topic Offering free WiFi in Archive

Offering free WiFi

hgpotter — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:15:02 GMT

I run a small cafe and want to offer my customers free wi-fi. How can I do this without having to give out WEP key?

Re: Offering free WiFi

Tracey — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:10:15 GMT

Hi hgpotter,

I am afraid you are not able to allow customer to have access to your Wi-fi without giving them the WEP key.

However we do have Openzone which you can become a reseller of the vouchers to your customers.

Hope this is of help

Tracey

BT Forum Moderator

Re: Offering free WiFi

Sogo7 — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:42:58 GMT

Well you could just write the WEP key on the chalk-board or make the key all zeros and change the ssid to read 'key is 0000000000'

However, I cannot stress this enough.

An open or unsecured WiFi connection is asking for trouble of the worst kind. For anybody can use your connection to download movies and various flavours of unsavoury pornography DAY or NIGHT provided they are near enough. Range is subjective and varies upon the surrounding area but will typically extend well beyond the confines of your premises.

Any legal proceedings as a result of copyright infringement or viewing material of an obscene nature using your connection will be planted at your feet with no defence posibble.

Re: Offering free WiFi

secretsquirrel — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 19:27:30 GMT

"Any legal proceedings as a result of copyright infringement or viewing material of an obscene nature using your connection will be planted at your feet with no defence posibble."

What law is that then?

If I leave my car runing while I pop back into my house to get something and some one steals it, it does not make me repsonsible for any crime they commit in it!

Re: Offering free WiFi

Sogo7 — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:50:41 GMT

I feel your pain and the car analogy is good up to point however,

what if you had or might have benifited from the alleged theft?

One would have to prove that the 20k in used notes buried in the garden was nothing to do with bank robbers who had earlier stolen your car.

I believe the legal term is "burden of proof". You have to prove there was unauthorised access to the router Wifi then finger the true culprit, bearing in mind they almost certainly spoofed your mac address to cover their tracks so the router logs your laptop as the only one ever being on system. This is often the case with domestic wifi cracking, coffee shops as described above the hacker may well just use a randomly generated one.