Providing Public WIFI. Any Issues?

We are a rural nature park.

Now that DSL is FINALLY available here in copper land we are looking to advance into the realm of providing public WIFI. 

We thought we would get ahead of the curve and provide wifi access in our parkiing, picnic, and astronomy observing area for those who want to take off work and go do some remote work at the park. I have experience with this as I have had to go to wifi hotspots to transfer large files that dial-up doesn't support. I still have dial-up at the moment as the particulars of finally getting DSL are decided on. One nice benefit is that when a phone rings in these public areas it isn't for me! Therefore I generally get more work done.

We also are a popular observing site for astronomy and our users would like access so they can do imporived public programs, check the weather, check out that remote telescope, etc. 

As we travel down this road and get set up our committee was considering any legal ramifications that may exist.

Anyone find a provider that charges more if you are providing free access? We are going with Verizon.

Anyone ever get request for activity files from the FBI, local police?You have to expect this happens from time to time.

Any issues we are missing?

We also plan to harvest e-mails and basic information for our database. This info will be required in order to get access to the wifi.  We thought it would be a great way to develop our mailing list.

Anyone doing this?

You started out well but ended with harveting personal email addresses. Once you get into the area of getting info from users, you have stepped over a legal line in many states. You begin to have all the responsibilities of a ISPs in some states, check out your state laws.

A search warrent from any law enforcement group can force you to tuurn over all information you have (but that is unlikely). I have been involved with a few public wifi sites and none have been requested info from law enforcement.

You will need a secure network, at the very least put the wifi external to your system and on a different ipadressing system.

Harvesting e-mail addresses would be in the form of: Joe Q. Public  logs on to our WiFI. He has to provide his e-mail address and perhaps his name in order to get to the WWW.

It would state that by using the wifi he is willingingly acknowledging that he will recieve e-mail content from the NP as a tradeoff for using our access point.

Rather than making an electronic system, what if you trade the email address on a sheet of paper for a sheet of paper with the access code good for 24 hours of access?  You now do not have any way to link users to email addresses, but you still have the collection process. 

Dave

Problem: NP has only 1 employee. I am not always avaialble on property. 

I had thought about providing access to WIFI as a benefit of being a donor. You get the info that way but it doesn't get info from walk-ins if I anot around. 

Hi-

I've wondered about this myself.  I think your first concern will turn out to be that technically any sharing of a DSL connection outside of your "household" is against the terms of your contract.  I bet Verizon would want to charge you more at the very least.

I imagine providing access for free would be more of a gray area.  Heaven forbid anyone would try to sell access (not that you would).  You might get away with it as a free service, on the other hand if they happened to find out you might lose your connection or get a huge bill.

Let us know how it turns out!

Richard

Actually that was one of the questions I asked them,. I explained what we were evcentually planning  and they said there was no restricitons.

Just found out tonight that my watering hole had their Internet disconnected because some one was doing something illegal on their WiFi and the ISP just shut them off.  Didn't get any details but I will try to follow up with the owner the next time I see him.  Now I might  have to go back to the office to do my close of business end of month processing at the end of each month. :-(

Dave