Hi all,

OK, I know that this is both sooooooo way off topic and commercial, I deserve a flaming from hell (I've just put on my asbestos y-fronts, in case), but as this group is the most varied teccy assembly I know, there's bound to be somebody here who can point me in the right direction.

I have a client who owns two hotels. They want to do two things:

1 - VPN between them.
2 - Give Internet access to bedrooms and conference rooms

Now, the first option is a piece of piss, but there are so many choices etc. for the second that I'm getting a bit stuck.

The reason why is that I need to be able to charge for access (either by bandwidth used, or bandwidth allocated), as well as being able to monitor how long each user is surfing for (this is to monitor the staff). Turning access on and off and then billing it all should be easily managed from a console somewhere (reception?) by a 'normal' member of staff.

Cost isn't really a worry - providing they can recover this by billing it to their guests.

Now, I'm not asking anybody here to do any legwork for me, but if anybody has any pointers on who or what to look for, I'd be very grateful.

Cheers,

Nick.

If you've got the time you can do it all by running Linux on the gateway between the internal hotel LAN and the Internet. It's already got traffic shaper support to allow you to limit the maximum available bandwidth per client. Measuring bandwidth used is simple as well.

The time consuming part would be to create a nice simple interface to it all really. A web interface using PHP or Perl would be the easiest for the staff I'd guess.

It's a lot of work combining all the individual parts however and it isn't a prepackaged solution which sounds like what you want.

- Trevor

Greetings!

Hmm... I thought about this kind of thing before for a few different projects... Random ideas:

a) Are you putting a machine in the room, or just providing the network link?
b) If you have a machine in the room, you could fashion it into a "kiosk" type situation. There is software out there, I can find out more if you are interested, that limits the browser to a specific group of sites, locks down the OS, that kind of thing.
c) If the hotel uses magnetic cards as keys, you might be able to rig a card reader into the system to "unlock" the kiosk, keeping out unauthorized access and starting the billing. You could have the billing autoterminate with an inactivity timer, say 15 minutes of no usage.
d) Billing by bandwidth can also be done by measuring packets from the interface.
e) Another possibility is to use a proxy server, and have that do your metrics / billing for you.
f) I would recommend that the billing not be a feature turned on or off by staff. Rather have it feed into the normal biller, just as telephone usage would.

Although you can probably do all the bandwidth monitoring you need with a Linux box, if you are looking for an off-the shelf solution, look at http://www.packeteer.com/

One of my Uni lecturers covered how to bill users when they are using their own laptops in airport/cafe/hotel situations. His solution was to get the user to go to a webpage on the local network where they fill in a form with their account/table/room number. When that is submitted to the server, the source IP (which would be DHCP allocated) and the account number are stored and any activity on that IP address is monitored for later billing. Before they fill in this form, they are limited to only accessing the login server. It's not infallable, but it is easy to set up.

I've stayed in hotels which had this service. They used a custom software solution which integrated with the hotel's billing system, which was integrated with the television set and remote. I'm sure commercial packages exist for this now, which you could just buy. They probably offer consulting services for installation and support, too. Wouldn't know where to look, though, except for the advertising pages of hotel-industry trade magazines.

Yeah, we have something similar to this on campus for our wireless network. The term we use I think is a "Captive Portal". When you start up your laptop with a wireless nic in it, it gets assigned an address through dhcp and seems to be connected. Then you open any web browser, and it redirects you to the (encrypted) login page where you give your uname/pass and after that it redirects you right on to the webpage you were actually visiting... It also opens up all the other ports on your IP, so you're not always going through an http proxy.

Our network at berkeley is called AirBears, and I'm sure google will turn up more information on what software they're actually using.

Matthew

Hi all,

Thanks to everybody for some good ideas. I've had a think about what I'm going to suggest and taken everybody's thoughts into account. Wonderful.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Thanks again.

Nick.

What about providing free Internet acess to everyone, but charge $1more per room. It would be easier than MAC sucurity and other technological options. Plus you could advertise that you have free Internet access.

I agree, I have thought the same thing. I have looked for hotels that offer that and have never found one.