We have all seen them, at the Mall, Airport, Train Station, Restaurant,  Hospital, and any public Wi-Fi. It’s a web page that pops up so you can access the internet when in these places. Once you interact with the Captive Portal, you can get onto the internet. This is your way to free Wi-Fi at these places.

When you get this, you’ll need certain actions or information before accessing the internet. Some may only ask you to look over their policy page and then click on a button agreeing to their terms of that policy. This is needed as it relieves the provider of the network of responsibility should someone do something wrong while on that network. Some advertise their web sponsors and you need to click on them first to complete log in, others like at Hotels require you to put in a Password and perhaps your room number to gain access. You need this to get online and if it doesn’t show; they lock you out and this just isn’t an option.

Read on to learn how to ensure a stable connection so you can get online quickly.

Captive portals solve many problems with regulation, but while solving some problems they do impose others.

The most common issue is when a captive portal doesn’t show up. If you are having this issue, look at our guide on solving it here.

A bigger problem and one that people are becoming more aware of these days is online security and privacy. When you connect to a public network, your device is exchanging data, syncing your emails, social media accounts, and other profiles. But what if somebody intercepts that traffic and gets a hold of your credit card numbers, social media password, confidential emails and messages, and browsing history?

Privacy is a simple thing to achieve with a VPN. But if you’re already using one, you may have noticed that you can’t connect to a network behind a captive portal at all. Why is that? Let’s find out!

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.

As a VPN, Speedify encrypts your traffic and you can finally connect to any hotspot and not worry about your privacy.