Free Wifi - aaaargh!

[SheridanP]

Hello all. I recently bought into BT Business on the basis that I would be able to offer free wifi to my customers. Specifically I based my decision on this info (found here: http://business.bt.com/broadband-and-internet/wi-fi/business-benefits/): "Everyone in business needs wi-fi access these days. .... By having it in your premises, you can tap into this market. You can either offer it for free or earn money by re-selling BT Wi-fi vouchers." 

Now that I have had the router installed and received the free wifi login leafets (little purple things which I can give out to customers), it transpires that this "offer it for free" option is restricted to exisiting BT customers.

I want to offer free wifi to EVERYONE - not just BT customers. However, there seems to be no way to do this. This was the single most significant reason for choosing BT and I had discussed my requirements at length with various sales staff at BT. Now it seems that I been mis-sold the BT service. 

I have found other posts refering to this problem, particularly small cafes and small hotels, but no solutions. Is the only way round this to give customers my superuser/admin password? Or is there a way to set this up that I am missing? 

Any advice appreciated.

[andyt22]

If you're not at all bothered about security (that is, your customers are not going to be making credit card purchases on the Internet or anything like that), you can just plug a standard wireless access point such as a Netgear WG602 into your internal network and configure it as an entirely open WAP.. Your customers devices will connect to it and the DHCP server on your BT hub will assign them an IP address etc and they will get Internet access without being a BT customer.

But I don't recommend this as anyone (eg the business next door) could piggy-back onto your BT connection and help themselves to it for free!

[LinuxLady]

Hi,

There are a number of ways you can do this, depending on what your usage/privacy concerns are.

The simplest would be to have the wpa key displayed (or handed out) to people who wanted to use it and change it regularly. Not great, but it works. (NB this is the WPA key, not the router password - the two are different and can be set independently)

A better solution would be to switch off the wifi on the BT hub, get a cheap router (or AP) and set up a suitable captive portal. If you can get a suitable router that will run openwrt you can set up the captive portal using something like wifidog. Otherwise, get an old PC with a couple of network cards and set up something like untangle on the PC. This isn't trivial, but it isn't that difficult to do either.

TTFN

Faye