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Comment by willidiots | Hacker News Reader

"Spreading the word" isn't needed. There are plenty of low-friction tech solutions to public Wi-Fi onboarding and the people responsible for these systems know about them.

The persistence of stupid captive portals etc. is an intentional move by the hotel, coffee shop, wherever. Their marketing department values your eyeballs + any data you provide as part of sign up. It's stupid because you're trying to get online, you don't want to experience this friction, but it's a "customer touchpoint" and the venues don't want to lose it.

Source: have built large Wi-Fi networks for 15 years, helped develop Passpoint support on Android, ran large U.S. coffee shop Wi-Fi, ran citywide Wi-Fi in NYC.

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I’ve seen ads sometimes on airport WiFi, but rarely anything of consequence at hotels, other than a basic splash page promoting the hotel itself. The hotel also already has all your personal information from the booking, so I don’t see how WiFi could be any kind of significant driver of further data collection through a captive portal page.

The one thing they do have to do is make you accept terms and conditions, and that almost always seems to be the primary driving force on these pages.

I didn't say it was a particularly valuable ad space, I completely agree :) But having had these conversations with the people responsible, that's nevertheless the reality.

There are existing supported technologies which solve all of these issues. You can set up a Passpoint OSU solution, route users through T&Cs once and provision their device with a secure credential for encrypted autoconnection in the future. Or build said sign-in into the venue's mobile app. But that requires consensus from the corporate stakeholders (marketing and legal), who tend to prefer status quo.

There are folks working on these problems, both from wireless industry and venue side, and if anyone is really interested in helping I'd suggest looking into the Wireless Broadband Alliance as well as the Wi-Fi Alliance. Passpoint will eventually kill portals but it's taking forever due to these politics.

With unlimited data connections I presume offering WiFi really only works for tourists anyway.

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