Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Public WiFi operators - What do you block?

I work for a small local government and we operate public WiFi in a number of areas for community use. It is very well received and gets quite a bit of traffic daily.

My question is to other operators of public networks and what you block? The public SSID traverses our corporate network but is all isolated and terminates on our Palo Alto firewall. We’re utilizing url category filtering and app-id to block a small number of things like adult websites but the previous admin also blocked things like VPNs and BitTorrent. I’m curious if others would agree with that sort of blocking?

My take on it as a user of public WiFi at say McDonald’s is that I would want to use a VPN firstly to protect my traffic from attackers but also for the obvious business use of connecting to the corporate network. As for stuff like BitTorrent although it can be used for nefarious purposes I’m dubious about the value of strictly blocking it when I could just apply some qos so users don’t blow away our bandwidth.



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