Protip, try these PSK’s before asking at the bar or restaurant:
drinkmorebeer
coldbeer
icecoldbeer
Most businesses have guest wifi and it usually works smoothly. However, I’ve identified a design issue for a specific use case. Default DHCP settings and a standard /24 Subnet work well for many environments. But an area with hundreds or thousands of guests coming and going daily has unique needs. Some guests at my local sports bar had reported that they could not connect to the guest wifi but only on some of their devices. It’s usually a new device or someone who doesn’t visit often. I knew the cause was that we were running out IP’s as I had run into the same symptoms years prior. With a building max capacity of 500 guests, 254 IP’s, and a DHCP lease of 7 days doesn’t meet their needs.
Since most non-chain bars and restaurants will likely have limited IT resources I think a software solution from network vendors is needed. During the initial hardware setup, a series of questions should be asked to determine the network’s needs. For these high-traffic environments, I advise the following.
SSID “Company Name Guest”.
If you’re in a shared building that has overlapping wifi signals consider all companies using the same SSID for easy roaming.
Subnet size equal to the building max capacity multiplied by at least 2.
Lease timer 8 hours.
Name Servers 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1.
Side note: Recently I was wondering why we even put passwords on guest wifi. I’m disappointed that I only now learned that open wifi does not encrypt the traffic. But at the same time, I’m happy as I can freely admit I didn’t know something and I got to learn something. I’ve seen the warnings but thought they were general “be safe in an unknown neighborhood” and not “everything is unencrypted”. But that does point to an opportunity to write about why that is and how we can change it. Without investigating, I think a certificate provided by the Access Point similar to how HTTPS works.
