In brief
Both approaches are right somewhere. The decision comes down to where your records live and what happens during an outage.
There are two basic approaches to guest Wi-Fi: a device that sits in your business (a box), or a service you rent (the cloud). Both work. The choice comes down to which risk your business can live with.
We write this as a maker of boxes. So we have taken care to state the cloud's real advantages as they are; the decision is yours.
The core difference
Box: guest traffic passes through a device on your premises. Verification, limits and records are produced there and stored there.
Cloud: your access points or modem talk to an outside service for verification. Records are kept in that service's data centre.
Where the cloud is right
Multi-site businesses. With thirty branches, managing them from one panel is a real convenience. A box solution needs a device per branch.
When you do not want to deal with hardware. In the cloud, device failures, disk replacements and spare parts are not your problem.
Small and temporary installations. Buying a device for a few months on a construction site or a trade-show stand may not make sense.
A fast start. You can sign up for a cloud service and go live the same day.
Where the box is right
Records stay on your premises. Guest data and access records sit on your own device. They are not handed to a third party. That matters both for data responsibility and for control.
What happens when the line drops? With a cloud service, guests cannot get online anyway — but more importantly, records for the outage window may be missing when the line returns. With a box, verification and logging continue locally.
No monthly fee per user. Cloud services usually charge per concurrent user or per access point, per month. As the business grows, the bill grows. With a one-time licence, extra capacity does not grow the bill.
Less dependence on line quality. Because the portal itself runs locally, the sign-in screen opens instantly even when the line is slow.
Other jobs on the same device. Firewall, content filtering and VPN can run on the same box. In the cloud these are separate products.
The "the disk fills up silently" objection
This is the most common objection cloud vendors raise against boxes: the disk fills, nobody notices, logging stops.
The objection is fair — for an unmonitored device. The answer is to make the device observable:
- Disk usage, services and certificate expiry are measured continuously.
- When a threshold is crossed, an alert goes out by e-mail, Telegram or webhook.
- The archive is copied every night to a target outside the box.
- The device is also watched centrally, so silence is noticed.
With those measures the objection is answered. Without them, the objection is correct and should be taken seriously.
Hardware failure
This is the box's real risk, and it deserves a straight answer: the device can fail.
What reduces the risk is a backup regime:
- The signed archive should have a second copy outside the box.
- Configuration backups should be available so a replacement is quick to set up.
- Keeping a spare device is reasonable for businesses that cannot tolerate downtime.
In the cloud that risk is replaced by another: the provider's outage, or the provider shutting the service down. In both cases the question is the same — do I hold a copy of my own records?
How to compare cost
Comparing a one-time purchase with a subscription by looking at a single monthly price is misleading. Calculate it this way:
Box: device + software licence + (annual maintenance × years) + SMS Cloud: (monthly fee × 12 × years) + setup + SMS
Compare the three-year totals. There is a point where they meet; where that point sits depends on the size of your business. For small, single-site businesses the cloud usually stays cheaper for longer; as the user count grows, the box pulls ahead.
Three questions to decide
- Is it a problem for your guest records to sit with a third party? If yes, box.
- How many branches do you have? With many, the cloud's management convenience weighs heavily — or look for a box solution with multi-site management.
- Will you have a regime to monitor and back up the device? If not, do not buy a box; an unmonitored box is exactly the scenario where the cloud is right.
Summary
This is not a good-versus-bad comparison. The cloud sells convenience; the box sells control and predictable cost. Choose by which risk you would rather carry.