Guest Hotspot Controller

I need a business grade firewall router which has Guest Hotspot Control capability. I have been looking at DrayTek Vigor 2862ac but it is getting poor experience reports on the DrayTek forum which brought me to these pages and two questions:-

Is there add on or plugin software to provide such a capability to a device with LEDE/OpenWrt installed?

Can anybody suggest a better firewall router please?

Budge

What are your requirements? Could be anything from a US$20 router and a captive hotspot through enterprise-grade routing, 802.1X, and payment and billing systems.

Hi Jeff,
I shall need at least three subnets; private, business and guests with hotspot control for guests accessing the internet and good security/isolation between them. Assume up to 50 guests at any one time.

The DrayTek was my first look. I have also considered good firewall router with separate hotspot management controller. Probably do not need billing system but will need guests sign on and to be able to terminate guests at "checkout."

I have seen there are some "..chilli.." offerings which work with openwrt but these possibly are beyond my tech expertise. I am hoping some members here have relevant experience they are willing to share.

Thanks for your reply. Hope this helps.

Personally, I'd suggest a 64-bit x86 router and discrete APs. My reasoning for this primarily lies with reliability and security (rather than "performance") as this seems like it is to be used in a commercial setting. By splitting off the APs they can be replaced/positioned independently of the router itself. The APs could be "real" APs, or could be SOHO wireless routers running OpenWRT. The router itself can sit in a secured office or similar location.

I have not run a captive portal myself, so experience of others with coova-chili or the like would be a good guide on that part.

For the router itself, OpenWRT will likely do the job, as would something like OPNSense/pfSense if you're looking for relative ease of configuration on a setting somewhat more complex than the standard home setting.

Do read the various threads on these boards around client isolation. It is a non-intuitive combination of options that are required under OpenWRT.

Depending on your line speed and if you have any need for traffic shaping or VPN, my personal recommendation for the router hardware would be a PC Engines apu2c4. There are also many cheap, imported x86 units available; and opinions on their build quality and reliability abound in, for example, the pfSense user forum.