For technical questions, please refer to our technical FAQ.

General


1. What is wrong with Wi-Fi in a visitor-based network or hotspot environment?
   
   
   • No authentication mechanism
   • No access control support (such as timeout, logout)
   • No exception free web sites
   • No usage reporting for billing, tracking
   • No mechanism to charge users (e.g. credit card)
   • No way to push personalized content (e.g. advertisement) to end-users
   • The Wi-Fi hotspot owners or operators need to prevent themselves from liable for the network abuse. Even for free access, the operators usually want to present a web page and require the end user to accept a user agreement. There are metering and tracking requirements for Public WLAN service providers in some countries as well.
2. Some WLAN Access Point (AP) hardware manufacturers claim that they do support WLAN Hotspots, what is it about?
   
   
   Most of them support Wi-Fi Hotspots in a very limited way. This architecture has the following problems:
   • You are tied to that particular WLAN AP manufacturer. We believe that AP vendor should focus on what they do best, which is radio frequency excellence.
   • This kind of WLAN AP Hotspots support is usually distributed in nature. You cannot manage the WLAN AP in a centralized way.
   • It does not cater for growth. Since most of the information such as user accounts or customized web pages reside in the WLAN AP itself, you have to upgrade every single WLAN AP for any change.
   • Last but not the least, cost. Since this kind of AP is proprietary in nature, the cost per AP is quite a bit higher than the standard WLAN AP. In fact, you will find out that expansion cost increases dramatically when you need to add APs (i.e. when your hotspots become successful and popular). The economics for this kind of proprietary AP punish your success and it just doesn't make sense for most Wi-Fi Hotspots owners (see point 11 “What WLAN AP does FirstSpot® support?” for more details).
3. Some service providers or aggregators claim that you can join their networks instead of setting one up yourselves. What are the differences then?
   
   
   In most cases, you sacrifice the ownership of your “airspace”. You will have much less flexibility on the welcome page (such as deleting their logos, including your own logo). Also, the service providers or aggregators will need to charge considerable access fee (to make profit) to the end-users, which limits the usefulness of the whole Wi-Fi Hotspot. Instead, FirstSpot® gives you unprecedented control over your Wi-Fi Hotspots.

FirstSpot® features and technology


4. Who will find FirstSpot® useful?
   
   
   • Hotels
   • Coffee Shops
   • Conference Centers
   • Internet Café
   • Universities and other education premises
   • Airports, Terminals, Public Transport premises
   • Shopping Malls
   • Business Centers
   • Multi-Tenant Units (MTU)
   • Enterprise that wants to provide guest access
   • ISP / Wireless ISP (WISP)
   • Operators of any visitor-based network or Wi-Fi Hotspots
5. Why should you pick FirstSpot®?
   
   
   FirstSpot® is the number one Windows-based hotspot software in the world. FirstSpot® has been in development since 2002 and other product in the market cannot match our feature richness and proven track record. Also, we believe that utilizing a standard PC hardware with familiar Windows environment will give you much better control.
6. What are the advantages of a Windows-based, software-based Hotspot management solution compared to a Linux solution or hardware box?
   
   
   There are many. Some of them are:
   • By using standard PC hardware, you wouldn’t be trapped with a proprietary, expensive hardware. Once your Wi-Fi Hotspot becomes popular and you need to upgrade the capacity, it is often difficult and costly to upgrade the proprietary hardware box.
   • It is much more flexible. You can put in any web site content in the PC, and you can even put in streaming video/audio content. We call this “local content”.
   • The familiar Windows environment gives you a head start without learning other platforms.
   • You can “try before you buy”. Just download the FirstSpot® trial version before committing. Try to obtain a free hardware box for a trial. :-)
   
   

   	FirstSpot® (Windows)	Linux	Hardware
   Ease-of-use	Easy	Difficult	Difficult
   Customization	Easy	Difficult	Impossible
   Price	Inexpensive	Inexpensive	Expensive
   WLAN AP	Neutral	Neutral	Proprietary, tie to specific brand
   Hardware Upgrade	Easy	Medium, often involve reconfiguring Linux	Expensive and limited
   802.11 standard upgrade	No action	No action	Need to wait for upgrade from manufacturer
   Local Content (e.g. stream data on-site)	Yes	Yes	No

7. How does FirstSpot® identify client devices (i.e. session handling)?
   
   
   FirstSpot® uses MAC address to identify and maintain session information. MAC-address session handling is more secure than IP-based session handling. Consider the following test :
   1) user A with IP 192.168.0.7 logins to gain access
   2) user A shutdowns the machine
   3) user B sets the IP to 192.168.0.7 (which is very easy), user B now gains access
   As you can see, IP-based session handling has some limitations.
8. Is FirstSpot® a proxy server?
   
