Wireless Captive Portals

While you should not use a public wifi network, there are known wifi networks that use captive portals. This page has some notes about trying to make sure you can connect to a legitimate captive portal.

URLs to test

Here are some URLs you can use to test connection to a captive portal:

• Device agnostic
  • www.example.com
  • captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html
  • httpforever.com
  • 1.1.1.1
  • neverssl.com
  • www.apple.com/library/test/success.html
• Apple devices
  • captive.apple.com
  • captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html
  • www.apple.com/library/test/success.html
• Windows devices
  • www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt
  • ipv6.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt
  • msftconnecttest.com/
  • www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt
• Android devices
  • connectivitycheck.gstatic.com

Other notes

Here are other notes about captive portals and wireless controllers:

• Zapier blog - force network login page to open
• Medium blog - How to Force a Wifi Login Page
• Device agnostic
  • IETF datatracker captive portal API
• Android devices
  • developer.android.com captive portal feature
• Cisco devices
  • Cisco 5500 series wireless controllers