AR300m Captive Portal issues solved!

Technical Support for Routers
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So I posted a few days ago about my issues connecting to a hotspot near my parents house overseas where I had no issues last year using lede 2.x, I had tried two other hotspots but I always had issues with this main one and had to tinker around non-stop cloning interfaces and such to get things working.

Yesterday i was looking in luci for network interfaces and I noticed that even though the Hotspot would show 2-3 bars, the RX was always 0, so I started moving the router higher up and I noticed slightly better RX.

So I built a big box and moved the router about 1m higher from the ground, the bars didn’t move much, but I can get IP all the time from the hotspots, get the connected message with IP, DNS, Gateway etc and I can connect w/o any issues.

I then reset the router to default settings using latest testing mode firmware 3.x and I also can connect w/o using any special parameters (I have disabled DNS rebind though)

I got an issue once where I couldn’t connect and for that scenario, I removed the hotspot interface manually from luci, rebooted the router and re-connected to the wifi hotspot.

1 Like
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Thanks for you sharing.
It looks like the hotspot signal is unstable. How far are you from the hotspot?
Is there any shade in the middle?

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No shade.

So last night I didn’t have any internet and I started researching the nature of Orange hotspot and I found out that this is not a city router / special device, but actually a semi-distributed internet service for Orange customers in the city by their cable/router box. So if the client agrees (I think), part of their internet is shared with other Orange customers who have access to wifi. If their internet gets slowed they will disconnect from you and another box “should” connect to you to give you internet.

Also I noticed that there are 2x-3x of routers compare to last year around me that have that type of signal, so there could be contention / competition for that signal.

I played around with the Wireless settings in Luci for the hotspot and I changed the channel width to 20Mhz for the hotspot and it seems I can connect to a particular hotspot quicker and get IP, but I get disconnected here and there. Is there a way to remedy this @luochongjun ?

Thanks!