This level would be best suited for businesses who have either a lower volume of traffic or perhaps a business center that wants to more strictly control those who are using the network.

The mimimum hardware cost for a device of this type starts at about $400. These are products designed for use by wireless ISPs, large companies, government institutions, or schools to deploy WLANs with secured user authentication support.

When an unauthenticated wireless user is trying to access the network, a logon page is shown instead of the requested page, forcing the user to enter user name and password. These also support custom web pages for advertising purposes.

These can also generate user log on/off information for back-end billing systems, or user access log status tracking purpose, which is very useful and demanded function for the environment requires highly security deployment, such as government locations, banks, military installations or high end coffee shops :)

Most can support multiple DSL/cable connections, enabling outbound load-balancing and bandwidth aggregation. (This means you can have lots of users downloading lots of data at the same time) Also, multiple connections can act as line redundancy/failed-over to improve uptime. e.g., If the DSL line dies, the cable connection will still be available.

Gateway-based routers are not difficult to install or configure, but are generally beyond the scope of most Aunt Millies. For this type of installation, figure a minimum of one day for an IT technician to install, configure and test. (This estimate assumes the most basic office environment where internet access exists and wire is already in place.)