An OpenWrt router running CoovaChilli as its sign-in system. This is what several white-box makers ship with their own menu on top.
Three things decide what a venue actually gets. The first two are the same everywhere in this list. The third is where equipment differs, and it is the reason each page says so plainly.
Your logo, your colours, your welcome message, in the guest's own language — and every way in you have switched on, from room number and surname to a tap on Google.
Speed, time limit and how many devices each guest may bring, applied by the equipment itself rather than being a promise on a page.
When your front desk reports a departure, the guest is taken offline there and then — not at the end of their time limit. Nobody has to remember to do anything.
How the equipment talks to us: This equipment cannot encrypt those questions on its own, so we set up a private link between the site and us and they travel inside it. It dials out; nothing needs opening up on your broadband.
Sold as small-venue equipment, supported here in full. Some guest Wi-Fi platforms run only on enterprise access points and turn this make away. Here it gets the same sign-in page and the same enforced plans as everything else on the list, the room-and-surname login for a hotel that runs it, and checkout ends a running session immediately.
None of this is work we do for you — it is the state the equipment needs to be in before the short part begins. A step that fails for something on this list is a wasted visit, which is why it is here rather than buried in a manual.
Not sure whether your site meets it? Send us a photo of the equipment and we will tell you.
Every make has its own quirks. These are the ones that matter on OpenWrt with CoovaChilli — not because they are problems, but because knowing them in advance turns a site visit into a short one.
Roughly half an hour on a straightforward site, most of it waiting for equipment to restart. Your console writes out every value for your property in advance — there is nothing to work out and nothing to invent.
You register the router, controller or access point in your Resort Manager Hotspot console. It generates everything the following steps need — the address of your sign-in page, the credentials, the settings — already filled in with your property's own values. Nobody copies a setting out of a manual and nobody types a password twice.
A guest who has not signed in yet has no internet, so the equipment is given a short list of addresses that stay open regardless — the sign-in page among them. Your console writes that list out in the exact form this equipment expects.
This equipment has no encryption of its own for these questions, so a private link is brought up between the site and us and they travel inside it. It dials out from the site, so again nothing has to be opened up on your broadband.
The guest Wi-Fi is set to open, with your branded page in place of the equipment's own. Usage recording is switched on at the same time — that is both your reporting and, in the countries that require it, the connection log you are obliged to keep.
Join the network on a phone, sign in, and watch the session appear in your console. Then end that session from the console and confirm the phone drops. The last step is the proof — everything before it can look right while the checkout half is not working.
Most sites come down to a choice between two or three of these. The pages below cover the ones closest to OpenWrt with CoovaChilli.
Equipment that reaches us by the same route, so the same things have to be true at the property: Zyxel without Nebula (USG FLEX) · Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess Stellar · ANTlabs IG (formerly InnGate) · Arista Cognitive WiFi (formerly Mojo)
Then there is nothing to buy. Tell us what you have and we will confirm the details for your site — or set the whole thing up for you, which is a service we offer.
