Updated
Hotspot Portal
Configure your captive portal branding, plan display, and subscriber payment flow for MikroTik hotspot billing.
What the captive portal does
The captive portal is the page subscribers see when they connect to your Wi-Fi hotspot. It displays your branding, lists available plans, collects payment, and confirms activation — all before the subscriber gets internet access. DataRadius hosts the portal and serves it through the walled garden on your router.
Opening the portal editor
Navigate to Hotspot → Portal in the DataRadius dashboard. The editor shows a live preview of what subscribers see on their phones.
Branding
The portal displays your business identity. You can configure:
- Logo — upload a PNG, SVG, or JPEG. Recommended size: 200 × 60 px for a horizontal logo. The logo appears at the top of the portal.
- Business name — shown below the logo if no logo is uploaded, or as alt text for accessibility.
- Accent colour — the primary colour used for buttons, plan card borders, and the active state. Pick from the colour picker or enter a hex value.
- Background — solid colour or a subtle pattern. Avoid busy backgrounds — the portal needs to be readable on low-brightness screens outdoors.
Changes apply immediately. There is no deploy step — save and the next subscriber who connects sees the update.
Plan display
The portal renders your hotspot plans as cards. Each card shows:
- Plan name (e.g. "1 Hour", "Daily", "Weekly")
- Duration
- Speed limit
- Price
Plans are pulled from your Hotspot → Plans configuration. The order on the portal matches the display order you set in the plans list — drag to reorder.
Subscribers tap a card, complete payment through their configured payment provider, and the portal shows a success screen with the receipt number and redirects them to the open internet.
Creating hotspot plans
Go to Hotspot → Plans → New Plan to create a plan. Each plan has:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | What the subscriber sees. Keep it short: "1 Hour", "Daily". |
| Duration | Session length after activation (minutes, hours, days, months). |
| Data cap | Maximum transfer in MB or GB. Leave blank for unlimited. |
| Speed limit | Upload and download in Kbps or Mbps. |
| Price | Amount in your local currency, collected via your configured payment provider. |
When you save a plan, DataRadius creates a corresponding hotspot user profile on every connected router automatically.
Typical plan configurations:
| Plan | Duration | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Hour | 1 hour | 5/5 Mbps |
| Daily | 24 hours | 8/8 Mbps |
| Weekly | 7 days | 10/10 Mbps |
| Monthly | 30 days | 10/10 Mbps |
Set prices in your local currency when you create each plan.
Congested-link fallback
On a hotspot with 30 active subscribers sharing a 10 Mbps backhaul, a new subscriber trying to load the portal might face speeds as low as 50 Kbps. The full branded portal with logo and fonts could take 10+ seconds to load at that speed.
DataRadius handles this by racing two responses: the full branded portal and a lightweight SPA that is roughly 2 KB compressed. The SPA contains only the plan list and payment form — no images, no web fonts, minimal CSS. Whichever loads first is what the subscriber sees.
The QoS rules applied during router setup also help — captive portal and payment traffic are prioritised, so the payment flow gets bandwidth ahead of existing bulk downloads.
Subscriber flow
The complete subscriber journey:
- Phone connects to Wi-Fi. The hotspot server blocks traffic except DNS and walled garden entries.
- The phone's captive portal detection triggers, or the subscriber opens a browser. The hotspot server redirects to the DataRadius portal.
- The subscriber sees your branded portal with available plans.
- They tap a plan and complete payment through your configured provider.
- The payment provider sends a callback to DataRadius. DataRadius creates a hotspot user on the router.
- The portal shows a success screen and redirects to the open internet.
The entire flow — from connecting to Wi-Fi to browsing — takes under 30 seconds on a normal connection.
Direct payments
Subscribers can also pay directly through their payment provider (e.g. sending to your account number or shortcode). DataRadius receives the callback, matches the payment, and either activates by MAC address (if the subscriber is connected) or sends login credentials via SMS.
Per-router portal configuration
Each router can be assigned to a different portal configuration. This is useful when you operate multiple hotspot locations with different branding — each location can have its own logo and colour scheme.
Navigate to Routers → [Router Name] → Portal to assign a portal configuration.