We will provide more details of the new system over time. We will also move our main website to match our new color scheme – the registration pages have already been transferred. There are of course tutorials and documentation to update – a lot of work for us we look forward to.

If you come to try our Chillifire hotspot management but cannot find the required documentation yet, please contact us for guidance through our support form.

We look forward to your feedback to our new system.

At the end of the day we want to provide you, our customer, with choices and not lock you into a certain path. For this reason we have offered an integration of DD-WRT into the Chillifire hotspot service for a number of years. We have taken the recent upgrade of our system as an occasion to update the DD-WRT configuration and make it work with newer version of DD-WRT, namely v24 SP1, and v24 preSP2.

To make things as easy as possible, we have created a configuration file that you can load into your DD-WRT router. This has been focused on the WRT54GL, but requires only very little adjustments (if any) for other router models that are DD-WRT supported. We have also updated our installation guide to reflect these changes and to support the installation process.

The DD-WRT configuration files, installation and configuration guides (with many screen prints) can be found here.

Note: DD-WRT is using a depreciated hotspot software, chillispot, whereas we use a hotspot software coova-chilli, that has emerged from chilispot and is alive and well. Some features such as remote firmware configuration support, and detailed hotspot user activity tracing or Peer-to-Peer traffic filtering are not available with DD-WRT. Please use ChilliWrt, Chillifire’s pre-configured OpenWrt firmware, if you require these features.

Fees due to Chillifire will be levied per invoice after they have actually been. This means vouchers are handled the same as credit card or payment account (like PayPal, 2Checkout, Moneybookers) payments that go through your own PayPal, 2Checkout, or Moneybookers account.

We trust this change will make vouchers more popular and we hope you find this new way to account for vouchers attractive.

As a new feature we have also enabled the request of vouchers for free-access hotspots. They can be requested through the same screen in the control panel as the pay-per-use vouchers. Please note that vouchers for free-access hotspots are not available if you have free subscriptions. They are only available for commercial use which requires a paid subscription.
As always we welcome any feedback you may have.

The next feature we added is a guest access to users, that you can switch on or off per account. If the guest access is enabled users can receive access to the internet for a defined period of time between 5 and 60 minutes. The system will allow guest access only once within a period you can also define within the control panel. This way you can define guest access for, say 10 minutes every 24 hours, to give users a ‘try before you buy’ option. Of course data limits and speed limts can be defined as for any internet access.

Next thing we improved was the definition of Price Plans for Pay-per-Use hotspots, the Access Control for free-access hotspots, and the definition for Guest Access. We have separated the definition of these different access control mechanisms into three different screens, to make the maintenance easier for you and less confusing.

Last but not least we improved the features of the buy screen of the Pay-per-use hotspot, adding hover button elements, highlighting of error messages et all, to make things easier for less web savvy users, so as to increase your conversion rate.

These are some new features, as always we encourage your feedback as to what other features you would like to see enabled on your hotspot.

We also support Foneras now, tested with Fonera+. Older Fonera models and Fonera 2.0 with Redboot enabled should also work fine but have not been tested yet. We are looking for your feedback.
Last but not least we have enabled a Netgear router WNR834B, v1 and v2

Firmware versions and installation instructions will be posted in our forum page with Firmware Downloads and Installation Guides

To manage your hotspot with Chillifire using DD-WRT on your router, simply install the standard version of the DD-WRT software on your router as you usually would (for installation instructions, supported models, and firmware download check www.dd-wrt.com). Once DD-WRT’s standard version is installed all that is required is some additional configuration through DD-WRT’s web front-end describes in this guide and you have a Chillifire Hotspot. Pricing and account options are customisable through our Chillifire control panel just the same as for a Hotspot run with Chillifire firmware.

