Many moons ago when we first bought our place in Spain (6 days and counting) I bought something called an OM2P – a small white WIFI Access Point. I’m talking several years ago.

What I was after was private WIFI and public WIFI – something I could charge a nominal sum for. Now the reason for this is that at the time, there was very little in the way of WIFI access in the village of Galera (Granada area) and it was costing me a lot for a beamed Internet connection from a company called Iberbanda (we referred to this state owned company as “Iberbandits”).

I figured if I put the access point near the edge of the building, anyone wanting to use it could do so for a nominal sum and that would help pay for the connection.

Today we have high speed Internet over there and I put the unit in a cupboard 2 years ago.  Today I dragged it out wondering whether to throw it away or find a use for it (door-stop perhaps). A quick dusting and it looks as good as new. The unit is interesting as ALL setup is done via the web. You plug it into 12v and your Ethernet – it finds it’s own way to talk to the CLOUDTRAX servers and from there you can go off to a website and control everything.

Convinced they’d have gone bust by now I plugged the unit in and went off to the website.

Not only was my OM2P recognised but I was informed that an update was due – did I wish to go ahead. I agreed and 10 minutes later not only was my OM2P fully updated but also given a whole load of new features – the update is only a couple of months old.  So now this little white wonder can create up to FOUR SSIDs.  I’m not interested in the public side so I switched off the main one. That left three SSIDs to play with.  They can be set up to be just simple access points on the network OR totally isolated.

As it happens when we head off to Spain, our place becomes a holiday rental (www.hollyberry-cottage.co.uk) for the summer and I was struggling with the best way to isolate my various access points from visitors to the cottage. Not only can the SSIDs be made utterly isolated – they can also be bandwidth limited (that’s not working for me – I’ve reported it) and even optionally isolated from each other. If you wish you can make SSID1 accept tokens from credit cards etc and let the public have a little bit of your bandwidth (isolated).. or not.

Good investment.