Hi Emily
We've been encountering many different approaches to wifi provision at the different museums and arts organisations we work with. But you have an advantage in that your two spaces are relatively small and so you won't need a lot of infrastructure. You may well find a separate, small business type package for each building will be a lot cheaper than a unified, specialist service. Have a look at what the major suppliers are offering but do check their ts & cs (grit your teeth).
Next up are the routers - you could probably get away with just one in the local history centre and perhaps one per floor in the museum. It's a good idea to buy some robust routers rather than use the one that comes with your package. There's a lot that you can do with the configuration of your router that most people ignore. For example you can set what hours of the day it is operational, what sites can or cannot be used and also what services are available - you might want to restrict it to web traffic only, so emails, FTP, torrents and so on are greatly restricted. All this is done through a control panel that you access from your own computer. You can set up more than one channel - say one public one and one hidden, private one for your own usage. Each can have different restrictions.
All these things get your set up as controlled as reasonably achievable - following that you can decide whether to have a log in or free access. Log ins require a technical infrastructure and this is where you'll find lots of costs and ongoing fees. A compromise is to have people agree to some ts & cs - this seems to control behaviour immensely - even though it's purely a social barrier. The other approach is the cafe style wifi password that you tell your visitors - this is often used as a marketing message : q - "what's the wifi password", a - "chocolatebrownies" - what would be the heritage equivalent!?
Visitors are coming to expect wifi service everywhere. You can also use the set up to deliver your content to users devices and to your own kiosks, and you can encourage people to interact with social media etc while in-situ. There's a fear in the sector that providing this stuff will have all visitors face down furiously tapping into phones and not looking at the exhibits, but this doesn't seem to bear out in reality - more a case of sporadic usage as part of a visit.
All the best
Peter
@peterpavement
Sent from my iPhone
> On 10 Feb 2014, at 15:08, Emily Hicks <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> We are considering installing free wi-fi broadband in the museum.
>
> Can anyone advise regarding this?
>
> 1. do you know roughly what your annual cost is (I know this will vary depending on contract types)
> 2. Do you password protect the wi-fi, or allow completely open access?
> 3. Does your contract have a download limit on it?
> 4. Do you think it's worth it?!
> 5. Is there anything else you would advise us thinking about? e.g. benefits or pitfalls?
>
> Very many thanks
> Emily
>
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