There are a couple of limitations that come with using DD-WRT and they are due to the fact that the DD-WRT firmware does not run an OpenVPN client.
• The lack of an OpenVPN on the DD-WRT versions that have  a hotspot daemon included means you cannot log in to the router remotely through our control panel, say, to change configuration options. You have to do that while in the physical presence of the router or set up other remote login options through DD-WRT. As we cannot login remotely we cannot check on the configuration and provide support or upgrades as we do with our own firmware. Please seek support on DD-WRT through their community forum.
• The DD-WRT does not provide a facility to log the IP address level detailed activities of a hotspot user. If you are living in a jurisdiction where this logging is mandated by law, DD-WRT is not the right solution for you. But even with DD-WRT we are logging login and logoff times, as well as router and device identifiers.

Other than that the router will behave look and feel like any other Chillifire hotspot. Yes, configuration of the router involved more manual steps compared to our own Chillifire firmware. However, DD-WRT certainly does have its uses and covers routers that OpenWRT alone has not yet unlocked. We therefore welcome DD-WRT enthusiasts to join our hotspot community and run a free or fee hotspot within minutes.

The DD-WRT configuration files, installation and configuration guides (with many screen prints) can be found here.

Detailed instructions how to load DD-WRT onto various routers can be found on DD-WRT’s wikki pages

General information about DD-WRT including support can be found on DD-WRT’s web site

What does this mean for you, the hotspot owner?

Having Europe based servers means you will have a superior customer experience, when located outside our home region Australasia. The internet is fast but not so fast that distance is not noticed. The lag (=delay) between a hotspot in Europe and our existing servers in Europe was noticeable. While not crucial it did at times create longer waits for hotspot customers when purchasing time or signing on. That is now a thing of the past. The new servers are based in central Europe and thus will not only benefit that continent but also the US (as there is a lot of fibre between the Americas and Europe), Africa and the Middle East.

To take advantage of these new servers we recommend you use them in conjunction with our new firmware. This new firmware has a number of features. For starters it will automatically identify the closest and fastest responding server to your hotspot. So you do not have to worry about the vagaries international internet speed, lag etc. The router will do that for you. So if you are based in Australia, New Zealand, or even Japan you will still be using the servers based in that region. However, hotspots based in the US or Europe will identify the new servers as the fastest and most responsive and will fall back to those. In essence everyone should have a more favourable experience for their customers.

The real leap forward in terms of the firmware however is the fact that it will be based on OpenWRT Kamikaze 8.09 and no longer on the older Whiterussian version. The benefit is that this new Chillifire firmware version can be installed on many more hardware architectures and thus routers compared to the old one. Microtik boards, Ubiquiti routers, FritzBox, Fonera, some Asustek and DLink routers, Atheros chipset based routers (to name but a few)are all within reach now. By no means are you confined to the good old WRT54GL – not that there is anything wrong with it. The firmware expects a minimum of 4MB flash memory and 16MB RAM. For a list of supported router models please refer to OpenWRT Table of Hardware for now. We will update lists of actually tested routers as the tests occur over time and we receive feedback from clients. We are reliant on the feedback of the community, as you will understand that we cannot test them all. If you want a firmware image compiled by us for a certain Hardware platform, please contact us via support. We will do that for you and ‘tackle’ the router together with you, if further adjustments for that particular model are required.

Another very important improvement is the ability to track web traffic down to IP address level for logged in users. This is a feature that may be a legal requirement in some jurisdiction. It has to be switched on deliberately, as it will generate some traffic from the router to the server (some 50 – 1000 KB per user per hour depending on how many pages they access) and this is not in everyone’s interest. At the same time you may not have a choice at all and may have to provide these records to the authorities of your jurisdiction on request. For those jurisdictions where this requirement is in place this function is provided. Now, because the very same jurisdictions generally also have very strict privacy laws these records are not made generally available to view on the control panel, but just on request and with good cause. We will make available for general viewing though details of login session per user as part of the ‘User’ transaction of the control panel. This gives some indication of usage including start and stop time, location and device used, as well as data up and download volumes. If more information is then indeed required by authorities we can make the detailed usage logs available on request with good cause.

The firmware also provides an overview of currently logged in users and the ability to disconnect them, if required. An improved interface to maintain your own splash page and add webpages or websites to your walled garden rounds up the improvements.

You can download the firmware images here 

Enjoy