Networking & wireless forum: Can you help me stop the bandwidth leeches at my pub's free Wi-Fi hot spot?

Hi Andrew,

Just wanted to say that prior to reading your question, I hadn't realized that this might be a problem for business owners. I live in Manhattan, and used to frequently take my laptop and a DVD and go out to dinner by myself and watch a movie. Now, however, I keep a list of local restaurants that provide wi-fi, and I patronize them so I can have dinner and stream a movie to my iPad from Netflix.

Am I an inadvertent "bandwidth leech?" Is streaming as much of a drain as downloading? I certainly don't want to cause problems for the restaurants' owners, but I patronize these establishments because they offer free wi-fi, often dining somewhere that wouldn't otherwise be my first choice.

Should I rethink this?

Thanks!

You're funny... No, for what you pay for a sitdown dinner in Manhattan you should get a free movie *grin*. I am sure the Maitre D' is perfectly aware, they'd have otherwise long since told you to take your platinum card elsewhere. But you made a very good point - free WiFi has become part of expected service, and the business owner needs to make sure he or she covers the cost. That cost is tax deductible. You might ask the manager if it's OK, but I'd do that where dinner costs $15, not where it costs $50. Would I, as a business owner, stop a poor student with only a limited Blackberry data plan from downloading stuff? I might suggest they go to the library, but then again, the student might bring in his Zuckerbuddy, who happens to own the Universum, can I predict the future?

For the OP, Fonera is not a bad option, they have routers you can divvy up between public / controlled, and private, where the node sets in the router how much bandwidth is available to the public, and they may drive traffic to your pub, depending on where you are. Check it out.

Andrew
I can empathize with your situation having owned an ISP long ago
and I had similar issues

I suggest a very quick look at some smarter routers , even the wrt-DD "hacked"
types to facilitate 802.1p Quality of Service bandwidth throttling and instead of allowing
a full 8000K per second , how about a nice pinch down to 1024K for all types of
allowing SNTP and POP3 and the basics 512K (in both directions)?

Pinch that pipe
or
ask your service provider if they could limit the traffic;
the problem is that it takes special "appliances" to do this stuff
and its costly for a biz owner that must deal with drunks and waitress-shrinkage at the till
and probably other things

dont worry about "slower pipe" syndrome
you are paying for the access and providing a free? service

you can also configure wrt-DD router types for special pay-to-access
support although its unclear in the forums on the logistics of this service
and brings up the Quality of Service issues in reverse.

Password of the Day suggestions provide an extra barrier but your staff now have to
deal with announcing that // it may provide some control but wont limit your
per-packet cost


John (37 years Telecom, 9 years in ISPaccess)

Read many of the replies and they all offer good advice. It sounds that you have a pretty casual system set up there and assuming you don't have your own personal computer on this WiFi that you're trying to setup, I'd keep it simple and use either WEP or WPA and change my router password every few days. This should prevent anyone in the parking lot with a laptop or neighbors from grabbing your bandwidth. From there, I'd consider a 'terms of use' document that any of my guests needed to sign & date in exchange for a password.

So far as choking down your bandwidth to keep the bandwidth hogs at bay, here's a good article on that.
http://markmaunder.com/2011/01/26/how-to-reliably-limit-the-amount-of-bandwidth-your-room-mate-or-bad-office-colleague-uses/

I agree, check your state laws. There is no real way to make wifi 100% secure.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/05/michigan-man-arrested-for-using-cafes-free-wifi-from-his-car.ars

I know it doesn't do much for business but a few places I visit hand out passwords with a register receipt. That way even the leaches have to buy something. A good traffic manager could identify abusers and slowly throttle them down to frustration without affecting other users.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Chillispot

Chillispot, a hotspot service for use with dd-wrt routers.
Read up!

I run a small coffee shop, we serve about 100 meals a day mainly breakfasts and sell loads of coffee and tea. My free WifFi was made useless with the number of leachers which angered my paying customers, after all it was for them...
The solution came from a regular...I began collecting e-mail addresses from regulars to send out daily specials, news, and odd bits like trivia...my regulars all get a new password every week as well as a free coffee now and then.

