internet connection for the wireless network, they instead used a switch to isolate the two networks on the customer premise and assigned each of them a different public IP address. Traffic from one network was blocked at the switch level from being able to traverse to the other, completely isolating guests from the company network. This provides the benefit of having two Internet connections, without the monthly expense of paying an ISP for two separate accounts.
To provide content filtering service, MultiTrends selected the ZyWALL 2 Plus by ZyXEL. The ZyWALL 2 Plus is used in bridge mode to provide a classification based content filtering solution. Rather than maintain a large internal blacklist of sites, the 2 Plus is configured to block sites based on the content of the sites. Any time a guest tries to access a web site, the 2 Plus checks with servers maintained by BlueCoat, which categorizes each site based on categories such as violence, drug use, hate speech, etc. If the site belongs to a category that Burger King wants blocked, the 2 Plus will block that request and instead return a website with a custom message as to why the request was denied.
To provide wireless access, MultiTrends chose the ZyXEL G4100 v2. The G4100 combines a wireless 11b/g network with a full-featured, self-contained hotspot solution. The G4100 was configured so guests would be prompted to log-in with user credentials proving they are a Burger King customer before allowing them out to the Internet. Users cannot provide authentication are provided with a custom portal page and full access to the Burger King website where they can learn more about Burger King, the menu, and any promotions. To provide guests with a username and password to log onto the wireless network, the G4100 utilizes a small IP based thermal printer. When a guest requests access to the wireless network, the Burger King employee simply pushes a button on the printer. This signals the G4100 to generate a unique username/password for that user, and prints it out on a customized receipt. The solution keeps things simple so employees don't require any technical knowledge or need to input information. The IP based printers are connected to the G4100 by standard Ethernet cabling, can be located anywhere in the store, and multiple printers can be used with a single G4100.
As an added benefit for Burger King, the G4100 is able to feed advertisements to guests while they browse the Internet. This allows Burger King to provide highly-targeted advertising to their customers highlighting current promotions or announcements.
Conclusion
