I am often on the road and I will stop at a popular fast food place or chain coffee shop in order to use their free WiFi. I have a Lenovo laptop running Windows 7 if that matters. I am able to see the store’s free WiFi listed in the Wireless Network Connections, and I can select it.
I then try for quite a while to get the T&C webpage to display so that I can agree to it. I bring up a new browser, I refresh an existing webpage… nothing. I normally use Chrome, but during this seemingly futile exercise I bring up FF and IE just in case that makes a difference.
After some amount of time, usually 5-7 minutes, all of a sudden the T&C webpage will appear, and I agree, and everything is good from that point on. So what is the trick to force that T&C page to show up? Does this happen to anyone else but me?
I rarely use free WiFi, so I was very frustrated the first few times this happened to me. So yes, it happpens to me. I’ve since figured out that I have to wait for the magic to happen. Still seems random. I would be very interested to learn whether this wait is normal.
Happens often with my iPad or phone. Sometimes restarting the device and turning wifi on will make everything work. I’ve had people suggest trying to load Google to bring up the page.
Make sure you’re trying to refresh a page that does not use SSL encryption. The router can not intercept an encrypted link to redirect you to the T&C page.
I always fire up a fresh browser, go to the google home page http://www.google.com and if I don’t get the T&C page, use Ctrl-F5 to force refresh it. As **freido ** suggests, make sure to explicitly provide the http so you don’t end up on a cached link to https.
The other useful thing is to keep other network-access apps from trying to use the not-yet set up connection. i.e. have your email client closed. And closed means truly closed as in not running, not merely minimized
There are lots of other background updating apps that try to use the network connection before its ready and some of them may confuse the wifi redirector. OneNote and OneDrive are examples.