I still have to give out the password to some who ask, or aren't regulars, but it's now a good service and a good reward for my customers. It takes three minutes to change once or twice a week and is always whatever is on special that week, this weeks password is 'scone' it's a simple thing to keep my customers happy, and even the kids who leach the signal once in a while end up having to buy something to get the password from me...and then it changes in the new e-mail flyer i send out.

On the positive side, i have a great e-mail client list, they love the specials that come in the emails, i sell out of everything on special, we have developed a great trivia game through the emails, and my problem was solved in a positive way with no angry people.

Surely it is password protected and you have to give anyone wishing to use it that password. if not then you should do so. Just means u change the password regularly.

Password of the day is one good answer.
Just having free internet useage opens up many issues you may have to deal with, and several people have offered some decent advice, but the best answer is to understand that just by having free internet service, you ARE drawing people into your business. You can try all the other things, but be careful that you are not turning people away in the process.

I have read through a good number of the posts above, although not all, and have the following thoughts:

First, a constantly/daily changing password will annoy your regulars. How much? I don't know, but it may cost you business.

I think your best solution would be to first, post your expectations to customers. Make sure they know that the service is not intended for high bandwidth use.

Second, configuring your local network. As noted by some, you need two separate networks: one for your business and one for your customers. This does not require two connections. Assuming your current bandwidth can handle all the traffic of both, you would probably want to go with a switch or router as the first point of connection which has no other services going, beyond basic routing activity. Not even a firewall. Connected to that are two separate routers, one for your business and one for your customers. If you have a powerful (expensive) enough business router, this can be done with just the one appliance. I am assuming you don't have some high-end Cisco or such appliance. On the router for customer use, it would need to have the ability to perform bandwidth throttling on individual connections. Decide how much bandwidth you want to allow any given user to pull at any given time, set the throttling to that amount and all is taken care of. You might want to consider a second, secure connection for "regulars" and special cases to whom you wish to provide more bandwidth.

The first customer connection would have no security beyond initial direction to a TOS agreement. This will pretty much eliminate any need of support. If you enable security, you will almost certainly regularly have problems with customers connecting and needing help. You don't want that. Any type of Firewall will cause a reduction in available bandwidth, so beyond the inherent NAT firewall, you probably don't want one.

As you move to increasingly costly and advanced routers, requiring more advanced and expensive technical skills to configure and operate, there are ways to allow users brief periods of high bandwidth but then fall back to a slower bandwidth after some period of time. This would allow the casual users higher performance while making life not so nice for the big file down-loaders/media users. You have to balance things like a $2000 router and a $100 an hour network person to setup and maintain against the cost of higher customer bandwidth use and possibly having to increase the bandwidth to your business. I like the one suggestion given regarding a Farady cage using chicken wire, but I'd have to question what that might do to things like cell phones and devices operating along those lines? Would that kill my phones 4G reception? ...

As others have pointed out however, the availability of the internet at such places is likely a significant draw to your business, providing you with additional customers who stay longer and probably purchase more so you have to carefully consider the advantages and disadvantages to any given approach. You might consider establishing some means of simply monitoring the bandwidth used by any given connection.

As others have also pointed out, the customer router/network should be off when the business is closed.

Check around and see if there are any ROI studies covering this topic. I expect that someone has done such and let that be your guide: what is the Return On Investment by providing various types of access?

With best wishes for your success,

Mike

MightyDrakeC,

If you notice, I mentioned the first step as a router or a switch. The point is to have something at the point of entry that allows for two separate networks and has the smallest impact upon bandwidth. This could be done with a single device for that matter. It would be possible to do this with an old computer, three network cards and Linux. Each router/firewall device has a negative impact upon data transfer. Having multiple one after the other incrementally reduces the final bandwidth available as well as increases perceived latency.

Also, the type of routers you are speaking of which are so cheap are usually not really appropriate for a business network. Most of the cheap ones you mention lack decent logging tools, bandwidth controls, etc. I have been looking at the new Asus RT-56N for my home for the very reason of network controls and logging.

Mike