Free Wi-Fi has become one of those things people simply expect. Check into a hotel, arrive for a meeting or sit down for a coffee and it usually isn’t long before someone asks, “What’s the Wi-Fi password?”
For businesses, providing it sounds simple enough. You have an internet connection, you give people the password and everybody’s happy. The question our engineers are more interested in is what those visitors can get to once they’re connected – and it’s exactly why proper guest Wi-Fi solutions matter more than most businesses realise.
At iTek, we’ve installed Wi-Fi for hotel, offices, workshops, leisure businesses and across sites where getting a signal from one end to the other is considerably more complicated than sticking a router in the corner. Cumbria also likes to give us thick stone walls, sprawling buildings and the occasional outdoor area for good measure.
Ben genuinely enjoys this stuff. We appreciate that not everybody does.
Give guests the Wi-Fi, not the house keys
Network segmentation sounds more complicated than it is. Think of it as giving someone access to the parts of your building they need without also handing them the keys to the office, stockroom, and filing cabinets.
Guest Wi-Fi should work in much the same way. Visitors get a reliable internet connection, while the computers, servers, printers, CCTV, payment systems and other technology running the business stay on the other side of the fence.
Having a network called “Guest Wi-Fi” doesn’t necessarily mean that’s happening, either. Brad can put an access point on a ceiling beautifully, but what he’s really good at is configuring how the network behind it works.
A separate password is one thing; properly separating the traffic is another.
Then 50 people try to connect at once
Security is only half the job because guest Wi-Fi still needs to be good Wi-Fi.
In a hotel, guests might be streaming in their rooms while staff are using booking and payment systems. In an office, the team could be on Teams calls while a meeting room full of visitors connects their laptops and phones. Add a function, conference or busy weekend and suddenly a network that seemed perfectly happy on Tuesday morning has rather more to think about.
Good Wi-Fi therefore starts with how the building is actually used. We look at the number of people connecting, where they need coverage, what the business systems require and which traffic needs priority.
Then there are the buildings themselves. We’ve encountered plenty of thick Cumbrian walls over the years, and they have many fine qualities; helping a Wi-Fi signal travel from one side of a building to the other isn’t generally one of them.
Your guest Wi-Fi could earn its keep
There’s another reason to think beyond simply handing out a password. If you’re already providing Wi-Fi to customers, particularly in hospitality, leisure or visitor attractions, it can become another useful point of contact with them.
A branded login page, what’s technically called a captive portal, can welcome visitors, provide useful information or offers and, with the right consent and privacy arrangements in place, give people the option to join your mailing list.
There can also be useful information in how the guest network is being used, which can help businesses understand demand and plan their service more effectively.
Nobody should discover that connecting to the Wi-Fi has somehow committed them to marketing emails until 2047, of course. If you’re collecting personal information, people need to know what you’re collecting and what they’re agreeing to.
Done properly, though, guest Wi-Fi doesn’t have to be another business cost quietly sitting in the background. It can give something back.
And yes, people will use it for things you'd rather they didn't
Give the public an internet connection and you can’t assume everyone is going to use it to check the weather in Kendal.
Appropriate Wi-Fi content filtering can restrict access to unsuitable, harmful or malicious content, which helps protect the network as well as the people working within the business. It can also reduce the chances of staff being put in an uncomfortable position because of material somebody else has accessed using a connection the business provides.
This isn’t about Adam sitting at iTek HQ monitoring what somebody in room 14 is Googling. Nobody wants that job. It’s simply about putting sensible controls around a service you’re providing.
Good guest Wi-Fi should be pretty uneventful
That’s probably the best compliment you can give it. Customers connect without thinking about it, staff systems carry on working, inappropriate content is filtered and the business network remains safely separate in the background.
Getting to that point takes a little more thought than putting the broadband router behind reception and writing the password on a chalkboard.
At iTek, we design, install and support guest Wi-Fi for businesses across Cumbria and the North West, – Carlisle, Kendal, Windermere and beyond – from straightforward office networks to much larger installations across hotels, leisure businesses and multi-building sites.
So, if your guest and business Wi-Fi have been happily sharing everything for the past five years, it might be time we had a look.
We’ll even try not to judge the comms cabinet while we’re there.
Get in touch with the team to start the conversation.