Honestly? It's 2017. Just throttle bandwidth and give your internet away for free.

There are some obvious cases in which this is unacceptable, but they are few and far between. The overwhelming majority of captive portals I see are just trying to get your contact info... so now you have two reasons why they should disappear.

Ah, first world problems. Where I am, data connections are out of reach for the vast majority of the population (yet somehow, they all seem to have smartphones - go figger).

Everyone goes to the mall, not to shop, it would seem, but to use the free wifi and bask in the comfort of free aircon.

Captive portals are here to stay in places around the world, and like it or not, they are a widely used solution that is not going away any time soon. I for one applaud the author of this website's attempts to shine light on the problem of authenticating to this network type.

There are still part of the world where you are require by law to log who is accessing the internet, in case he/she does something illegal.

Yet another fantastic reason to get rid of captive portals. They spy on you _and_ are frequently broken.

> The overwhelming majority of captive portals I see are just trying to get your contact info...

IIRC in some countries they're required (by law) to do so, because, y'know, terrorists.

Far worse than terrorists, filesharers.

Most captive portals I run across are trying to verify that you are in fact a paying customer. Typically by making you enter your hotel room number and name or something.

Normally you would think it would just be easier to set a wifi password and skip the captive portal nonsense, but so many vendors harbor the fantasy that other people will pay for the wifi so they have to leave it open and put a "buy 24 hours of internet for only $30!" link in there.

I hate captive portals. They are such a nuisance, especially when you have your machine configured to always connect via VPN.

I don't want your shitty slow internet. I want to pay $20 for fast enough Internet on a plane, not some 56.6kbps bullshit.

$20 is one month worth of broadband in some countries. Anybody can do what he wants with his money, but $2 would be a more appropriate price tag for a few hours of Internet. If you're working, $20 could be OK though because you're gaining more.

It also depends on where you are. Getting high-speed, low-latency internet to a shopping centre in the middle of a metropolitan area is probably a bit easier and cheaper than getting it to a plane flying 40000 feet above the Atlantic. And while I probably wouldn't pay $20 for eight hours of internet on a plane (unless I really needed it), I don't find the price tag entirely unjustified.

On a plane?

> but $2 would be a more appropriate price tag for a few hours of Internet

Correct. That's (one of the reasons) why Starbucks coffee is pricier.

WPA/WPA2 Enterprise supports a multi user environment. You can require a unique login per user and thus associate payment with that. It also alleviates the problem with mac address whitelisting.

Then people either have to pay offline or you need to set up a different unencrypted network with a captive portal to facilitate payment.

What would you suggest if someone wants payment for a water tab? Ever seen that?

I think we should move towards considering Internet access as a general service that people make available for their guests/customers.

How do you see this scaling?

Do you think hotels and restaurants can deliver reliable internet without charging for it?

Is it reasonable to assume that companies that don't charge for wifi can afford the staff to make sure that users don't abuse it?

I am considering your proposal & I don't see it working at all.

I wonder why this seems so intractable in some countries. In others, such as Indonesia or Vietnam or Taiwan, WiFi really is free in most establishments and nobody seems to have a problem with customers abusing it. Even a $10 hotel has WiFi. Versus say London where a $300 hotel charges $25 for WiFi. In many places nobody would ever expect to pay one cent for WiFi in a place where they are already a paying customer unless it's an Internet cafe.

"Versus say London where a $300 hotel charges $25 for WiFi."

It's almost an inverse relationship, in my experience. The economy to medium-priced "business travel" hotels (the sort found near most U.S. airports) usually have free wifi, while the fancy "luxury" hotels often charge for it.

Because it's usually people that can afford it, or a business trip, where the company will pay for it.

My company will pay for it, but it's a hassle to pay for it, submit the receipt, etc.

I simply choose better hotels.

> Do you think hotels and restaurants can deliver reliable internet without charging for it?

Absolutely. 100% of the hotels that I've stayed at in the last five years have had free wifi. Almost half of those have still had captive portals.

Hell, my gym provides free wifi. The captive portal is literally just a button that says "Continue to the Internet" and redirects you to their Facebook page (not even a terms of use).

Every Starbucks I've been in recently has free wifi. Every library I've visited has had captive portal-free wifi.

I don't understand what sort of "scaling" you're referring to.

> Do you think hotels and restaurants can deliver reliable internet without charging for it?

Yes. Because most already do.

> Do you think hotels and restaurants can deliver reliable [[tap water]] without charging for it?

> Is it reasonable to assume that companies that don't charge for [[tap water]] can afford the staff to make sure that users don't abuse it?

Sorry to post the snarky response, but with internet access, as with all shared goods like access to water or noise in a semi-shared space such as a hotel, yes, I do expect they can handle it and not have it be a big deal.

I was thinking the same thing, with [[lights]].

More like mustard and ketchup and napkins, along with a functional (clean, stocked) washroom.

Internet WIFI should be treated as a condiment. A business that can't afford condiments probably shouldn't be in business.

> Do you think hotels and restaurants can deliver reliable internet without charging for it?

Many do. I've never seen a restaurant charging for Wifi, and I've seen plenty offering it for free. Quality varies, some are good, some suck. Hotels are all over them map, but I just stayed at the hotel that advertises free high quality Wifi (and it indeed was fine) as one of the amenities.

US-centric, of course, in some places I guess it many be too expensive for restaurants to do this.

It shouldn't be too expensive for a restaurant to do.

Although a restaurant can get by without wifi, most modern restaurants have it for managing OpenTable, monitoring yelp reviews, ordering supplies online, etc.

I guess the signal might get a bit worse the farther away you get from the wifi router, but in general, providing wifi to customers shouldn't cost any additional money.

I think the real cost isn't that they use wifi, but that they actually sit around longer but purchase less in their time spent at the establishment. It's really important for restaurants to turn tables over quickly.

People usually don't lurk in those places anyway, I think. Usually there are coffee shops etc. that are much more open to that kind of thing.

"It shouldn't be too expensive for a restaurant to do."

Heck, most McDonalds restaurants have free wifi these days, and that's about as cheap as it comes.

I see it scaling the same way hannob's example does, with water. Who charges for a drink of water?

Most restaurants in Germany do. You'd have to explicitly and sometimes adamantly request "tap water" to get access to free water, otherwise you'll be served and charged for fancy "mineral water".

Most restaurants in most countries charge extra for a glass of plain water. The USA impresses foreigners with its free universal iced water.

Cost of internet can priced into the prices for goods and services provided

Almost none of the captive portals I run into want payment of any kind; they almost always just have a click-through for "don't abuse this network" or similar terms.

If you really want payment, then post a URL wherever you post a sign about the SSID, and/or make the SSID "Go To example.com after connecting".

put the payment url on a sign, just enforce an ip whitelist until customer has paid. Or in extreme sign-less situations put it in the ssid e.g. "pay at portalpage.com"

> put the payment url on a sign, just enforce an ip whitelist until customer has paid. Or in extreme sign-less situations put it in the ssid e.g. "pay at portalpage.com"

This is a captive portal. But worse, because even HTTP sites don't send you to the portal.

But on the plus side:

  * no MITM attack
  * no TLS cert errors
  * no "do I need to hard-refresh? what's the key for that?"
  * no question if network access is working or not
  * one reliable clear action to get access

See the various comments about work-arounds for work-arounds. Random plain-http intercept-check sites because some captive portals try to make iOS not pop up the mini sandboxed captive portal browser. The endless confusion.

This stuff would be a lot simpler if people weren't always trying to make it needlessly "easy" and fucking it up even more every time.

802.11 standard could come up with some kind of captive portal standard.