Any suggestions to help prevent illegal torrent downloads

[bill_wallace_73]

We are a 100 room hotel and we have recently purchased a ZD1200 and 6 x R500 which work in conjunction with a Peplink Balance 20 to provide better bandwidth using 2 x ip's.

I am concerned about having hotel guests downloading movies or music from illegal P2P or torrent sites. The reason is because our internet provider will soon determine that our IP address is frequenting downloading from these sites to often and we will get a warning letter and then they may cut us off. This has already happened in the USA and now Canada (our location) is also starting to follow suite. I can continue to operate with a blind eye or I can take some preventive measures to avoid this serious potential issue in the years to come. Because of our type of guests I am sure that there is a high percentage of illegal downloads taking place on a weekly basis. However, I still want our guests to be able to access legal sites like Netflix or Skype, etc.

Does anyone have some suggestions or recommendations that can be enabled in the ZD1200 or R500's to help with this issue?

FYI, the new system runs great. Only issue I see so far is that most of the iOS iPhone users have a low signal strength while windows and android users have a much higher signal strength. IE: Most likely the iOS software is not automatically reconnecting to the new stronger AP and holding on to the initial connection site. Read this in another article and I may have to implement the recommended solution of adding code to force them to monitor and reconnect.

[jason_hinterste]

In Wi-Fi, the client device decides when (and if) to roam.  There are some tricks that can be played to force off a device that has too weak of a signal, but it is a brute-force method.  Note also that iPhones tend to read about 10 dB lower in signal strength than a laptop at the same location, because of the weak transmitter and antenna in the iPhone.  Hence, your signal may not necessarily be as strong as you think it is, since it is really from the client's perspective.

With regard to your original question, you really should invest in a content filter that can do application layer filtering of P2P applications as well.  Most AP vendors, including Ruckus, do not include such an appliance in their product portfolio, but there are many 3rd party devices out there that will perform this function.  I've used SonicWALL (now owned by Dell) in the past for such applications.  You should be sure to scale appropriately for the amount of network traffic you have - I've seen WISPs undersize such a device to save a few $$, then it becomes the bottleneck of the network..

[monnat_systems]

bill

for your torrent problem, there is nothing much controller can do and a firewall would be a suitable device to implement.

[monnat_systems]

Bill, Yes, there are ways to control the second issue which you mentioned however suitable one would be to use SMARTROAM

if you google or search in this forum with this keyword you should be able to find some articles on how to do this...

[alan_sneath]

With regards to the firewall (yes, you will need one), make sure to enable application control as well.  I was initially just blocking BitTorrent ports, but found out the hard way after receiving a threatening letter from some American IP enforcement company that the clients now randomise the ports they use.  You need to actually analyse the traffic, which means you'll need a proper business firewall.  Like Jason Hintersteiner above I also use SonicWALL devices, but other vendors are available 🙂