Hotspot software: vouchers, speed limits and access logs for guest Wi-Fi

Most guest Wi-Fi starts with a password on a card next to the till. It works fine. Guests get in, the neighbour gets in, a man who checked out three weeks ago still gets in from the car park. Nobody thinks about it until the line crawls on a Saturday night or a letter arrives asking who used your public IP address at 21:14 last Tuesday. With a shared password the honest answer is "no idea".

That gap is what hotspot software closes. It is also why we built one.

What is hotspot software?

Hotspot software is a program that sits between your internet connection and your guests and decides who gets online, how long they stay, how fast they go and what record is left behind.

The visible part is the login page. Join a hotel network, a page pops up asking for a code, you type it and you are online. That page is called a captive portal and the people selling it often call the whole product captive portal software. The portal is only the front door though. The useful work happens behind it: counting minutes and megabytes, holding each device to its speed limit, refusing blocked sites and writing down what happened.

How wifi hotspot software sits on your network

The setup surprises people because it is so physical. Your modem stays. Your access points stay. A PC goes between them.

The PC needs two network cards. The modem plugs into the first one and the access point into the second. Every guest packet now passes through that PC on its way out, which is the only reason it can enforce anything. A USB Ethernet adapter works as the second card.

From the guest side the flow looks like this:

1. They join the Wi-Fi network.
2. The login page opens by itself. Some phones only show it after the guest tries to load a page.
3. They type the code from their voucher slip or sign in with a member account.
4. They are online until their time or data runs out. Then the internet stops for that device.

Nobody installs an app. Every extra step between "joined the network" and "reading email" turns into a question at the front desk.

Vouchers, speed limits and filters

A wifi voucher system is the part that turns Wi-Fi from a free amenity you cannot control into something you can price.

You set up packages. A package is a duration (minutes, hours or days), a data quota or both. You decide how many devices can share one code, from 1 to 10. You set a download and upload limit in Mb/s, a price and how many days an unsold code stays valid. A code is two to six letters followed by six digits, printed like ABC-123456.

One detail we cared about: a code only works once it has been sold. Print a pack of 200 slips on Monday and leave them in a drawer and none of them opens the internet until someone rings it up. Sales go into the end-of-day revenue like any other cash or card sale. Cancelling an unused voucher takes the amount back off the register. Slips print on a thermal printer or on A4. The voucher docs walk through the package screen.

Groups are where guest wifi management stops being one big pipe. Guests, staff and devices that should never see a login page (the lobby TV, the POS terminal, the cameras) each get their own group with its own speed, filter rules and internet line. A typical split is 20 Mbps for guests and 50 Mbps for staff. With more than one internet line, traffic can be shared across them and a backup line takes over when the main one fails.

The web filter has 11 categories including gambling, adult content, harmful sites, VPNs and proxies, piracy, hacking, social media plus ads and trackers. You add your own block and allow lists on top. A device that changes its own DNS setting does not get around it.

Here is the limit we would rather tell you now than have you discover. Filtering works by name. It sees which site a device asks for. It does not read the page. A determined user will find gaps in any name-based filter, ours included. For a hotel lobby or a school dorm it catches what you need caught. It is not a firewall for a bank.

Public wifi logging: why the access log matters

When you offer internet to the public, everything your guests do leaves the building under your public IP address. If somebody on your Wi-Fi sends threats or attacks a website, the trail leads to your line and not to the guest's phone.

The question you need to answer is narrow: which device was using this public IP, on this port, at this time? Without a log you cannot answer it. With a shared password you cannot even narrow it down to a room.

HandyCafe keeps two records.

The access log notes which device connected from which address and when. It is written automatically. Each day's file is sealed and signed. Every day also carries a fingerprint of the previous day, which chains the files together. If anyone edits an old file, the integrity check shows which day was changed. By default the access log is kept for 2 years.

The connection log on the gateway goes deeper: device, MAC address, destination, port, protocol, the internet line it used, the public IP and port on the internet side, start and end time and bytes moved. It is kept 90 days by default. You can change that or turn it off.

The tool people actually use is Find device. You type the public port and the date and time from the request. The public IP is optional. Pick local time or UTC and a tolerance from plus or minus 1 minute up to 1 hour. You get the matching device and its details. Entries can be exported as CSV. The connection log docs cover the details.

Logs also settle ordinary arguments. A guest who insists the internet was down all afternoon becomes a five-minute conversation.

