In layman's terms, a captive portal is a page you get at the coffeehouse, airport, hotel, etc. You have to get permission at before connecting to their Wi-Fi network. Most businesses have these since it gives them better security and a way to market to customers, it’s a win-win for them indeed.

Sometimes you’ll just click that you accept their terms; other times they’ll ask for a password, a method of payment, complete this quick survey or other info that you will need to agree to.

What happens when you get blocked or can't load the captive portal page? No internet access, this does not bid well in today's time. If you received the “Internet blocked by captive portal” after running a network diagnostic, it could be a few things causing this. In some cases, having your computer set to use a custom DNS server can cause problems with captive portals. In most cases the problem is related to the network itself and you as a user can’t do anything about it.

If you are using a VPN to stay safe on public Wi-Fi, you must have a network protection such as a VPN connection. You become so vulnerable and really need the protection in a public Wi-Fi. This is, unless you have Speedify’s bonding VPN.

You have to get the captive portal page to display. Try these tricks first:

• Close all open tabs in your browser. If you have a secure site open ( https:// ), the portal can get confused. Close everything in your browser. If you have your startup setting “Continue where you left off”, then change it to “Open the new tab page” and open your browser again. If you don’t see the captive portal come up, try going to a http:// website as they can trigger the captive portal.
• If you are in a hotel, you may need to log into the captive portal after a period of time to continue using the internet. This will force you to go through the whole thing again.

These are all temporary solutions and not the most convenient ones. Raise a complaint to your ISP or if you are staying at a hotel, bring it up to the management as this is an ISP issue.

And if you are using a VPN, the only way to connect through a captive portal is to turn it off. Unless you are using Speedify bonding VPN.

For those of you concerned with privacy that would like to use a VPN on public Wi-Fi hotspots behind a captive portal, you can finally do that with Speedify.

When you join a Wi-Fi hotspot with a login page, Speedify will:

1. Show you a notification asking you if you want to login.
2. Keep you connected over cellular data so your other ongoing online activities (like Skype / Slack calls, streaming, gaming) will continue to work via the cellular connection, protected by Speedify so you don’t have to worry about dropped calls or streams.
3. If you click the notification prompting you to connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot, Speedify will pop up the login screen in a window.
4. Once you login successfully, Speedify will immediately start using the Wi-Fi connection, allowing you to seamlessly switch over from cellular to Wi-Fi without stopping any of the things you are doing online.

Speedify is the only VPN app that can help you combine multiple internet connections (Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, Ethernet, Starlink, Satellite and more) to improve the stability, speed and security of your online experiences. Moreover, Speedify handles captive portals better than any other VPN:

• when it detects a captive portal, it automatically moves the traffic to and from the captive portal login page outside of the encrypted VPN tunnel
• once you successfully log onto the network, Speedify moves that direct traffic back to the VPN tunnel
• you can always use the split tunneling feature (Bypass) for specific services - this will put traffic to and from those outside of the bonded VPN tunnel.

Now you can finally forget about captive portal router issues of Internet blocked by captive portal. Connect to any Wi-Fi hotspot and not worry about your data and privacy.