One of the first questions a visitor will ask when visiting your business is, “what’s the Wi-Fi password?” Don’t share it. Unless, you have a guest Wi-Fi network. Here’s why.

Security Is a Huge Concern

Guest Wi-Fi accounts allow you to completely control access to your company computers, servers and other devices. When a guest enters your office, you have no means knowing whether or not his or her personal device is secure. Neither do you have any reason to assume that it is! Your guest Wi-Fi account will help protect your network from any malicious software that may live on your guests’ devices. Furthermore, an isolated Wi-Fi network helps to prevent guests from accessing file shares, networked printers, and other resources that might be available to those who have joined your main wireless non-guest network. This can be an important feature in a business setting when you have outside vendors or partners that may also be competitors that you want to provide Internet access to, without giving them “the keys to the kingdom”.

You’ll Want To Limit Guest Bandwidth

A guest Wi-Fi network will also enable you to limit the Internet resources available to your visitors, particularly bandwidth. It’s nice of you to provide your guest with an in-house resource, but you don’t want to negatively impact the performance of your team at the expense of a guest. Depending on your router’s features and configuration, you may be able to limit the bandwidth provided to your guests so that you can keep your main network’s traffic as the priority. To see if your router has this capability, look for Quality of Service (QoS) options in your router’s administrative console (available via your web browser).In other words, why would you risk slowing down your employees’ connection speed? When you segment your Wi-Fi networks, you can provide your guest reasonable access to the Internet without any detriment to your office-wide network performance.

You Can Turn Off Your Guest Network Without Turning Off Your Main Wireless Network

If your guests get a little too comfortable and start hogging all your bandwidth you can easily turn off the guest network without it affecting the rest of your non-guest network traffic. Again, the value here is the ability a second network offers to completely control your in-house resources.

Again, Security Is a Huge Concern

Security is the number one reason to make the small leap to a second network. Though more susceptible to a brute force attack, the segregated nature of the guest network serves to keep risks to a minimum. For better security, change the passphrase for the guest network regularly, print the latest code on slips of paper, and then hand them out to your authorized guests as needed.

Convinced of the need yet? The easiest way to create a guest Wi-Fi account is to install a secondary, business-grade Wi-Fi router. If you don’t have a guest Wi-Fi account for your network or don’t even know where to begin looking for routers, give us a call! THB is always happy to help.