Some honest caveats. The log records where a device went, not what it said: traffic is encrypted and the gateway does not open it. Under very heavy traffic, entries can be dropped when the buffer is full. It is rare. A packed Saturday night is when it happens.

And the connection log is your customers' browsing metadata. That is personal data. Keep it as long as you have a reason to and no longer. In Turkey, Law No. 5651 requires hotels, cafes, dorms and similar places that offer public internet to keep access logs and use a content filter. Many other countries have their own retention duties. Check yours. Having a log does not by itself make a venue compliant with anything.

Introducing HandyCafe Wi-Fi Manager

HandyCafe has made software for internet cafes since 2003. For most of that time Wi-Fi was something our customers ran next to us on a router and a password. They kept asking for the same things: codes they could sell, limits per guest and a log they could hand over when asked. HandyCafe Wi-Fi Manager is our answer.

There are two pieces. HandyCafe Wi-Fi is the service on the gateway PC, a Windows machine with two network cards that does the routing, limits, filtering and logging. It can be the reception PC or a separate one. Wi-Fi Manager is the reception app where you sell vouchers, build packages and read the logs. It runs on Windows or Mac.

Price: $99 a year per venue. Unlimited devices. No per-user fee and no add-ons. The 14-day free trial does not ask for a credit card.

Now the trade-offs.

The PC has to stay on. While it is off, guest internet stops. A restart drops everyone for 1 to 3 minutes. That is the cost of using a normal PC instead of a box bolted to the wall. We think it is the right trade for a small venue. It is still a trade.

With one network card the software installs but cannot manage traffic. Speed limits, filtering and voucher login all need the second card.

Running the service on a separate PC from reception buys resilience. If the reception PC shuts down, sold vouchers and connected guests keep working. You just cannot sell new vouchers until Wi-Fi Manager is open again.

Hotel wifi hotspot software: what changes at reception

Hotels feel the shared-password problem most. The password goes on the key card holder, then on review sites, then onto the phones of people who stayed last year.

With vouchers, reception prints a slip at check-in. Set the duration to match the stay and the device count to match the room. A family of four gets a code for four devices. A one-night business guest gets one. When they leave, the code stops working without anyone touching it.

Staff move into their own group with a faster limit. The lobby TV and the POS terminal sit in the no-code group so they never hit a login page at 7 in the morning. The login page shows the hotel's name in a colour you pick and in 25 languages, which matters when half your guests do not read the local one.

What we do not have yet: guests cannot log in with their room number and surname. There is no link to a property management system either. Reception hands out a voucher slip. For a 20-room hotel that is a non-issue. For a 300-room hotel running a PMS it is an extra step at the desk and you should weigh it.

Cafes and restaurants

A cafe wants Wi-Fi to feel free while stopping one laptop from camping on the bandwidth for six hours. Print a two-hour voucher with a sensible speed cap on the receipt. Regulars can get a member account instead.

Libraries

The voucher pitch does not fit here. Libraries rarely sell internet.

What fits is the filter, the logs and per-patron limits through member accounts. A patron signs in, gets a fair speed and a daily allowance. The library keeps a record it can show if something goes wrong on its connection. In a children's section the adult and harmful-site categories do most of the work.

Schools and dorms

Dorms combine the hotel's problem (people living on the network for months) with the library's (young users and a filter you will be asked about). Students sign in with member accounts. Put students and staff in different groups and social media can be blocked for one while staying open for the other.

The access log earns its keep here. When a complaint comes in about something sent from the dorm's address, you find the device instead of guessing.

Internet cafes

This is where we started. The PCs already run HandyCafe. The Wi-Fi was always the loose end, with phones eating the bandwidth the gaming PCs need. A guest group capped at 20 Mbps protects the machines that pay the rent. Our piece on internet speed for a gaming cafe runs the numbers on how much line you need in the first place.

Wi-Fi vouchers sell at the same counter as PC time and show up in reports under their own Wi-Fi category. If you are still comparing systems for the PCs themselves, start with internet cafe billing software. For locked-down shared machines outside cafes, see PC management software for shared computers.

Before you decide

Wi-Fi Manager does not do login by room number today. It has no SMS phone verification and no consent checkbox on the login page either. If one of those is a hard requirement where you operate, ask us first.

For everyone else the sums are short. A gateway PC, a second network card and $99 a year buy a record of who was on your line and a way to stop one guest from eating everyone's bandwidth. Try it for 14 days on a spare PC with your own access points. The Wi-Fi Manager page has the details.