A Solution For Making WiFi Cost Effective

rkohutek writes "This whitepaper came out of my employer's desire to deploy high speed wireless internet to an underserved, mostly rural area. Although very easy to do on the ground level, I found it to not be a cake walk when it came to actually making it a viable network case -- in a "normally" deployed wireless network it is very easy to spoof an IP or MAC address and hop on the network and get free bandwidth. This is not acceptable and the acronym WARTA, Wireless Authentication, Routing, Traffic control, Accounting was thought up to cover the things that we needed to do. Read on for how we managed to make it work using Free Software: HTML or PDF." Update: 06/07 20:42 GMT by T : He sends along word of this mirror as well.

Comments

I wouldn't worry

[rice_web]

Take a long time to look things over and ask: is the piracy worth the risk? If a few individuals use the service illegally, but you have a solid base of paying users, isn't that better than not entering the market at all and missing out on an opportunity or implementing a costly security feature that could mitigate any profit?

Re:I wouldn't worry

[gmack]

The piracy is *not* worth the risk. The last thing you need is some wardriver grabbing every available ip and starting a spam run. Just picture it.. thousands of complaints and no way at all to deal with them. I'd imagine that would get blacklisted pretty quickly. Or they could use your network to break into things without getting busted.. not fun either when the buck stops with you.

Overall though I think 802.11 is the wrong tool for this job.. why use it when something like Moterola Canopy has a larger range *and* is more secure?

Dump 802.11 and the pppoe link and problem solved.

At least I hope so. I'm submitting a proposal for a rural network on monday.

Re:Hmm...

[SkArcher]

Free as in Speech, not Free as in beer.

Re:Solution

[WoofLu]

I had been looking to solutions like that one for a while, while I was reading the specs, it really seemed like the picture I had in my head (:

anyway, the portal approach, when on an unknown network abroad can be a good thing, but on a daily basis, I'd just get crazy! So, merging the two ideas would just be great: PPPoE login for long-time customers, and ability to use the captive portal to register only for a couple of hours...

Thanks for your contribution.. I hope to be using something alike sometime soon here in Luxembourg (that spot between France, Germany and Belgium (: ).

better for who?

[SweetAndSourJesus]

It may not be better for you, but it's certainly better for your ISP if you connect using PPPoE. IP space is getting pretty limited, and if they can service 10 customers with 4 IP addresses, all the better for them.

You don't honestly think they took your convenience into consideration when making the decision to use PPPoE, do you?

Re:Simpler way to make it cheaper...

[RAMMS EIN]

``Is it wrong to take advantaeg of Stupid people ? George Bush does it, Bill Gates does it... why shouldn't we ?''
You've just said it.

Re:Dear God!

[PurpleFloyd]

If you read my post all the way through, you would have noticed that I said that its use in DSL and cable modem connections is pointless (it provides little extra security, but wastes bandwidth and irritates end users). PPPoE is a good choice here because public wireless access can't authenticate based on physical links; there must be some way to ensure that a user's resources aren't being stolen. This is where PPP and RADIUS authentication come in handy, and this is what makes PPPoE a reasonable solution for wireless 802.11x.

Re:Why not IPSEC?

[yhetti]

According to everything I've read, interop. between IPSwan and...well, basically anything else is shoddy at best. Trying to get Windows 2000 or XP to work with FreeSwan is not something a normal technician could do on a service call. Windows 95/98/ME is basically out the question. I may be wrong, but that's the impression I get.