Re: [Captive-portals] Thoughts/comments on draft-nottingham-capport-problem-01

["Cohen-Rose, Adam" <[e-mail]>]

Hi there,

Thank you for the comprehensive problem statement and I hope you have a
good discussion tomorrow in Buenos Aires.

A brief introduction: I work at The Cloud, part of Sky UK, where we run
over 20,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK.

We spend a large amount of time trying to give our customers a good
experience when getting online, accessing from mainly mobile phones and
tablets, so we definitely welcome moves towards standardising device
behaviour.

Some stats that might help with context: around 50% of the requests to our
captive portal come from non-browser apps; also we see over 500 million
HTTPS requests per week from unauthenticated users and this is only
growing as sites move to HTTPS.

The move to HTTPS does provide us with difficulty -- when devices don¹t
open a captive portal browser but offer a search bar that goes to an HTTPS
site, the end user is sometimes left with an empty page and no indication
of how to connect.

At The Cloud we come across similar situations to those described by Lukas
at Asteas/IACBOX -- our captive portal pages are there to authenticate,
inform and sometimes to pay, but also to capture customer information
(such as whether they consent to be contacted by our venue partners).

We operate both open and secured SSIDs, but since we are not a mobile
operator there is not yet any simple way for us to offer the secured SSID
to walk-up customers. One option that might be worth bearing in mind is
some mechanism to prompt customers to switch from the open SSID to the
alternative secured SSID in the same location.

I¹m very happy to contribute towards an industry survey and will keep
following the discussion in the mailing list.

Best wishes,

Adam


--

Adam Cohen-Rose
The Cloud (A Sky UK Ltd company)

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