I often get asked by my clients how they can offer free W-Fi to their guests. I have never really found a easy to manage system that worked flawlessly. Most of the systems I found are targeted more towards large setups, or they don’t offer built in sub netting. A couple of years ago I discovered Meraki, which is exactly what I need for my clients. The problems is that a lot of my clients don’t like to spend a lot of money, and they see the yearly license fees as too expensive. So I continued my quest to find a cheaper alternative.

Enter Open-Mesh, Open-Mesh is an extremely low cost, cloud based, Wi-Fi solution. It offers public Wi-Fi, both free and paid, and allows you to completely separate those clients from your private network. It also allows you to create a captive portal for the public Wi-Fi. It is all managed via their cloud based management portal called Cloud Trax.

In case you don’t already know this, I run a small IT consulting company. By small, I mean, just me and my wife. Last week a client of mine needed to renew their AVG licenses so I thought this would be a good time to switch them over to AVG Cloud Care. If you haven’t seen AVG CloudCare I suggest you check it out. I have been a long time supporter of AVG. I feel like they have the best balance of protection, while not bogging down your computer. Not like some other companies, ahem Nort cough cough, or McA cough.

Anyway, last Friday I went on site to uninstall the old AVG 2012 and install CloudCare on their 6 PCs. The process went just fine, I thought. Monday morning I got a call from one of the employees saying that their email wouldn’t load. So I logged into CloudCare and connect to their computer, that is one of my favorite features! Once I logged in I saw this lovely message.