So you own a little café and you think it would be cool to set up a hotspot for your customers to use, eh? If you want to set up a free hotspot, here’s all you need:
A reliable broadband Internet connection. DSL, cable, or T-1 will work nicely.
A wireless access point. For a small hotspot, a simple consumer-grade access point (like a Linksys wireless router) will do fine.
A sign to tell your customers about the hotspot and how to connect to it.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it than this. Here are a few additional issues to consider:
You need a firewall to prevent your customers from poking around inside your private network. The wireless access point should be outside of the firewall.
No matter how good your sign is, your customers will have questions about how to connect. So in addition to how to make a mocha latte, you need to teach your employees how to help customers connect to your hotspot.
Your broadband provider may not appreciate it if you let the general public access the Internet through your wireless access point. In fact, your service contract may prohibit it. As a result, you probably need to pay a bit more to share your broadband connection with the general public.
If you want to charge for hotspot access, you’ve got a lot more work to do. In particular, you need to devise a way to charge your customers. The easiest way to do this is to purchase a single-box solution that includes the necessary wireless devices as well as software that handles the authentication and billing.
dummies
Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/wireless-network-administration-setting-up-a-hotsp.html
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