In a council library on any weekday afternoon, someone is applying for work, someone else is completing a benefits application, and an older resident is trying to book a GP appointment because the phone line has been engaged all morning. None of them has reliable broadband at home, or the mobile data left to manage it. For a significant proportion of the population, the connectivity available in a library, a community centre, or a leisure facility is not a convenience. It is the route through which they reach the services they are entitled to.

That reality sits at the intersection of three pressures every local authority will recognise. Public services continue to move online, which means the residents least likely to have connectivity at home are often those with the greatest need to access those services. Councils hold sensitive information about the people they serve, from case files to financial records, and carry a clear accountability for protecting it. And budgets remain under sustained pressure, so any service costing more than it should is money not spent on frontline delivery. Public wifi sits in the middle of all three, which is why it deserves rather more attention than it usually receives.

The hidden risk: public access bolted onto a corporate network

Guest wifi is often switched on because residents expect it, added to whatever network already existed in the building, and then left alone for years. It works, nobody complains, and it drops down the list of things that need looking at. The difficulty is that a service which functions perfectly well from the user's point of view can still be carrying a significant amount of risk in how it has been built.

Where public and corporate traffic have not been properly separated, every device connecting in a reception area, a leisure centre, or a library becomes part of the same environment as the systems the council depends on. A resident checking their email in a community building should have no possible route to a case management system or a finance platform, and yet in networks that have grown organically over time, that separation is frequently assumed rather than designed. This is not a theoretical concern. It is the reason network segregation appears in almost every security framework and assurance review a council will encounter.

There are two adjacent points that information governance and IT leads will recognise immediately. Where card payments are taken anywhere on the same estate, from leisure bookings to parking to room hire, proper segregation is directly relevant to PCI DSS obligations, and a poorly separated guest network can bring parts of the estate into scope that were never intended to be. And where public access is provided in settings used by children and vulnerable adults, councils carry safeguarding expectations around content filtering and appropriate use that a basic open network simply does not address.

Then there is the question of value. Many councils are running a patchwork of site-by-site wifi arrangements accumulated over a decade or more, each with its own contract, its own hardware, its own renewal date, and its own support arrangement. Nobody set out to build it that way. It happened one building at a time, usually for sound reasons at the time. The combined cost across an estate is often considerably higher than a single managed service would be, while delivering less consistency, less visibility, and weaker assurance than leadership would expect for the money being spent.

What a properly engineered guest network actually looks like

The good news is that none of this is difficult to solve. It simply requires the public access network to be designed with intent rather than inherited and extended.

Traffic segregation is the foundation. In plain terms, this means the logical separation of guest traffic from corporate traffic, so that public users operate in an environment that has no route into internal systems at all. It helps to think of it as two entirely separate lanes sharing the same road surface, running alongside one another but never crossing. The public lane reaches the internet and nothing else. The corporate lane carries the council's own systems and is invisible to anyone connecting as a guest. Because the separation is built into the design rather than applied as a rule afterwards, it holds consistently and can be evidenced when somebody asks.

Secure portal access comes next. A properly engineered guest portal controls who connects and on what terms, with authentication appropriate to the setting. In many public spaces a straightforward registration process is proportionate. In others, particularly where the connection provides access to anything beyond general internet use, multi-factor authentication gives the council a much stronger position on who is using the service and how that access is governed. This matters for security, and it matters equally for demonstrating appropriate use to auditors, information governance colleagues, and elected members.

Cloud managed wifi is the practical answer to a dispersed estate. Councils operate across dozens or hundreds of buildings, and managing each of them independently is neither efficient nor consistent. A cloud managed platform allows policy, filtering, authentication, and monitoring to be applied uniformly across every site from a single place, with genuine visibility of what is happening across the whole estate rather than a partial picture assembled building by building. When a filtering policy needs updating, it updates everywhere. When a site develops a performance problem, it is visible before residents start reporting it.

Taken together, these elements are what allow a council to extend public access confidently rather than cautiously. When the boundary between public and corporate is designed, tested, and monitored, opening up connectivity in more places stops being a risk decision and becomes a service decision.

How TNP approaches this for local authorities

At TNP, we design and manage secure public access networks for local authorities as part of our managed wifi and cloud connect services. We engineer the guest portal, the authentication, and the traffic segregation as a single coherent design, rather than as separate components added to an existing network and hoped to work together. The security position is established at the design stage, which is the only point at which it can be established properly.

Because we work independently of any single vendor, the design is led by the council's requirements rather than a supplier's product set. That independence is a significant factor in value for money as well as in quality, because the right combination of technologies can be selected on merit and cost rather than on compatibility with whatever platform happens to be in place already. For an organisation trying to consolidate a fragmented estate, that freedom often makes the difference between a workable business case and an unaffordable one.

