McWi-Fi Problems
McDonald’s Wi-Fi asks you to accept its terms first, and if that page never appears you are left connected to the network with no internet.
Speedify is an app that combines Wi-Fi and your phone’s 4G/5G cellular and encrypts your traffic like a VPN, so you can carry on over 4G/5G cellular while the portal sorts itself out. Without that second connection, Speedify works as an encrypted VPN and cannot get you online until the Wi-Fi login works.
Take a look at what a captive portal is, and what to do when a VPN is stopping the McDonald’s page from loading.
With Speedify, your internet stays on when one connection fails.
What is a Captive Portal?
To understand why you can’t connect to McDonald’s Wi-Fi, start with captive portals. Captive portal is a web page that you have to view and interact with before connecting to the Internet. You’ve seen this, when you first log on to McDonald’s Wi-Fi. A web page that requires certain actions before Internet access is available will pop-up.
So why are you unable to connect to McDonald’s Wi-Fi? It’s hard for you to know unless you are the one running the captive portal. System breaks can sometimes occur. But it could be a different reason for different networks. In other cases having your computer set to use a custom DNS server can cause problems. In most cases the problem is related to the network itself and you can’t do anything about it.
Can’t Connect to McDonald’s Wi-Fi with a VPN On
If you are even a little concerned about your online security and privacy, chances are you are already using a VPN. And if you’re not, you should be. Especially if you often connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots. A VPN encrypts your data and prevents any hackers from stealing your personal and sensitive information.
However, you may notice that you can’t connect to McDonald’s Wi-Fi if you are connected to a VPN. You will have to disconnect the VPN in order to connect to the Wi-Fi which leaves you open for hacker attacks. Sometimes you will be able to connect to the VPN once you are already connected to the network. The network setup has specific rules. There are IP address ranges that are acceptable to log in. With a VPN you are masking your IP address and the login page will see a completely different IP than the one it’s expecting. So, you won’t be able to connect to the Internet at all.
But you will if you use Speedify.
How Speedify Handles Captive Portals, McDonald’s Included
When you can’t connect to McDonald’s Wi-Fi, you should try Speedify. When you join a Wi-Fi hotspot with a login page:
- Speedify will show you a notification asking if you want to log in.
- Speedify keeps you connected over 4G/5G cellular, so your other online activities (like Microsoft Teams or Slack calls, streaming, gaming) keep working, encrypted, while you sign in.
- If you click the notification prompting you to connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot, Speedify will pop up the login screen in a window.
- Once you login successfully, Speedify will immediately start using the Wi-Fi connection, so you move from cellular to Wi-Fi without dropping your session.
Under the hood, Speedify’s Captive Portal Assist feature handles sign-in pages like this:
- 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, which sends traffic to and from those services outside the encrypted tunnel.
Speedify’s technology combines multiple internet connections at once, all while encrypting your traffic and keeping your data secure.
Now you can connect to hotspots with login pages without switching off your encryption first.
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