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Trying to sort this for my mother. She has a holiday cottage she lets out next to her house and wants the guests to be able to access wifi whilst they are staying. The holiday cottage has no landline but she has BT wifi. So far she has advised them to use the the BT fon that the router also transmits but the wifi strength in the cottage is terrible. I have tried to set up a range extender/repeater to increase the range of the Fon but it seems flaky at best with most folk who try to access it reporting it fails for them.
Repeating her actual wifi appears dead easy and quite stable - I did this for her when she lived in the cottage for a bit and it was reliable for months. Just seems to be something about the Fon that makes it not play nicely.
So in the real world what are the risks of sharing your wifi with others and how can you reduce any risks?
Many thanks.
I'd be very wary if she does any local file sharing between devices or doesn't have good security on all of her wi-fi enabled devices.
Maybe easiest to set up a second wi-fi router closer to the holiday cottage and wire it into the home hub? she can set it so it only has access to the outside world via the modem then?
Having said all that, my Mum would be lost trying to achieve this.
You can get routers that run two wireless networks, a main one and a guest one. The guest network can have access to the internet but not devices. Sounds like the sort of thing you need. Don't know exactly which ones but apple's airport extreme is an example.
If you're OK fettling etc. you could load up DD-WRT on a router and use that?
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Guest_Network
Some routers allow you to set up more than one wireless access point. My netgear does this.
That would be my first step.
That way you can have one named "ConvertsMumsHolidayCottage" or whatever for guests to connect to with a well known password and another second one that doesn't broadcast its name for your mum to use privately.
Doing this should mean that guests are on an entirely separate sub-network.
Many thanks fellas - that's my google searching keywords for tonight whilst watching silent witness sorted!