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Providing WiFi for customers

Thu, 24/03/2011 - 10:54 — neilo

Hi,

Has anybody found a good (i.e. reliable and cost effective) solution to provide wireless access for customers? We currently provide this service, but need to protect ourselves more, as per the legal text below:

2.1 Digital Economy Act 2010 and EU Directive on Data Retention (2006/24/EC)
EU and UK legislation increasingly requires internet access providers to retain information on their users and internet usage. Therefore:
• Do not allow anonymous use of customer WiFi (even if this is protected by a network password). Users should be required to log on to the WiFi service by providing some personal information.
• For each user, keep a record of all internet communications (e.g. internet sites accessed, destination of communications sent etc). Data should be kept for 2 years and be automatically deleted after this time.
• On request, be able to quickly supply information on a user’s internet activity to the appropriate authorities

So if anyone has found anything, it would be great to hear.

Thanks,
Neil.

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TechtXt's picture

Hi Neil,

If you are going to provide wireless access to public users then you have to by law have a device to store the MAC addresses of each device that uses your network.

this costs a couple of thousand pounds.

Tue, 30/08/2011 - 18:10 — TechtXt
Mr Hopwood's picture

Hi Neil

The way I would approach this to keep cost down is to buy a standard access point and a basic PC (with 2 network cards).

I would then install the PC with a version of Linux server (or get a company it) on the PC, you will be able to add a open source (free) web site filter, virus scanner, inline proxy config, web site browsing logging tool, plus a forced login to access the Internet at the cost of a pc or a pc & configuration.

Its not as scary as it sounds :) open source Linux servers are used but the likes of google, facebook and IBM plus millions & millions more out there....

Wed, 27/04/2011 - 10:06 — Mr Hopwood
roy_cunningham's picture

Hi Neil,

Most managed wireless solutions can do this, albeit for a large capital outlay. The controller hardware can cost upwards of £1000 and the access points around £300-500 each. There are also speciality solutions available for hotels, internet cafes, etc., but again you would need a regular income from paying guests/visitors to make it worthwhile.

For your requirements, cloud computing technology can help. My company provides cloud-managed wireless as a service for as little as £1 per day. We provide the access point(s) for your premises, which are managed by our datacentre-hosted controllers. Visitors who connect to your network will be asked to logon with their name, email address, etc and you can give them access for as little or as long as required. You can even decide how much you wish to charge them (if anything) and keep 100% of the profit! There is no up-front capital outlay - just a small one-off activation fee per access point.

Does that sound like what you need? Give me a shout if you need more information or have a look at: http://www.flexsys-group.co.uk/cloud-wireless-networks/

Hope that helps!

Thu, 21/04/2011 - 14:23 — roy_cunningham
Alison Knocker's picture

Hi Neil

This puzzles me - how do internet cafes get around this law? There must be a standard way of doing so I would imagine.

Thanks

Thu, 07/04/2011 - 15:55 — Alison Knocker
monicaseeley's picture

Hi, email me and I can give some you contacts who might be able to help based on their own experience. Regards, Monica

Sat, 26/03/2011 - 21:40 — monicaseeley
budchawla's picture

Hi Neil,

I'm guessing when you say "wireless access for customers" that you are some sort of retail establishment that offers WiFi to visitors (as opposed to you being a provider of wireless infrastructure).

While this isn't my exact area of expertise, in the absence of any other answers here perhaps your best bet may be to offload the onus onto a provider like BT by simply signing up as a BT OpenZone partner? This way they handle the entire wireless side of things including user authentication and presumably (I would look into this assumption) you transfer the responsibility of maintaining logs and user identification to BT?

Hope that helps!

Fri, 25/03/2011 - 15:41 — budchawla

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