Secured Guest Wireless Access

 

Providing guest WiFi is a necessity and expected in virtually any industry. This provides access to the internet for your visiting users or employees' personal devices. However, it can also open up your network to several potential issues and threats. Engineers at ConsultX design guest wireless so your corporate network will be protected from allowing unmanaged, unregulated devices to gain internet access. We start with methods such as using VLANs, access control lists, or physically separate internet connections in order to control what the guest devices have access to.

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Guest access policies can vary based on the business requirements for accessing the guest wireless network. Options include:

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• Lobby administrators: A person within the organization manually creates usernames and passwords for guests to access wireless through a splash portal page. These are used by businesses who do not want to allow anyone within range of the guest SSID to be allowed to access.

• Self-Registration: This is where the user receives a splash page and is required to enter information before they can access the internet. Items such as name, email, phone number, or social logins are all options to require a user to enter. SMS Authentication is also available to confirm the users phone number is real. It is possible to use access codes to limit usage to only those people who receive the code.

• Wide open WiFi: Some organizations will prefer to simply allow anyone to immediately access the guest wireless without any form of authentication. However there is no method to identify any device except by its encoded hardware address.
   

Additional security options include preventing peer to peer communications, adding per user bandwidth controls, and restricting certain application types from being used. Monitoring what users have access to and how much bandwidth they are consuming will be important to ensure the primary business internet availability is balanced with the guest internet usage.