I have written about FON before (they provide a business model for sharing one’s bandwidth through Wifi). They use a custom firmware for the Linksys WRT54G routers. I have the feeling that current Wifi routers (or access points) cannot offer a good balance of security/flexibility. Opening your own network for everyone is currently too dangerous. There’s Wifi trolls that gobble up your bandwidth and there’s hackers that scan your ports for vulnerabilities. My idea is that now you would need 2 Wifi zones, one behind the other, each having different security and different policies. With access points costing as little as 25 euro, that is not a big investment.
I see 2 scenario’s:
Scenario 1: first the public
- Description
- The first router is connected to your broadband and serves the PUBLIC zone (e.g. SSID “FREEWIFI”). On one of the wired Ethernet connections (the Linksys has 4 of those) the other router is connected, that serves the PRIVATE zone (e.g. SSID “PROTECTED”). Both are in a different IP range. The PUBLIC one requires no login, the PRIVATE one requires WPA + maybe MAC address checking.
- PRO
- * both the Internet and the PUBLIC zone are outside your PRIVATE network, so you can have the same firewall settings for both, and ‘dangerous’ traffic never passes over your INTERNAL network.
* the first router can be configured to prioritize traffic from the fixed ports i.e. the PRIVATE network.
- CONTRA
- * If the PUBLIC router does not support QoS (Quality of Service) or bandwidth shaping, then a wifi troll can consume all the available bandwidth, and the PRIVATE network is left without anything.
* if the PUBLIC router is broken (or switched off) no one has Internet connection.
Continue reading ‘Double Wifi: municipal wifi with protection’
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