I set up a wireless hot spot for the Seaview Hotel and Dive Resort about two months ago. They wanted to offer in-room internet free to their guests, and maybe if they felt like it, charge for casual access from the lobby, bar, restaurant and meeting room. They wanted it to be secure, and to prevent the average user from gaining access from his car in the parking lot and avoiding payment.

The solution I found that suited them to a T was the ZyXel B-Air 4000. It's described as a “Wireless hot-spot in a box” and is pretty damn close. In fact it's worked so well that we've bought one here, too and are going to roll it out in the First Class Lounge at the airport. The 4000 is about the same size as a competitor's WAP, with the familiar two antennas hanging off the back of the box, a WAN port, and four switched LAN ports. That's where the similarities stop though. This WAP has an RJ-11 port on the back that plugs into a special thermal printer (that came with the Access Point) with a big illuminated button on it. The AP has all billing, accounting and authentication built in, and it's designed to work with the printer. There's some security built in, “Layer-2 Isolation” they call it whereby people who are on the WLAN or LAN cannot see each other or their traffic.

The default set up is this: push the button on the printer and it spits out a ticket with the SSID, WEP key and a randomly generated username and password good for 30 minutes. Push it twice for one hour, three times for 90 minutes, etc etc. It's also fully customizable. I have theirs set up so that one push is one hour, two pushes is 24 hours and three pushes is seven days.

You go to your laptop (or whatever device you're using) and put in the SSID and WEP (or just the WEP if you have Zero Config turned on in XP) and you get a connection and an IP address. This is where the cool stuff starts. Open your browser and try to go somewhere... you're re-directed to http://1.1.1.1 and asked for a username and password. Put it in, and the access point grants you access to the internet, makes a note of your MAC address,and starts counting down from 30:00. when your time runs out, your next web request takes you back to the 1.1.1.1 login screen. There's a “walled garden” as well, that has some administrator specified links that are “free” to go to without having to log in. You can also specify up to 10 different web pages to “pop-up” on your customer's screens at intervals or random times as well.

The ONLY problem with this hardware is that the built-in antennas are 2.2dBi antennas. After installing it, I “war-walked” around the resort with my laptop checking the signal strength. The only dead areas were one or two rooms at the very back of the property, sitting at the bar, and the dive shop out at the other end of the parking lot (although I didnt expect it to reach that far) The crisis came the next week. The wireless signal could not penetrate into the rooms, even right across the hall from the front desk where the access point is physically located. Open the door, get online. Close it and you're hooped.

We decided to get a big 8dBi omnidirectional antenna and mount it in the lobby. With that kind of power we should be able to cook TV Dinners in the rooms. The antenna was an Enterasys model, sourced locally with a female N connector (pretty standard). Where we ran into a problem was with cabling. The cable we got was a male N to an SNA Female. The 4000 uses Reverse Polarity SMA connectors. after searching and searchng and searching some more, we were resigned to breaking out the soldering iron and making an SNA Female to R/P SMA Male adapter when I came across this site.

Fleeman Anderson & Bird in Tampa stock an N to R/P SMA cable! w00t! and it was only $30 bucks! Their 8dBi omnidirectional antenna was only $54.99 instead of the $195.00 we paid to get the designer Enterasys box that ours came in. Grrr.

Further down on their Omni-Directional Antenna page are 5.5dBi Rubber Ducky antennas, the namesake of this post. they make them with all different kinds of connectors to screw/plug directly into pretty much any company's WAPs and wireless routers. The kicker? They're only $15.50 each. I could have gotten 2 of those and doubled the antenna gain on this access point and... and... bought a whole lot of candy and junk food with the remainder!

Not to be left out, Linksys released new antenna upgrades today for their WAPs and WRTs. They said they were addressing the #1 customer complaint: not enough distance in coverage. I may just buy some of these rubber duckies and upgrade all the antennas on my wireless network at home.