Wi-Fi Hotspot Regulations

It’s not easy understanding what you do and don’t have to do as a public Wi-Fi Hotspot provider these days. The UK and EU governments are very keen that we’re all connected to the Internet with rocket fast Internet services however they keep threatening to ban Wi-Fi Hotspots completely.

So what’s this all about? There’s a EU directive that basically says that anyone that’s got a Wi-Fi Hotspot Service installed in their business is a public communications provider. It doesn’t even matter whether you’re using a company, like PolkaSpots Supafly WiFi Hotspots or doing it yourself. As a public communications provider, you have to keep a record of everyone who’s using your service, their IP addresses, mac addresses and login / logout times. But because of the data protection act, you’re not actually allowed to do this – you just have to have the ability to do it. Silly silly.

At PolkaSpots, we were actually one of the very first Wi-Fi Hotspot Companies to adhere to these regulations. Our clever little system records all the traffic on all our Wi-Fi Hotspots and should we be required to do so, can dump all the traffic, emails and web from a particluar site to a server in our office.

All this is quite worrying? Not really, it’s actually good these rules are in place. The answer is not to completely ban Wi-Fi hotspots, it’s to control what’s being downloaded at the Hotspots. For example, all our Wi-Fi Hotspots come with content filtering and we have clever bandwidth management in place to prevent any single user from abusing the connections.