roll your own wisp

July 11, 2006 9:04 PM

roll your own wisp

we recently moved into a commercial loft building and are the only office with internet access. as people move in, they keep asking if they can share our wifi and say they're glad to pitch in.

so - what's the best way to set up a wisp that will allow me to charge people by the month with mac-address filtering?

thanks

posted by subpixel to technology (13 comments total)

i hate to possibly derail, but won't that violate your contract terms with your isp?
posted by lester at 9:14 PM on July 11, 2006

One of the first things you should consider is exactly what kind of contract you have with your Internet Service Provider. Many (most?) standard service agreements prohibit any kind of resale.

That's not to say you can't do it, but you're going to want to be careful not to piss off your ISP.
posted by bshort at 9:16 PM on July 11, 2006

I don't know if Speakeasy DSL is available in Brooklyn, but if it is, look into them. Last I knew, not only did their terms of service allow this, but they actually handled billing for you.

The mac-address filting, though, would have to be done on your access point. Also, I recommend protecting yourself from the people you're giving access to, with a dual-router setup.

ISP -> Public WIFI -> Private WIFI -> Your PCs

This way, anyone on the Public WIFI has access to the internet, but is firewalled off from your PCs by the Private WIFI router.
posted by CrayDrygu at 10:11 PM on July 11, 2006

openwrt
posted by pompomtom at 10:43 PM on July 11, 2006

I would not bother with maintaining MAC-address filter lists and crap like that. Have you ever tried to use a MAC-filtered system in an office setting? A client comes in with their laptop, and you'll have to fuck around with their computer in ways they might not be comfortable with, just so you can go through the rigamarole of adding them to the whitelist, so that they can get on the Internet, and get work done. It's not worth their time or yours.

Just take your neighbors' donations, Seriously.

Making it all 'official' and locked down means that you'll end up spending the money they are giving you on your time maintaining it instead of getting work done.
posted by blasdelf at 11:30 PM on July 11, 2006

Actually, along with the openwrt I should add:

chillispot
posted by pompomtom at 11:36 PM on July 11, 2006

blast.

erm, Chillispot
posted by pompomtom at 11:36 PM on July 11, 2006

Couple of thoughts:

First, if you're going into the business of being a wisp (wireless ISP), you want to look carefully at the technical requirements of what you expect to do, and match the equipment and services you provide to the cost of providing it, with some profit margin left for operational overages, maintenance and eventual upgrade. If you are only going to be providing service to 8 or 10 people, a single SOHO level wireless router and a DSL connection, with maybe a UPS for power protection, may be all you need. But if you are going to be providing services to 50 people, the SOHO level gear won't reliably cut it, as it won't have the internal processor speed, memory or wireless spectrum to keep 50 concurrent sessions running smoothly.

A lot depends, too, on physical layout and area. As your space fills with people and equipment, electrical noise goes up, and reflections and dead spots in the wireless signal field can become problematic. You may need a number of WAP devices, properly set up for adjacent area operation, to deliver reliable full speed connections to all users, in a typical cube farm office situation.

Finally, as others have noted upthread, security and privacy become legitimate concerns in shared office suite environments. You may need separate public and private wireless zones for each business, and some means of logging for intrusion detection and use/policy enforcement. You can probably cover some of this in contractual arrangements, but frankly this all more problematic in WiFi networks, which, at the low end, tend to lack VLAN support and other features commonly used to secure wired networks appropriately. So, you may need pro gear from the outset, to be able to provide such services, to limit legal liability.
posted by paulsc at 12:25 AM on July 12, 2006

As long as it's just a couple people, just divide the cost, like roommates sharing utility bills.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 6:27 AM on July 12, 2006

Be careful. I wanted to go down the OpenWRT route but Linksys have just changed their hardware so that it's now impossible to install OpenWRT on a standard WRT54G. Double check what hardware you are going to use if you go down the OpenWRT route.
posted by tommorris at 7:31 AM on July 12, 2006

Be careful. I wanted to go down the OpenWRT route but Linksys have just changed their hardware so that it's now impossible to install OpenWRT on a standard WRT54G. Double check what hardware you are going to use if you go down the OpenWRT route.
posted by tommorris at 9:31 AM CST on July 12 [+fave] [!]


Do some googling and searching on Digg. It's now possible to install linux (didn't read the article, so don't know if it was OpenWRT,DDWRT,etc) on those models.
posted by cellphone at 9:05 AM on July 12, 2006

Here Re: new Linksys routers
posted by cellphone at 10:49 AM on July 12, 2006

OpenWRT will run on the WRT54G v5 if you strip it down hard, but v4 hardware (either as the WRT54GL or just older boxes) is still pretty easy to find, and will run the full distribution.
posted by baylink at 11:19 AM on July 12, 2006