On-site point-of-sale billing system which manages public use of wired or wireless access network

摘要

A wireless access point is deployed at a business location to provide a public wireless local area network (PWLAN) having access to the Internet. A computer at the business location facilitates transactions of selling access to the PWLAN and facilitates transactions of goods or services other than access to the PWLAN. An on-site software component receives an amount paid for PWLAN access either by polling a point-of-sale software component of the computer or by receiving a manually-entered input of the amount paid. An on-site password generator issues a password to access the PWLAN based on a transaction for PWLAN access. An on-site authentication component and an on-site timeout component act to determine whether to allow or deny an attempt to access the PWLAN based on a password received by the wireless access point and based on whether the received password has an associated amount of remaining time of PWLAN access.