Wireless Hotspot Providing

fov · 11th November 2007

Does anyone have any experiance in setting up a wireless hotspot like some cafes and hotels have?
I have a customer who runs a B&B and they have brought up the idea of providing internet access to punters. Free access would be fairly easy I guess, just a couple of access points in the building but to make it paid for seems a bit more tricky.

Cyberprog · 11th November 2007

pfsense, captive portal, radius server with mysql database backend (freeradius), and a simple set of scripts on an allowed domain through the capitve portal should do the trick, with a cron job to track access time in the database and with refresh on the radius auth turned on

othellotech · 11th November 2007

ora zyxel 4000 "hotspot in a box" which works very well - having setup a few pub based hotspots on ouyr DSL service with them

PeteK · 11th November 2007

Zyxel G4100's (the 4000 are discontinued) hotspots are ok if you don't mind shelling 400 quid for the wireless unit and another 150 quid for the token printer.

For chuff sake, we do this with Mikrotiks with Paypal (yeah I know, not my choice, but haven't got around to integrating Protx yet, and Paypal works out of the box) and its about 150 quid all in. Oh and its properly robust and if you want to do SMTP proxying you can, local web proxying etc etc, all in the box.

NetworkTP · 29th July 2008

FON can do this can't it??

midnightsoftwar · 29th July 2008

Or how about The Cloud - especially with the iPhone having it free

adammccarthy · 29th July 2008

I'd second the pfsense idea ... I used to run it on the WRAP platform, although that has been superseded by a new embedded pc now.

goscombtech · 1st August 2008

wifidog ftw

thats what we use on all our public ones, for those of you that have used them

chriswestuk · 13th August 2008

There are a few, the out of the box solutions are all well and good but not completely to plan.

Its always best to run it yourself as other companys want a share of the profits.

if your interested in a more in depth chat, email me at chrisATwest-wire.co.uk

freethought · 13th August 2008

MikroTik RouterBOARDs with RouterOS v3 all the way

adammccarthy · 26th August 2008

Just came across Coova.org. I haven't used it but it looks quite nice.