Spoiler alert
Just providing public WiFi these days without ensuring some level of quality is no longer sufficient. The user for which you are providing such convenient services has a minimum expectation that they should be able to at the very least consume their social media contents without a poor user experience and the notion of insecurity.
Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well!
Philip Stanhope
My Thoughts
We live in a world were getting connected and staying connected is now part of our lives. This article is not composed to argue how this affects us in general. Contrary to that, it’s to cover certain areas to pay attention to if and when you decide to provide public WiFi to customers. You might also find this information useful if public WiFi is been provided.
There are three reasons (3 Protects) why I feel much thought and care should be put into this;
- Protect guests from themselves: If you have a disclaimer mentioning the use of the network is at the user’s risk, you should still take the due diligence to at the very least protect to a certain extent users from those with malicious intent.
- Protect your IP address reputation: If a guest attempts to access content that is deemed illegal, this can be traced back to your public IP address. For this reason sites and content, restriction needs to be applied.
- Protect your bandwidth: Prevent a guest from using all of your available Internet bandwidth thereby creating a poor user experience for both other guests and you the provider of the service.
How does a Public WiFi solution look like?
Here is a quick breakdown of how a public WiFi solution should look.
- Provide an acknowledgement and disclaimer page: Upon connection to the Public WiFi, the user should be provided with a disclaimer page that they need to acknowledge before they are allowed to browse.
- Use separate networks: If you can, provide a second ISP link for the public WiFi or virtually split your current network into two, keeping one for private and the second for the public WiFi.
- Implement content restriction: Use content restriction tools to prevent access to illegal.
- Implement bandwidth restriction: To prevent a single user from hugging all the bandwidth, restrict the maximum individuals can utilize at a single point in time.
- Implement access time restriction: No point enabling the public WiFi while your business is closed. This prevents freeloaders in the car park helping themselves while contributing zero to your establishment.
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