Most guest WiFi platforms stop at a login box. Aethernet Cloud treats the connection as what it actually is — the one moment every guest gives you their full attention — and hands you a design studio, a marketing surface, a guest database and a security lens on the back of it. This page is the complete inventory: what each part does, and why it is built the way it is.
A guest selects your network, sees a splash page you designed, signs in with an email code or a social account, the network authorises the device, and they arrive on a landing page carrying your message. Every stage belongs to you — the branding, the fields you ask for, what happens after sign-in, and what the guest sees once they are online.
The captive-portal sign-in window is a stripped-down browser that guests dismiss the second they are online — it is the worst possible place to put an offer. The landing page opens in the guest’s real browser, after they are connected and relaxed. That is where Aethernet Cloud puts your marketing, and it is the single biggest design decision in the platform.
The splash page is the branded screen a guest meets before they are online. Aethernet Cloud gives every property a full editor for it — logo, background, colours, wording, and precisely which details you ask a guest to hand over.
A property is rarely one audience. Run a members’ page, a restaurant page and a conference page at the same site, each with its own branding and its own fields. Point each SSID at whichever page it should show; one page is always the default, so the plain address is never ambiguous.
Name, email, phone, date of birth and marketing consent are controlled per splash page. Optional extras — gender, postcode, country, interests, room number, check-in and check-out dates — are set per property. Ask for less on a restaurant page and more on a resort page.
Guests verify with a code sent to their email, or sign in with Google, Apple or Facebook. Email works on every network configuration; social sign-in needs the guest’s real browser rather than the mini captive window, and we set each site up accordingly.
GDPR wording, terms, privacy policy links, data-retention settings and the marketing opt-in label are all configurable per property — so what a guest agrees to matches what you actually do with the data.
After a guest is authorised, Aethernet Cloud sends them to a page you built. It used to be a fixed shape — header, adverts, continue button, always in that order. Now it is an ordered list of sections you drag into any arrangement.
Sections on the left, the page they produce on the right. Rows drag to reorder.
Sections stack and adapt so the page fits a 360-pixel phone as happily as a laptop. That is deliberate, and it is the opposite of how the advert canvas works — an advert is a poster that scales as one piece, a page is a document that has to adapt. Free placement is safe in a creative and would shatter on the device every guest is actually holding.
Free placement on a fixed-ratio canvas, with an inspector for colour, font, size, rotation and shadow.
Most platforms hand you a headline box and an image field. Aethernet Cloud gives you a canvas: place text, pictures, shapes and buttons anywhere, and the finished advert scales as a single unit into whatever space the page gives it.
An advert is not just a picture. It can carry an offer, open a page you wrote, hand over a coupon with a scannable code, and tell you honestly how it performed.
An advert can do nothing at all (pure branding), open a detail page you write inside Aethernet, or send the guest to an external site. The middle option exists because hotel and restaurant teams do not build web pages and had nowhere to point a link.
Attach a coupon with its own code, terms and expiry date — an expired one is shown struck through rather than quietly vanishing. The QR code is its own feature with three modes: a website, the coupon code, or plain text, because the most useful QR on a hotel advert often is not a coupon at all.
Adverts live in a library owned by the property, not welded to one page. Put the same creative on two landing pages and edit it once — both update. Performance is still tracked separately per placement, so you can see which property or page it works on.
Impressions and clicks are counted once per viewer per advert per hour, so a guest reloading a page cannot inflate a number. The viewer is stored as a one-way fingerprint of the connection, never the address itself — and if that check cannot run, nothing is counted at all.
Adverts that do not need the full designer can use a ready layout — banner, hero, text, promo or image — and drop straight onto the page.
Place each advert at a third, half or full width and drag it into position. The page lays out on a six-column grid on desktop and collapses cleanly to a single column on a phone.
Give a placement a start and end date, or pause it without deleting it. A seasonal offer can be built once and left to run itself.
