All business owners should consider offering their customers and staff with a free wifi connection. A guest wifi usually uses a different SSID from the network your corporate network which helps to restrict what guest users can access. This is to maintain the security of your network. It isolates your main network away from your guests to protect you from any malicious or fraudulent activity.

Not only does a guest wifi network benefit your relationship with staff and customer, it also improves your network security. By setting up your network this way, you will have control over who has access to your company’s network of computers, servers, storage and printers. This is an important factor since the more sophisticated viruses and malwares today can use any portable or mobile devices to attack your network.

Business wise, aside from the security benefits mentioned above, there are some benefits you can achieve by providing your staff and customers with free wifi:

1. Customers love the idea of getting something for free. So offering up free wifi could be a deciding factor in the customer’s decision in choosing you over the competition.
2. Guest wifi helps to build customer relations. No matter how much customers prepare, there may be times when your customer needs to connect back into their network to get additional documents or data. A guest wifi connection allows them to do this securely and quickly.
3. Guest wifi helps to keep customers and staff personal devices off your corporate network if they need to work while onsite.
4. Policies can be applied to the guest network to restrict the bandwidth allocated to each connection. This can be used by both staff and customers. With a guest wifi you can prevent staff from crippling the corporate network when they unintentionally upload a monthly worth of holidays photos into dropbox from their phone.
5. Acceptable use policies can be required to be accepted to minimise corporate liability if the guest user connects to some questionable content.

Though security has a very important role in your network, how easy you connect to a wifi network is also crucial to the success of the guest wifi. Your guest wifi connection should be protected with a password and username or a guest wifi captive portal that managed the connection.

Always remember that the connection should be isolated from your main network and at the same time easy to access. If you have staff or customers who bring their devices into your business, most of the time they expect that they can access the web.

Please feel free to contact Myrtec if you would like more details on offering customers and staff a guest wifi connection.

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