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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Deploying WLAN for office visitors and guests

Hong Kong is an entreprenual society, as such our economy thrives on small and medium enterprises. A lot of these organisations have minimal IT support if any and yet are huge consumers of the latest IT products and keep up with trends.

Wireless LAN (WLAN) or as its more popular name WiFi is increasing in usage in our city particularly as people start using handheld devices such as PDA's and the new generations of mobile phones with WiFi support.

A business doesn't work in isolation and one has visitors, vendors, customers and guests all coming into an office location. Whilst the office staff is generally networked very well (typically with a wired network), visitors are generally left without any access or sometimes offered access via the office WLAN.

Offering access via the office WLAN or even via a wired connection opens up the risk of having an external entity access to an office's internal network. I'll leave it to your imagination as to what could possibly go wrong here (virus infection, internal file shares visible etc).

Whilst it is always possible to deny any form of Internet access to a visitor, it is possible via a La Fonera not only to provide access but at the same time be secure.

You may rightfully ask

Won't it require the visitor/guest" to be a fonero so that he could connect to our office's FON Access Point ?

The answer is

  • Use the Friends and Family mechanism available by logging in on the FON User Zone.

The Friends and Family mechanism in the FON User Zone enables a fonero to setup local users on his FON Access Point with an associated password. This username and password is specific to that FON Access Point.

Thus with this mechanism, one could allow access to the Internet to visitors/guests in an office environment and still have them separate from the office internal network. Hmm, isn't this like having your cake and eating it too ?

 

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