Setting Up a Wi-Fi Hotspot

If you are serious about running a hotspot business then it will be useful for you to know the basics involved in setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot. There are primarily two ways to enable your business venture with its very own Wi-Fi hotspot business. The first way is to contact a third party hotspot provider, who will do all of the hard work for you, but at a price. The second way is to do it yourself, purchasing all the equipment, software and associated peripherals and installing a high speed internet connection. For the purpose of this article we will presume that the business has made the decision to take the second option, and set up their own Wi-Fi hotspot.

First comes the planning
The most vital stage in achieving a successful implementation of a robust and fully operation Wi-Fi hotspot is the planning stage. You will need to decide firstly how large you intend your Wi-Fi hotspot to be in terms of both the number of online users, and the overall coverage area. Once you have made these decisions you can move on to the actual procurement of equipment.

Install high speed internet
Based on the number of concurrent Wi-Fi hotspot users as chosen in the planning stage, you will need to procure an internet connection that is sufficiently fast to service them well. Typically you will need to allow 256kbps of download bandwidth per active user, and around 32kbps of upload bandwidth.

Procure the wireless equipment
Depending upon the size of the coverage area decided during the planning stage, a variety of different pieces of equipment may need to be purchased. For smaller Wi-Fi hotspots, a single high quality wireless router may be all that is needed. The best hotspot software can automate the whole process of setting up and managing a hotspot with a single router, to the degree that anybody can do it without profdessional help.

If the Wi-Fi hotspot covers a larger area or has a more complex floor plan, you may need wireless repeaters or extenders. This falls into the realm of network extension rather than hotspot setup and is a very common issue -- many people do this themselves but, if you are not knowlegeable about networks, any local computer support service can help you extend your coverage. Even with a larger or more complex hotspot area, again, good hotspot software can make it easy and simple to set up and maintain the hotspot, and even take care of hotspot subscriptions and charges.

Procure the Wi-Fi hotspot software
If you are going to be running a hotspot business that uses a paid Wi-Fi hotspot then you are going to need some software to get this working. You will need to trap any TCP/IP traffic and then route the user to a special, local web page that can take credit card details and process the transaction, before issuing a password to log in to the Wi-Fi hotspot for a period of time. Free Wi-Fi hotspots seldom use passwords of any form so, from that point of view, specialist software is not required to set one up. However, even for a free hotspot, there are other benefits in using a good dedicated software solution to host your hotspot. Good hotspot software will allow you to implement better security, and to better control your users' actions and give them a better experience when using your hotspot. The right software can also make the setup much quicker and easier, to the point where setup is automated. You can even dissallow certain IP addresses or URLs which are known to cause problems. This last feature can be automated or manually set up very easily.

Configure your new hotspot
Plug all the equipment together, install any required software, and then configure everything. Until recently, this was a fairly complicated process if you really intended to set up a robust, fast and secure Wi-Fi hotspot. Now, for a single-router hotspot, the whole setup process can be automated by using the right hotspot software. Even with more complex network requirements, whilst you may need help to extend the network coverage, a non-technical person can easily get the hotspot set up and running.