Best of the ISP-Lists

Fixed Wireless Equipment

Setting Up a Hotspot

WISPs share advice on adding a hotspot to your network.

[September 4, 2008]

On the ISP-Wireless list in August, TH asked:

Not trying to start any wars here, but I was wondering what everyone is using for hotspots and the advantage (if any) of "rolling your own" or going with an appliance designed for it.... pros / cons

[AV wrote] "We actually have a very, very simple hotspot set up with a MikroTik that we put into our local park. Nothing more than user gets a splash page that tells them to enter a username and password and gives them access to the Internet.

The MikroTik worked out pretty well for us since we was using it, anyway, to link up to one of our APs. So we just have two 2.4 GHz radios in a MT and enabled the hotspot service."

[TH replied] "a couple I have found:

http://www.chillispot.info/index.html ... comments?

and on the other side....

http://www.tranzeo.com/products/docs/ISS6000.pdf

http://www.handlink.com/eng/products/broadband/
iss6000/products_broadband_iss6000.htm

I am in the process of setting up a couple of hotspots that I want customers to be able to sign in with credit card or hotel code ... I am not scared of set-up/configuration but don't want to spend a ton of time in a learning curve. I am thinking of a Tranzeo TR-6600 or TR -6000 radio coupled with ??? "

[TU warned] "Stay away from the "ORIGINAL" version. It's not well supported anymore. If you want to use this software, look to :

http://coova.org/wiki/index.php/CoovaChilli

and then for the front end to it :

http://theuamcenter.sourceforge.net/"

[SA suggested] "Air Marshall by IEA has worked great for us for a long time now. Has sign up server that works great, runs on lin or win."

[RL asked] "Has anyone found a less costly way to do Hotspot billing?"

PJ brought the conversation back to Mikrotik:

"We have our hotspot solution running on Mikrotik and it's running well.

We have two scenarios, one where the hotspot stuff is all handled locally on the MT box, and another where we run EOIP bridges between the hotspot site and a central Hotspot controller running MT as well and run multiple hotspot interfaces on that, better for centralised management that way plus we can then use proxy cache and other things like PPPOE options and the like. Then we run Mikrotik User Manager in the backend for authentication and use a prepaid card style of access with a username and password on it. It can be sold or given away depending on the requirement of the host site. This is a pretty easy system to setup, you can even integrate authorize.net and paypal I think and other stuff with it if you want, it can handle all of that, plus we use custom scripted login pages which allows us to do advertising and pretty much whatever we want before and whilst the user is logging in.

Hope that helps."

—End