How To Set Up Free Wi-Fi For Customers (Complete Guide)

Are you planning to set up free Wi-Fi for your customers? If yes, then here is a complete guide on how to set up free Wi-Fi at your site of business. Now before proceeding further, we need to know what exactly setting up free Wi-Fi for customers means and how it is beneficial for small businesses. You should be through with the nitty-gritties of the working of the internet. Click to know more about the same.

When you set up free WiFi at your place or site of business, then you are allowing your customers to connect their phones or laptops to your WiFi at free of cost via hotspot. A hotspot provides access to internet service through a wireless local area network. The WLAN is operated on a router that is supplied by an internet service provider (ISP).

Benefits of Setting up free WiFi to the customers:

Setting up this service can benefit your business in many ways. It can benefit the old business as well as a new business. We have listed below some of the major benefits of setting up free WiFi for customers:

According to a survey, it has been found that customers spent a large amount of time at places with free WiFi. So, we can say that it helps to engage customers or it increases customer engagement.

1. It enables the marketing of your business digitally. It is often seen that people have a lot of engagement with their social media and followers. When they get a free wife at your site, they will talk about it on their social media account. It will increase their engagement as well as unknowingly, and they market your business on digital platforms.
2. Some research also shows that the free Wi-Fi set up helps to boost sales. For example, suppose if you have a café and you provide free access to your Wi-Fi to all your customers. Suppose some new customers have landed at your café and they got to know they got free Wi-Fi with coffee. They loved the concept and talked about it to their friends or family. This may get you more customers and hence boost the sales of your business.

How to set up free WiFi for the customers

We will now follow certain steps to see how to set up free WiFi for customers.

1. Choosing a Reliable and affordable ISP

ISP stands for the Internet service provider, and it provides internet access to the customers. So, it becomes very important to have an affordable and reliable internet service provider. One can choose from a variety of ISPs according to their availability to the area of business, keeping in mind the above points.

2. Setting up a Router and Modem

The second step is to select a router and a modem to establish the connection to the ISP. The setup should be according to the ISP. That is, the modem should be compatible with your ISP. If there is no compatibility between the two, then you will not get the connection to your router. It is unnecessary to have a modem of the company as that of ISP, but compatibility between the two is necessary.

3. Choose a high-bandwidth or high-speed service plan

There are several service plans that are offered by all the ISPs out in the market. It is important to select ISPs with high bandwidth because lower bandwidth can result in slow speed. It will give your customer bad experiences as they will not be able to browse the internet smoothly. So, to have better customer service, choose a plan that will provide high speed at an affordable price.

4. Setting up a Public Network

Now the next step is to set up a guest network or public network. It is important because when you allow customers to access or connect to your private wireless network, then there is a risk of a security breach. So, to secure your personal data and business, you need to set up a public network with WPA/WPA2 encryption and a secured password. Also, it is advisable to turn off the SSID to your private networks for added security.

5. Captive portal set up

Before allowing your customers to use your network, you must set up a captive portal. A captive portal is nothing but a web page that will appear when a customer tries to access your WiFi. It contains the terms and conditions that users must agree to in order to access the internet. It includes conditions that a customer will not open an illegal site etc. Setting up a captive portal will help you lower your liability. This is because if a person tries to access a forbidden site, then they will be responsible for the act and not you.

You can also program your captive portal in such a way that you can easily prevent the hogging of the bandwidth. You can limit the visits to the sites, which lowers the bandwidth. This will help to provide equal bandwidth to every customer at the site of your business.

These were the steps to set up free WiFi for customers.

Conclusion

Now, when you have performed all the steps to set up the WiFi, it is necessary that you provide your customers with the correct IDs and password of the network. You can do this by adding a board in an area visible to all your customers or provide on the table for each individual separately.