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Customer Wireless Solution

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by thedan

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My company wants to add wireless access for customers in waiting areas. However, I do not want our employees taking their laptops to work and abusing company time and resources. Currently, the waiting areas have wired connections with unrestricted internet access. What is the best way to allow customers (who may return regularly) wireless internet access, yet prevent the company from becoming a hotspot for its employees and other non-customers?

Short of somehow reducing the range of the AP's to the perimeter of the waiting areas, I've not yet found a definite solution. The closest thing to what I need that I could gather was using IAS with a MAC filter and session timeouts (user connects >> MAC address is logged >> after X minutes, MAC is disconnected and blocked indefinitely). While the concept works, anyone could simply spoof another random MAC address every X minutes to have infinite access.

Important note: customer access is on its own VLAN and gateway (obviously separating it from the rest of our network).

6 replies

by fred123456

We have a similar problem here. We allow jurors to surf the web on our "Public" wireless network which is through out the courthouse. We have scripts in place that check each device that attaches to the network. If it is a "courts" device it rejects the connection.
But for personal laptops their is not much we can do other than enforce the "no personal hardware/software" policy in the courthouse.

by dan.cox

We use directional antenna's.
We put them in the ceiling above the area we was access allowed and the computers have to be in that area. The signal will go straight down from those antenna's and will not go out sideways to other area's.
I would assume your employees should not be hanging out in the waiting area's that you have. So this should work ok.

by virtual1

So basically your boss wants to open an internet cafe because its cool but doesn't want to charge his customers for it and he doesn't want to provide any filtering either?

I've got a little experience with this but it usually ends up in heartache for the client. Ask your boss these questions.

1) Do you want to be liable for the objectionable content that your guests download to their laptops that your female employees can see when walking through the waiting areas and be sued for not providing a safe workplace?

2) What if a child were to walk by that person who was viewing objectionable content?

With that said do a google search for internet cafe software.

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&rlz=1T4GGIG_enUS245US246&q=internet+cafe+software&btnG=Search

by thedan

We don't want to charge anyone for the connection (they are in the waiting room because they are already paying us). Nor do we want to block any content.

The point is to allow customers to continue whatever computer activity they might otherwise be doing if they didn't have to sit in a waiting area (if someone wants to browse questionable sites, that's they're liability, not ours; we are not public property).

The goal beyond that is to prevent employees from losing productivity to the temptation of bringing their own wireless devices.

I was recently given the idea of incorporating a Cisco NAC solution, but I hear it's expensive. Anyone with experience on that?

by virtual1

you can install a gateway that communicates with a radius server that pulls in your customer data to authenticate the user based on the criteria in the database

this is the way that the hotel / motel industry does it.

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