Advice on WiFi networking

neilball

If you can connect with wired ethernet then the Ubiquiti Unifi could be a good choice. The Unifi AC-Lite are not bad value, and using the Unifi controller software gives you a managed wifi system which is very comprehensive. The controller software can be run on a PC it laptop and is really meant to be left running continuously. You can also buy the Unifi Cloud Key - a self-contained micro computer that runs the controller software and can be accessed from the cloud for remote management.

One of the options when setting up the Unifi wifi is to have a guest account. If the rest of your network supports VLANs then this would work exactly as Mickevh suggest above, but in a home environment this is not very likely. So the other option is to configure the guest wifi to be isolated from the everything on the network except the gateway (router). This works well enough on the Unifi system for most people. One quirk when using this is that if you connect as a guest and use an IP scanner then you will still “see” all addresses of devices on your network, but you will be unable to “talk” to any from the guest network. With a VLAN-separated network you would not see any other devices on a scan as the network is completely segregated (when correctly configured). But without managed network switches and the knowledge of how to configure them it’s not something worth bothering with.