Creating a public hotspot

[atbnet]

I'm looking forward to signing up with Republic Wireless sometime this summer when their beta opens up again and was thinking, "Wouldn't it be nice if there were more public hotspots?" So, it got me to thinking, why not create one myself? Does anyone have any experience with doing something similar? Are there ways to protect myself such as send all the traffic through a VPN or TOR? Or am I just being naive here and just setting myself up for legal problems when someone decides to use my WiFi to hack the Pentagon?

 

[nwdude]

I do. Just buy a portal and get a payment system in on it. Then make sure you log the traffic for this. It would cost you few k$ but it can be done.

You can do this in few ways. one way it this

get a portal for payment. Aradial is one.
get a platform for access points. Cisco wlc 2500 is one. Get access points. Direct them to the aradial for payment.
Setup the aradial to talk to the credid card company.
Secure the whole lot.
log the whole lot.

 

[/dev/null]

Or if you want to do a free one:

* Partition off completely from your network
* bandwidth QOS max @ 128-256kbit or so. This should discourage heavy downloaders
* Block all outbound except for 80/443
* Force 80/443 traffic through a web proxy.

It'll probably be OK for who want to check their facebook, google something, etc but too slow for people to drive by/torrent crap.