If you have ever tried to implement one of the hotspot HowTos on this and other sites, it might have dawned on you that this is not an easy feat to accomplish. Amazingly most solutions also leave out the most important part – how to get paid by the punters using the hotspot. Some will offer prepaid solution or access tickets that need to be printed, but this will require staff being involved on the premises. And in particular, once you want to offer a professional service and not just a toy concept it gets tricky – and expensive. Just imagine all the servers you need to provide redundant and load balanced freeradius, mysql and web servers. It is generally not worth the effort and expense for just one hotspot – unless of course you are willing to accept outages, unhappy customers etc.

Nelle prossime settimane potrei trovarmi a configurare la connettività wireless di un albergo della mia zona. Approfitto quindi dell’occasione, anche nel caso in cui non se ne dovesse fare nulla, per scrivere un po’ di documentazione sulla configurazione di un sistema di accesso a Internet pubblico e controllato, sia wireless che cablato.