   
   No. Proxy is a bottleneck to the whole network is not recommended for hotspots. Also, proxy-based solution limits you to only a few applications (such as web only) and it significantly limits the usefulness of the hotspot. As FirstSpot® is not based on proxy technology, it will provide access to ALL applications (e.g. Email, Web, Instant Messaging, Audio, and more...) after the client logins
9. Where does FirstSpot® store user accounts information?
   
   
   User accounts are stored in an embedded ODBC datasource. You can change the ODBC datasource to a server-based SQL such as MySQL or SQL Server. Alternatively, FirstSpot® v3 (or later) supports RADIUS protocol. Normally, you should only use RADIUS Authentication Mode if you have another NAS (Network Access Server) that supports RADIUS.
10. What is Exception Free Web Site?
    
    
    A feature that allows some web sites to be “free”(i.e. without forced login page). FirstSpot® allows you to specify Exception Free Web Site in domain keyword format. The advantage of specifying host (i.e. domain name) keywords format is that it allows you to specifying all the sub-domains for a particular domain. It is very difficult to get all the IP addresses of all the sub-domains. For example, if you want the user to freely access all Yahoo web sites (i.e. www.yahoo.com, uk.yahoo.com, au.yahoo.com …), instead of building a list of IP addresses of all yahoo web sites (which is difficult if not impossible), just specify “yahoo.com” in the FirstSpot® setting.
    (FirstSpot® does allow you to specify IP addresses in addition to domain name keywords as well)
11. What WLAN AP does FirstSpot® support?
    
    
    The nice thing about FirstSpot® is that it is AP neutral. In fact, you can take advantage of a cheaper "thin" vanilla AP (note that the WAN port within AP is not used) to keep the cost down. At the time of this writing (June, 2003), this kind of AP is sold for as low as US$40 (e.g. Netgear MR814). The saving really adds up if you deploy more than one AP, which is quite common since each AP only cover a small area. Keep in mind that FirstSpot® will take care of DHCP, DNS and NAT so all you need is an AP that sends out WLAN signal! In fact, you need to make sure that you turn off the WLAN AP's DHCP server as it will conflict with the DHCP server within FirstSpot®.
12. What are “Instant Keywords™”?
    
    
    A Patronsoft-invented, user-friendly FirstSpot® feature that allows end-user to type a keyword (e.g. “logout”) in the browser to perform some specific action (e.g. bring up the logout screen). Refer to FirstSpot® Demo for details.
13. What Network Topologies does FirstSpot® support?
    
    
    Both distributed and centralized network topologies. You can put FirstSpot® on-site, or deploy FirstSpot® remotely. Please click here for details.
14. What is a Captive Portal?
    
    
    The technique that forces unauthenticated users to a web portal (“capture” the users and redirect them to a “portal”) for authentication. Captive Portal allows you to leverage a web browser to authenticate without installing any client software in the PC.
15. Does the end-user need to install a client software?
    
    
    No. FirstSpot® is completely browser-based.
16. How does FirstSpot® handle idle timeout?
    
    
    FirstSpot®'s idle timeout handling is both efficient and accurate. It will only timeout users if they are idle (i.e. no network traffic) for a specific amount of time. Also, there are no "keep alive" packets sent from browser to FirstSpot® (which will degrade network performance).
17. What Wi-Fi standard (e.g. 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n) does FirstSpot® support?
    
    
    All of them. As FirstSpot® is completely protocol neutral, you do not even need to touch FirstSpot® when you change or upgrade your APs. In fact, FirstSpot® can work with Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi.
18. Can FirstSpot® run on client Windows version like Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7?
    
    
    FirstSpot® v7 can run on Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 as well as Windows server like 2003 or 2008. Please refer to our requirements page for more information.
19. How about the technology? Is FirstSpot® developed by PatronSoft, or just a repackage of open source software like most hardware companies do?
    
    
    FirstSpot® is 100% developed in house. It is not based on any open source project.
20. So you are against open source?
    
    
    Absolutely not. We are not against open source. We are against people charging for open source software without contributing back to the community. If you want open source software, just download it for free.

Pricing


21. What is the FirstSpot® pricing model?
    
    
    FirstSpot® is based on simple server-based pricing. It is an unlimited user license (no more concurrent or named users limit!) that gives you much better flexibility to structure the Wi-Fi Hotspot access package. Click here for details. Also, visit here for feature comparison among different FirstSpot® editions.
22. This pricing model sounds attractive. Does this model limit your usage of FirstSpot® (such as pushing compulsory advertisement, limiting your ability to customize the login page, or unable to delete PatronSoft logo) in any way?
    
    
    No. FirstSpot® web portion is written in PHP/HTML and can be easily customized.
23. How about the network ownership?
    
    
    PatronSoft is a technology provider, period. We do not own your network in any way. We believe the "airspace" ownership should belong to the premises owner and no one else.

Partnership


24. I am a reseller or system integrator. Can we talk?
    
    
    Of course! We welcome all channel inquires. Please see here for details.