The captive portal is your salesperson on permanent duty. It opens by itself when a customer joins your WiFi, shows your bundles in your colours, takes the payment and issues the voucher. And that voucher really does expire: when the time is up, the router closes the access on its own.
They join your WiFi network. Without typing anything, your zone's page opens on their phone: that is how a captive portal works. Until they hold a valid voucher, it is the only page they can reach.
They see your name, your logo, and the bundles you have set up, with their duration, their data and their price. Prices show in the currency of the zone's country, FCFA in Cameroon, naira in Nigeria, shilling in Kenya, and the portal speaks French, English or Swahili depending on the phone's language. They choose, they pay, they are online. The whole thing takes under a minute when the operator's network is responding normally.
Every bundle carries the name you gave it: "Day pass", "Unlimited night", "Student bundle". That is the name the customer reads on the portal, and the one they remember. Sooner or later customers start asking for it by name at the counter, which is the sign your price list has landed.
You choose the units for each bundle. Data is entered in MB or GB, duration in hours or days, speed always in Mbit/s. The portal then shows the bundle exactly as you built it, "2 GB · 3 days · 5 Mbit/s", and never puts raw minutes or kbit/s in front of your customer.
Five moments, from first contact with your WiFi to browsing.
The customer picks your WiFi network. The router intercepts them and shows your page. They can browse it freely: the portal sits inside the walled garden, the area allowed before payment.
They compare your bundles, 500 MB for an hour, 2 GB for the day, 10 GB for the week, and tap the one that suits them. The price stays visible all the way through, with no surprise fee added along the way.
They enter their mobile money number, MTN Mobile Money or Orange Money in Cameroon, M-Pesa in Kenya, Airtel Money in Uganda, Wave in Senegal, and get a USSD push to approve with their PIN. If they prefer a bank card, they go to a payment page hosted by our provider and come back to the portal afterwards. The methods on offer depend on the zone's country: see the list.
The portal shows a waiting screen while the operator confirms. If the payment fails or times out, the customer can start again straight away. No access opens until the money is confirmed.
The voucher is created, the session starts, and the countdown begins at that first connection. At the same moment the code locks to that first phone — unless you created the bundle to accept several devices. The customer keeps the voucher screen as proof, and you get the sale notification in the Manager app.
This is the most common way money leaks out of the trade: a customer buys "a day" on Monday and gets back online free with the same code three weeks later. With WiNet that does not happen.
You can give a bundle a validity in days, say "valid for 7 days". The countdown does not start at purchase; it starts at the customer's first connection. A voucher bought on Monday and used on Wednesday gives its full seven days from Wednesday. That is what the customer expects, and what you can explain to them without contradicting yourself.
When the time is up, the router clears things itself: the code is deleted, the running session is cut, and the small file that let the phone reconnect on its own is wiped. The customer has to buy again, exactly as agreed on the day of the sale.
Not at purchase. So vouchers printed ahead of time — in Mikhmon, these days — sell over the following weeks: as long as a code has never been used, it does not go stale in the drawer.
The expiry rule is enforced by the router itself. If your operator link goes down you stop selling for the duration of the outage, but no expired code becomes usable again in the meantime.
When you create a bundle, you choose how many devices one code accepts. At one — the default — the code locks to the first phone: a customer who passes it to five neighbours gives them nothing. At three or five for a family or office bundle, the router itself refuses the extra connection. Worth saying before selling a one-device bundle, though: if the customer switches phone mid-bundle, the code will not follow them.
Not everyone buys from their phone. The customer with no Mobile Money, the one who would rather pay in coins, the pupil turning up with their lunch change: you serve those at the counter. WiNet codes themselves are born from a portal payment — nothing is printed in advance. Cash sales happen in Mikhmon, hosted by WiNet and opened from the expert mode on your router's page.
By default, one short code and one field to fill on the portal, with no separate password to type on top. It can be read out over the phone, read back from a screenshot, and typed one-handed on an entry-level keypad. If your customers are used to something else, you set the code length, the character set, and whether it is a single code or a separate username and password. The setting applies to the codes the portal sells.
The default character set has no 0 or o, no 1, l or i: anything that blurs together when read has been taken out. No more customers coming back because "it doesn't work". You can also switch to digits only, quicker to type on a phone, if that is what your customers know.
The customer pays in coins, you create their code in Mikhmon — hosted by WiNet, opened from the expert mode on your router's page, with the admin credentials you already hold. Need a sheet for a festival weekend? That is where it prints.
What you take in cash at the counter is yours in full: WiNet charges no commission on sales made in Mikhmon. The commission only applies to access sold through the portal.
The sheets you already printed lose nothing: as long as a code has never been used, its countdown has not started. They stay valid to their term — and the next ones are generated in Mikhmon.
A code sold at the counter follows the same rules as one bought on the portal: it accepts no more devices than intended, and it expires on the date set.
Most zones sell both ways: the portal collects on its own from customers who have Mobile Money, and Mikhmon serves everyone else at the counter. Portal money feeds your WiNet balance; counter money is already in your till, with no commission.
A code that is too short can be guessed: anyone on the zone's WiFi can try them one by one. So WiNet refuses settings that are too weak: 4 characters minimum, whatever the character set — the app reminds you as you set it. Changing the format invalidates nothing: the new setting applies to the codes the portal issues afterwards, and the vouchers you already printed keep working.
The portal belongs to your zone, not to WiNet. You change what shows on it from the app, and the change is live straight away.
Customers recognise your business at the top of the page. It is your shopfront doing the selling, not some anonymous brand.
Buttons, selections and accents all pick up the colour you choose for the zone.
Push a promotion, the dish of the day or a local partner in the page's ad space.
A customer who gets stuck messages you straight from the portal, without hunting for your number elsewhere.
Add, remove or reprice a bundle whenever you like: the portal updates itself, no technical work needed.
Each zone has its own portal, its own colours and its own bundles, even though everything is run from a single account.
The template decides the layout. All templates are free and can be switched on zone by zone : BASIC is enough to start selling on day one, and the others change the presentation, not the features.
| Template | Access | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| BASIC | Free, on by default | Any zone starting out: a clear bundle list, logo, colour, payment. |
| BUSINESS | Free | Shops that want a more polished page and a prominent ad space. |
| CAMPUS | Free | Schools and campuses: lots of short bundles, quick to read on a small screen. |
| CAFE_HOTEL | Free | Hotels, bars and restaurants: a warm welcome screen, room for your own promotion. |
| EVENT | Free | One-off events: day bundles, artwork built for the occasion. |
The BASIC portal sells exactly the same bundles, with the same payment methods, as every other template. Switch template whenever you like: it costs nothing.
A captive portal has to load on tiny connections, usually on entry-level phones. WiNet made that a rule: no external resources. No font pulled from somewhere else, no library from another server, no heavy image forced on the page.
Everything the page needs comes from the portal itself, inside the walled garden the router allows. The page opens even when the connection wobbles, so the customer doesn't give up before paying.
That restraint protects your bandwidth too: whatever the portal doesn't load is bandwidth your paying customers get for browsing.
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