Last summer, John challenged churches to offer free WiFi like Starbucks. An excellent idea, too.
What would it look like if the local ministries and churches began offering free WiFi to anyone who would drive up, without forcing them to register or even have them “buy” anything?
What do you think would happen? One thing is for sure – I’d love to see it happen more often!
And it did!
About a month later, John announced a church had taken him up on his challenge.
What do you think about an open wireless connection?
Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent out a call to action encouraging people to join the Open Wireless Movement.
Meanwhile, the Buffalo, NY police department is spinning cautionary tales of innocent people being falsely accused of being pedophiles, complete with full police SWAT teams ramming down their door. The message: Secure your network!
In this scenario, free WiFi wasn’t free at all; it came with a price, and many of you weighed in on the matter. There was certainly a mix of reactions. Some blamed the PD, while others said users need to increase their router security.
In fact, researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan designed a new paint that absorbs WiFi signals, thus adding an actual physical WiFi security via signal deflection. No need to worry about your neighbor cracking your code, then!
This seems to be a polarizing issue. We certainly don’t live in a utopia. It would be nice to offer free WiFi, but what if someone uses it to victimize children!?!
None the less many people still run open Wi-Fi networks in order to share the wealth—although lots of people use their router software to limit how much bandwidth other users can suck up.
What do you think?
Where do you stand on the issue?
Free WiFi or secure WiFi?
[HT How-To Geek]
we offer free secure (as secure as WEP is) wifi at our church, the password is the churches phone number. The wifi network is physically isolated from the work/production network to avoid congregants/crackers getting access to important files.
That’s a good middle ground.
I fall in to teh yes camp.
We’ll be offering free wifi very soon. Our mesh kit is on order and once it’s installed it will be open to the church and non-church alike (if the signal is strong enough).
The public traffic will be limited and will be filtered but not monitored and I’m undecided whether to do a one time free registration but will certainly have a splash page stating wifi provided by…
To my mind it’s another tool to draw folks in so why not.
You’ve really thought your strategy through.
I like it. I like it, a lot.
I am in favor of free wifi. But I do not think you have to give up your own secure wifi. I have a fairly cheap router that has a guest wifi option that I leave open and unsecure.
Especially for business and churches where people gather, having free wifi is just part of the deal. People need internet access for almost eveything. So if you have a meeting at the church, you should have some provision for free wifi.
exactly what i was thinking, you can have the best of both worlds, offer free but have a secured network for the actual church network…
Word.
We’re currently in the yes boat as well. However with a few reservations.
We do provide free public wifi, which is currently physically isolated from our “office” network. While our other AP’s all serve wifi around our building, we’ve only deployed one public access point, and significantly turned town it’s transmit power with the intention of limiting wifi usage to the coffee shop area of our facility.
We do limit bandwidth to a collective total of 500kbps / 100kbps on the public AP. We also limit protocols on the public AP to only HTTP and POP3/IMAP traffic to prevent “abuse.” OpenDNS also provides content filtering for the content, so it’s a relatively “risk-free” platform, granted OpenDNS isn’t perfect, but it gives us some metrics as to what content is flowing through the AP. If something unusual should come about, we may reconsider this configuration in the short run.
This summer we intent to do a bit of an overhaul. We currently run a conglomeration of various DD-WRT compatible AP’s, this summer we intent to segment our virtual SSID’s onto VLAN’s and connect all of our AP’s onto one physical network and rely on VLAN’s to segment traffic and keep all of our users where they need to be, and out of where they don’t.
You just blew it up.
Awesome.
We have offered free wi-fi for about 4 years now throughout most of our campus. It is on a separate DSL network from our church office T1 line which protects our file servers and systems from unauthorized users. It is an open unsecured wi-fi signal but we use a Sonicwall router using robust Content Protection which will block any site that has content we want to restrict ranging from porn to political.
We also have a member of our congregation who is a police detective that works on the Child Protection Force and they actively pursue child pornography and child internet abuse. He has talked with us at length about our systems and how we can help protect everyone who uses our public wi-fi. It has been a good experience so far.
I’m happy to here so much pro-action.
Awesome!