How to design motel rooms internet (metered connection for guests)

[toxsickcity]

Hi.

 

My aunt has a motel which she has asked me to see what's required to get internet into her rooms..

Instead of simply hooking up a bunch of wifi routers on hotspot mode and giving everyone unlimited which I think would be very easy.. but a bad idea. 

I need to learn how to limit and create login accounts etc...

 

I have a fairly large background in computers. I run a small scale computer support business. Have setup endless office networks, home networks but my aunt wants to enable internet in her motel rooms.

 

I remember openmesh would have been a possibility but now taken over and is a paid service.

 

Is there any projects that are open source and free to setup and install?

I need to do this on a fairly tight budget

 

Main requirement would be to have data allowance per login to the service..

Such as login user being room number..

Then a specific password for each room.. that resets daily and maybe gives each user 800MB

Just as an example.

 

I hope someone here knows this sort of thing and can guide me.

 

If it does matter we are in rural western Australia.

 

Many thanks

Shaun

 

 

[mariushm]

I'm not really familiar with this, but if I had to research like you, I'd start by looking into PPOE ... how to set up a ppoe server. This way, each person in the hotel would have to login with a username and password and they'll be connected to the Internet ... the username could be Room##  and password, something you can reset/change each time a person gets a room.

 

As for limits, I'm not sure how you could impose them... there's probably scripts.

A specific number of MB per day would be kinda cruel ... you get into a Facebook page and you're downloading a few megabytes. This page is probably 500 KB or so in logos, avatars, signatures and banners and ads.

 

Ideally, you could set up a transparent proxy that would cache ads and stuff people often access and reduce some of the bandwidth used.

 

The easiest would probably be to connect each room to a network switch and force the network ports to 10mbps and you basically force each room to 10 mbps. You probably wouldn't be able to watch 1080p videos on Youtube, but 720p would work.

 

You could probably also add some traffic shaping like for example "any connection gets unlimited speed for the first 10s or 200-500 KB, then gets limited to 3-4 mbps " or something like that .. 3-4 mbps would still allow people to watch a 720p video on youtube.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Look at the unifi system. You can have a guest portal setup that people need to login to, and they have a pretty seamless system to do this.

[brwainer]

For a proper connection to the PMS (Property Management System), meaning that the guest network gateway is tied into the database of which rooms are actually checked in so that people don’t just get internet by putting in any room that might not be paid, I’m not aware of any free / open source software. One of the big names in this space is Nomadix, there are other companies but I’m not familiar with any of their names. You can try asking the vendor of the PMS software if they know of any guest internet systems that support integration with your PMS.

 

For lower end hotels and motels, it is much more common to have either access codes (one code for everyone, changed anywhere between once a day and never - the most common are monthly and never) or vouchers (one-time use codes that allow access for a certain length of time and/or amount of data). For this I recommend the Unifi system (access control is applied by the APs in conjunction with the controller), or PFSense (access control is applied by the firewall/gateway). PFSense is the main free and open source option I command recommend.

[toxsickcity]

I think I am going to go way of unifi

I have done alot of reading and talking sounds like a robust and smart system

 

Alot of people say it's easy to setup!