Short pieces on the questions that come up when a property actually has to run guest Wi-Fi — written for the person who owns the place, not for a network engineer.
None of these are about Wi-Fi equipment. They are about tables, customers and quiet Tuesdays — and the Wi-Fi turns out to be the answer more often than you would think.
One coffee, one laptop, the best seat, nine till five. Let the equipment have the awkward conversation.
Every “what’s the Wi-Fi?” interrupts a sale, and the password ends up on the bench outside. Take the sign down for good.
You cannot email a card payment. The four seconds when a walk-in customer tells you who they are, and how to keep the junk addresses out.
Reviews are written by the annoyed unless everybody gets asked. How to ask everyone, automatically, at the right moment.
The A-board faces the wrong way and Instagram showed it to eleven people. Get on the one screen everybody in the room is reading.
Real specifications, checked against each vendor’s own pages rather than a guest count nobody publishes — and no prices, because we don’t sell this hardware.
hEX refresh, hEX S, L009 or RB5009 — compared on ports, PoE and real routing headroom.
Dream Router, Cloud Gateway and the U7 access point range — and why the console is not optional for us on UniFi.
Standalone EAP versus the full Omada ecosystem — gateway, controller and access points, honestly compared.
AP22, AP25 and AP32, and the Secure Gateway pairing — now sold as HPE Networking Instant On.
Why Cisco Business Wireless has one current model, and when Meraki is actually worth its licence cost.
ECW220, ECW230 and the XG60-FIT gateway — and why the router underneath barely matters here.
Written for the person who owns the place, not for a network engineer.
Devices per room, contention ratios, the arithmetic that decides whether Friday night works — and the satellite overage bill that catches resorts out.
Wi-Fi is one of the three things that drag a review score down most, and the score sets the rate. What the data says, and the ten-minute friction that causes it.
Not a ranking. The five places platforms actually differ, written so you can put them to anyone, including us.
The words the guides use, defined once: the glossary →
Have a question that is not here? Ask it. If enough owners ask the same thing, it becomes the next guide. Ask us anything →
The guides say what to do. The device pages say what your kit can do: Ubiquiti UniFi, TP-Link Omada, MikroTik, Aruba Instant On, Cisco Meraki, Ruckus, EnGenius and thirty-three more. The full list →