Every guest who signs in becomes a record you own — not a number on someone else’s platform. That database is the foundation for post-stay surveys, review generation and the reporting your owners ask for.
Names, emails, devices, visit history and the fields you chose to collect, exported whenever you want. It is your marketing list, built automatically by people asking for WiFi.
Send surveys after a stay or a visit, track your Net Promoter Score over time, and compare properties against each other.
A poor score raises a manager alert rather than sitting in a report nobody opened — so the problem gets handled while the guest is still reachable.
Guests who had a good experience are pointed toward leaving a public review, turning satisfied stays into the ratings that drive future bookings.
Aethernet Cloud watches the name lookups happening on your guest network and checks them against curated threat intelligence — roughly 1.5 million known-bad domains, refreshed automatically. It is how you find out that your guest WiFi is talking to something it should not be.
| Category | What it catches | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Active malware | Live command-and-control and malware distribution hosts, from a continuously updated threat feed | High |
| Phishing | Credential-harvesting pages impersonating banks, brands and login portals | High |
| Cryptojacking | Browser-based mining scripts quietly consuming your bandwidth and a guest’s battery | High |
| Ransomware & scam | Known ransomware infrastructure and fraud domains | Medium |
| Gambling & adult | Acceptable-use categories, for properties that need to enforce a policy | Medium |
| Piracy | Torrent and file-sharing infrastructure that creates liability on your connection | Medium |
This is visibility and reporting, not content filtering — it tells you what happened on your network rather than blocking it at the door. It is available on Professional and Enterprise plans and is switched on per property. One honest limitation worth knowing: guests using encrypted DNS or private-relay features on their phones tunnel their lookups elsewhere, so those devices are invisible to any system of this kind, including this one.
Aethernet Cloud is a software layer. Your access points, firewall and controller stay exactly as they are — nothing is ripped out, nothing is replaced. Above that layer it connects to the systems that run your property.
Aethernet Cloud sits above the hardware you already own and connects outward to the systems that run the property.
If you run several properties, the per-property view is not the one you need. The management company portal sits above every property in your portfolio.
Guest capture, survey scores and NPS side by side across every property, so an outlier is obvious instead of buried in a per-property report.
Each hotel keeps its own identity — its own splash pages, landing pages and adverts — while you keep one place to manage them all.
Property staff see their own property. Regional and corporate users see the portfolio. Nobody is handed more access than their job needs.
Per-property cost falls as the portfolio grows, and the management portal is included once you reach a handful of properties. Talk to us and we will put real numbers against your estate.
A guest WiFi platform collects exactly the kind of personal information that turns a minor incident into a reportable breach. LEFCON has spent 25+ years doing security and compliance work for hospitality, and Aethernet Cloud is built the way we would want a vendor to build it for us.
Names, email addresses, phone numbers and social identifiers are encrypted in the database with AES-256-GCM. A copy of the database on its own does not hand anyone your guest list.
Firewall passwords, wireless controller keys, RADIUS secrets, PMS credentials and two-factor seeds are all encrypted at rest — not just the guest data.
Staff accounts support authenticator-app two-factor with single-use recovery codes. Sign-in is rate limited and returns an identical response on every failure, so an attacker cannot learn which accounts exist by probing.
Changes made in the admin console are recorded automatically, with anything credential-shaped redacted from the log. Coverage does not depend on a developer remembering to add it.
Everything a property designs — adverts, page layouts, colours, fonts, links — is stored as structured, validated data rather than raw markup. Colours, links, fonts and sizes are each checked against a fixed set before they ever reach a guest’s screen. It is the single most important decision protecting guests on a platform where clients author content.
Aethernet Cloud is monitored and supported by LEFCON Prometheus, our round-the-clock helpdesk and network operations centre — the same team that supports our managed IT clients.
Aethernet Cloud is designed, built and supported by LEFCON — a managed IT services company that has designed, installed or supported over 500 networks internationally. Tell us about your property and our engineers will confirm exactly how it fits, and what it costs, before you commit to anything.