Our experience across local government runs deep. We understand the assurance expectations councils are held to, the practical reality of managing a geographically dispersed estate on a constrained budget, and the fact that public wifi is rarely anyone's full-time responsibility. We also invest in this area beyond commercial delivery. We provide free guest wifi portals across council networks and free fibre connectivity to community centres, because widening access to connectivity is something a business like ours is uniquely placed to contribute.

This is a long-term partnership rather than an installation. The service is managed, monitored, and maintained, policies are kept current, and the estate can be extended to new sites as the council's digital inclusion programme develops, without starting the procurement conversation again each time.

Bringing it back to what matters

A properly designed public access network delivers on all three of the pressures we started with. Residents can reach the services they need from the community buildings they already use, which turns a digital inclusion commitment into something practical rather than aspirational. Corporate systems and resident data sit behind a boundary that has been designed and can be evidenced, giving information governance and IT leadership a defensible position in audits and assurance reviews. And consolidating a fragmented estate into a single managed service typically costs less than the arrangements it replaces, which means public access becomes something the council can extend rather than something it has to ration.

If you are unsure where your own organisation stands, three questions are a useful place to begin. Is our guest network genuinely separated from the systems holding resident and corporate data, and could we demonstrate that separation if we were asked tomorrow? Do we know who is accessing our public network, with appropriate authentication in place, and can we evidence how that access is controlled? And are we paying a fair price for a service that actively supports our digital inclusion commitments, or simply covering the cost of basic access across a patchwork we inherited? The answers usually make the next step fairly clear.

Frequently asked questions

How do councils provide secure public wifi?
Secure public wifi is delivered by designing the guest network as a separate environment from the outset, with guest traffic logically segregated from corporate traffic so that public users have no route into internal systems. A managed guest portal controls who connects and on what terms, and a cloud-managed platform applies consistent policy, filtering, and monitoring across every site in the estate.

Is guest wifi a security risk?
Guest wifi is a risk when public access has been added to an existing corporate network without proper separation, because every device connecting then sits in the same environment as internal systems. Where guest and corporate traffic are logically segregated by design, the risk is substantially reduced, and the separation can be evidenced in audits and assurance reviews.

How do I separate guest and corporate network traffic?
Separation is achieved by designing the guest environment so that public traffic is logically isolated from corporate traffic and has no route to internal systems. This is built into the network architecture rather than applied as a rule afterwards, which is what allows it to hold consistently across a dispersed estate and to be demonstrated when required.

What is a captive portal for guest wifi?
A captive portal is the page users see when they first connect to a public network, where they register or authenticate before being granted access. A well-engineered portal gives the organisation control over who connects and on what terms, supports acceptable use policies, and provides a clear position on how public access is governed.

Do I need multi-factor authentication on a guest network?
Multi-factor authentication is not required in every public setting, but it gives a much stronger assurance position where the context calls for it. The appropriate level of authentication should be determined by the setting and the level of access being provided, and applied consistently as part of the overall design rather than added to individual sites in isolation.

What is cloud managed wifi?
Cloud managed wifi allows an organisation to manage wireless networks across many sites from a single central platform, rather than configuring and maintaining each building independently. Policy, filtering, authentication, and monitoring are applied consistently across the estate, and performance issues are visible centrally rather than only when reported locally.

How much should public wifi cost a council?
Costs vary with the size and complexity of the estate, but many councils find they are paying more than necessary because public wifi has accumulated as a patchwork of separate contracts and equipment over many years. Consolidating into a single managed service commonly reduces total cost while improving consistency, visibility, and assurance.

How does public wifi support digital inclusion?
Public wifi supports digital inclusion by giving residents without reliable home connectivity a place to access online services, from job applications and benefits claims to healthcare appointments. As more public services move to digital channels, connectivity in libraries and community buildings becomes a practical route to the services residents are entitled to.

Does guest wifi affect PCI compliance?
It can. Where card payments are taken anywhere on the same estate and guest traffic is not properly segregated, parts of the network can fall within the scope of PCI DSS that were never intended to be. Proper logical separation between guest and corporate traffic is an important part of keeping that scope contained and evidencing compliance.

How do I manage wifi across multiple council buildings?
Managing wifi consistently across a dispersed estate is best achieved through a cloud managed platform, which applies policy, filtering, authentication, and monitoring uniformly across every site from one place. This replaces the site-by-site approach that many organisations have accumulated over time and gives central visibility of performance and usage across the whole estate.