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Make money from your Wireless LAN! - Bluesocket

Never before has there been a suggestion that your corporate network might be a source of revenue; but Bluesocket thinks that that time has come - it has launched a "Wireless Gateway" which allows the LAN manager to charge for Internet use.

The "hotspot" public Internet concept, as announced by BT recently in the UK, will certainly get several IT managers thinking about wireless extensions to their own networks; and the question will arise: "If passers-by use our Internet link, can't we charge them? And the answer seems to be "yes," if Bluesocket has it right.

Bluesocket's latest product, the WG-2000, sits between wireless Access Points (from any of the major vendors) and the wired LAN, "acting as a gateway between wireless and wired components." And security is the main attraction, which the company highlighted in its presentation to the Networld + Interop (N+I) show in Las Vegas this week.

But filthy lucre is another lure.

"In addition to offering VPN-like encryption (PPTP, IPsec), Bluesocket's Wireless Gateways offer network management features including role-based access control (such as for granting guest privileges), Class of Service (CoS), authorisation, authentication against central servers (RADIUS, LDAP, Active Directory, Windows Domain) and RADIUS accounting," said the official release. Then, temptingly, it adds:

"Support for RADIUS accounting enables enterprises to track and charge for wireless access, thereby gaining revenue from their WLANs."

The company has also used security as the main feature of a smaller product - the WG-1000 Small Office Edition, (WG-1000 SOE) a single component wireless gateway solution for WLAN security and management "designed expressly to meet the functionality and price-point needs of small-to-midsized (SME) businesses and departments within large enterprises."

The company's theory is that this will sell to "locations that typically do not have an IT "department" where personnel are skilled/trained on security policy." At $3,495 this seems implausible; companies who don't have an IT department are unlikely to be aware of the need to install something like this. However, it may well sell to individual departments within an enterprise, where they want "a single-component, easy to deploy, use and maintain solution" to secure and manage wireless networks to Microsoft Office, e-mail and Internet access.