Setting Up Guest WiFi Access Using QR Codes and NFC Tags

repligation

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Nov 23, 2012
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Needless to say we are having a few friends over this evening and I thought I would share the findings of my experiment.

This morning I set up two paper cards for our guests to connect to our Wi-Fi. One card was for the Guest WiFi and the other was made with full access to my NAS drive (for those I wish to share media with). Originally I had set them up for our Christmas party using NFC tags with NFC Task Launcher, but I also wanted to include QR Codes this time for those without NFC.

The NFC tags work great but the other person must have NFC Task Launcher installed in order to use them.

As for the QR Codes, I created them using two different sources: QrZilla | Online QR Code generator and Wifi QR Generator from the Play Store. Both of these sources worked. I like the browser based qrzilla better because it doesn't require installing a new app on my phone. I just pasted the resulting QR Code into a Word document and printed it with wifi logo next to it leaving space on the page for the NFC tag to be applied.

Here comes the point of this post.
I tried three code scanner apps on my GS3 to test my printed QR Codes and only one actually directly connected my phone to the wifi network without any extra work or steps.

1. AT&T Code Scanner--Only opens a web page with wifi data fields delineated by semi-colons. I might as well just write down the SSID and Password next to the NFC tag and save them a step.

2. Red Laser--Reads the QR Code and shows the network available to connect to, but never actually connects.

3. Scan--Worked perfectly. Takes you directly to your Wi-Fi Networks screen in settings and connects directly.

We have a Dual Band 2.4Ghz/5Ghz Netgear Router with Full and Guest SSIDs on both bands, so I am ultimately going to create two more cards for the 5GHz band as well. The GS3 is capable of using the 5GHz band because it is capable of using 802.11a (802.11a/b/g/n) but most devices (like our Nexus 7) cannot. The 5GHz band gives higher transfer speeds but less range.
 

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