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We install our routers and antennas in hot spot locations. The back haul is from a telco provider, paid. We direct the users to a 20-second advertisement prior getting the use of internet browsing.

We get paid from those who place ads in our system. The hot spot locations allow us to install our system and we pay the telco for the line.

How can we make it so our users get a 20-second advertisement on login and then have the ads to pop up after every say 30 mins of usage by end users? Since its free for users on Wi-Fi, the users use our system. But we are unable to restrict the users during the 20-second ads as the address bar is displayed, so users can go to internet browsing.

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    Writing in All Caps is a very bad idea, you might want to fix that if you want an answer. It is considered "shouting" and reduces legibility.
    – TheUser1024
    Jul 12, 2014 at 9:14
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    You will not get around the address bar issue or the 20-second delay easily without some coding that uses sessions to work out if they've requested a page within 20 seconds of initially connecting to your captive portal - if they do then redirect to an advert. The way you're going about it will be highly annoying for users, however. You should offer, say, free 1hr connections and paid-for, say, 6-month connection leases...
    – Kinnectus
    Jul 12, 2014 at 9:28

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You want to look for "captive portal" solutions, where all connectivity is blocked except maybe DNS, and all HTTP attempts are redirected to your web page. Then design your captive portal web page so that you don't get the UI to accept the terms until after the video has played. Set a 30 minute timeout for the sessions, so that every 30 minutes the user loses connectivity and gets shunted to the captive portal again, to watch another ad and then get the UI to enable full browsing.

Many enterprise-class or public-access-class APs have captive portal features. I believe you can also do captive portal with some of the aftermarket Linux-based AP firmware distros like DD-WRT, OpenWrt, or Tomato.

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  • While this works, it would be so much better if somehow they were able to repeat the advertisement without dropping the connection.
    – o0'.
    Jul 12, 2014 at 18:24
  • @Lohoris How would you propose checking to see if the user didn't just switch back and not actually view the ad? The only solution I could think of would require requiring the installation of third party software, and that is problematic due to the number of OSes you'd have to support (Windows, iOS, Android, MacOS, and possibly Linux and BSD.)
    – trlkly
    Jul 12, 2014 at 21:11
  • they could inject a banner to any non-encrypted page you visit, for instance.
    – o0'.
    Jul 13, 2014 at 11:11

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