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

Abstract

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.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.