Netgear Hotspot Nighthawk M1
Question about Netgear Hotspot Nighthawk M1
The thing is explicitly advertised for use when travelling or in hotels (offloading with WiFi or Ethernet from the hotel to save data volume). Most hotels I know use a captive portal where you have to enter your room number/name or something and not just a WiFi with password. Does offloading work if such a captive portal is connected upstream?
Helpful answer
For all those who are interested: Tested it today in a Starbucks. WiFi offloading did not work with Starbucks, Coop or SBB free WiFi. The captive portal is not displayed in the web interface of the hotspot, which would be necessary to log in. With the purely password-protected WiFi at home, it worked perfectly. Speed was very good via USB tethered laptop (over 200Mbit/s) and rather moderate via WiFi (approx. 10Mbit/s - with active offloading only the 2.4GHz WiFi of the hotspot can be used).
Displaying the captive portal in the web interface should actually be feasible. A firmware update from Netgear would be nice here. I will write to them in the support forum.
Displaying the captive portal in the web interface should actually be feasible. A firmware update from Netgear would be nice here. I will write to them in the support forum.
I have already tested Offloading in public networks of the city of Zurich. The captive portal was displayed in the client, I could log in and dial through. After that it works perfectly. I'm no longer sure how I did it. I had certainly switched off 4G.
Offloading refers to lan use.