Internet Hotspot Idea

[Zephik]

DD-WRT comes with a hotspot service option which allows you to sign up with a company, I forget which, for free and basically they'll throw in a little advertisement bar in your web browsers window and in return, you can earn up to $25 a month depending on your traffic. So that's pretty awesome I thought, but I use the router too and I don't really want A) an advertisement bar in my browsers window and B) I don't think there are enough people around here to generate $25 a month anyways, I probably wouldn't even make $5 a month.

But I did get an idea from discovering this neat little feature in DD-WRT. Is it possible to setup something where when you connect to the router, it directs you to a webpage or something saying that you can use this "hotspot" for X a month? And then just link that to paypal or something? Then when they pay for it, it opens up the router so they can use it?

[Luke122]

I'm sure that can be done using a proxy setup. I've seen that very thing in hotels before. :)

[x88x]

I'm not sure if there's anything off the shelf that'll do what you want, but it would definitely be possible to set up.

dd-wrt currently comes with built-in support for WiFiDog (http://dev.wifidog.org/), Sputnik (http://www.sputnik.com/), and ChilliSpot (http://www.chillispot.info/) hotspot management systems. It uses AnchorFree's hotspot advertisement system (http://www.anchorfree.com/advertisers-agencies/hotspots.html), but idk if you could, like, whitelist certain MACs or user accounts or something, to not get adds.

Pretty much anything is possible, it's just a matter of how much effort you're willing to spend making it happen :D

[OvRiDe]

The term for what you are describing is called Captive Portal. It allows you to redirect an incoming HTTP request to a different page for authentication or advertisement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal

[Luke122]

The term for what you are describing is called Captive Portal. It allows you to redirect an incoming HTTP request to a different page for authentication or advertisement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal

Thanks!

[billygoat333]

I'm sure that can be done using a proxy setup. I've seen that very thing in hotels before. :)

we actually have this very setup in our hotel, even though our wifi is free we still require a username and password to log on so as to discourage stealing our bandwidth. :D