A guest network is smart thinking--it's like letting someone into your house but making sure they can't rifle through your desk drawers.

Difficulty Level: Easy

What You Need:

>> A router (either AirPort Extreme 2009 or another dual-band brand)
>> Extra Ethernet cabling (if not using a dual-band wireless router)
>> An existing wireless or wired network

Increasingly, we depend on internet access to run our lives, and when we have guests over to our house, apartment, or workplace, normally we either have to open our wireless network or give the guest our network password. Either way, you open up your wireless network to security risks.

No worries--we’ll show you how to easily setup your own guest network using either an AirPort Extreme (early 2009 model) or another brand of router (we’ll use a Netgear). On newer routers that have two antennas and therefore support dual bands, the tools needed to create a guest network usually already exist in the provided software. However, you’ll need to check your particular router to see if this type of functionality is provided.

AirPort Extreme Base Station

1. Get Manual

Clicking Manual Setup lets you manually manage your AirPort Extreme.

On your Mac, navigate to and open the AirPort Utility, an application used to manage your base station, found in /Applications/Utilities. Click the Manual Setup button and enter your management password.

2. Roll Out the Welcome Mat

Want to let your guests' Macs talk to each other? It's more social that way.

Click the AirPort tab, and then the Guest Network tab. In this area, you’ll be able to configure your AirPort for guest access. Check the Enable Guest Network checkbox and type in an identifiable name for your guest network. Computers connecting to it will not have any access to your personal network and won’t be able to communicate with each other. However, if you check the box that says “Allow guest network clients to communicate with each other,” guests will be able to exchange files with and otherwise connect to one another.

3. Secure It

When encrypting your wireless network, we recommend using WPA encryption, because it’s more secure and less vulnerable to attacks.

In the Guest Network Security dropdown, you can select between different types of encryption. When you do this, you will be able to enter a password for your guest network. Don’t use the same password as you do for your main network, obviously, or this whole exercise will have been pointless.

4. Start It Up

After a short restart, guests will be able to connect to the wireless network that you just created.

Once you’ve entered all of the required fields, you can click Update. After your AirPort Extreme restarts, you should see an additional wireless network appear with the name you specified in Step 2. Guests can now log in to that network using the password you chose in Step 3 and access the internet. Again, guests won’t have access to your personal network and shared resources (network printers, disks, and so on).

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