In the market for a versatile, low-cost Ethernet port analyzer? Check out and use promotional code "wirednot" for 10% discount! Twitter Chatter (I find Twilio almost as much fun to say as LaserFiche, by the way)
Pssst- If you have a Dashboard, Meraki is easy to try- and you get 25 free Twiio interactions so you can feel what the experience is like for texting the auto-generated password from your own easy-to-customize splash page before signing up for a Twilio account. Combine it with Personal PSK, and I think users and admins would both win, at least in my wireless world. Though I personally have no use for social media logins, I understand the appeal in certain markets (but would never use my own accounts for guest access- I’d rather go without). (We use Message Media for the Bluesocket, is more expensive and less snappy in my experience).Īnyhow- If you’ve never gone the SMS path for guest access, I can vouch for it’s effectiveness. It only works with Twilio as the SMS service, but that’s OK as Twilio is cheaper than cheap, and each texted password costs you a penny. Where it is feature-thin, I can work around until they tighten it up (and I did make my wish last week, so I’m assuming the elves on Mount Meraki are almost done already).
No extra appliance needed, no additional fees, and it works so, so nicely with the rest of the magic in the Meraki cloud-managed wireless solution. I’m about to deploy it in a unique situation, and am pretty pleased with it’s slick integration to Twilio as the SMS provider, and that I pay nothing extra to Meraki for exactly the SMS auth feature I want: The SMS auth groove is new to Meraki, and they still have some development to do on it before I’ll sing it’s praises too loudly, but it works good. But… on balance, this has been dynamite- and is the only off-the-shelf 3rd party gateway kind of thing that I’m aware of that you could bolt on to anyone’s WLAN and make work if you didn’t like what your native solution does for guest access (Sorry Cisco, you still don’t get easy guest access as far as I can tell). And the appliance hardware is pretty dated.
The appliance works well as DHCP, firewalling, NAT, rate limiting, quarantine, MAC exception home for odd stuff that fits nowhere else and a handful of other guest-relevant functions, but also has (and is over-priced based on) lots of Bluesocket-specific WLAN stuff you’ll never use if you don’t have Bluesocket APs. Unfortunately, you have to invest in a full-blown Bluesocket appliance to get the functionality, but even that’s not all bad. Sure, it’s not so impressive today given that there are now lots of other guest portals that do SMS, but it still works very well, and is what we continue to use at my University because it does just work. But when I pushed back, Bluesocket was willing to do a little bit of development and was able to provide something that really was ahead of it’s time (we’re talking like 2006 here): And like Cisco, they tried telling me that if I was willing to change my requirements, they could provide a solution. When I first approached them with my needs, they- like Cisco- couldn’t do self-provision SMS based with. Rumor was that Coloubris had a gateway that might work, but this was around when HP bought them and we literally couldn’t find a human being walking the earth that could tell us anything meaningful about that gateway. Though we were a Cisco WLAN back then, Cisco couldn’t come close to fulfilling our simple requirements. Years ago, I set off on a quest to find a wireless guest solution that was easy to support, easy for users to self-provision through, and that met our organizational requirement that guest sessions not just be tied to some bogus email account (the thing is funny only so many times in a row) but to use 10-digit cell number as the “User ID”.
You can front it with a WPA2 PSK or leave it open (everyone has different use cases, business drivers, and policy), but for answering the challenge of “make it easy on ’em but still let us have some bit of real, verifiable information to tie to a person”, SMS-based auth is hard to beat. It’s becoming more popular to tie guest access to social media “credentials” (a bit of a joke to call ’em that), as there’s usually some marketing hook behind that, and some networks really don’t care WHO you are, like really.īut when you need to have some level of accountability on your guest network for whatever reason, using SMS-based authentication is not a bad option. But, that ain’t happening for a while (if ever). In a perfect world, Hotspot 2.0 will take care of authentication and encryption, and all would be sunny to everyone’s satisfaction.
For wireless guest access, there are all kinds of ways to skin the cat.