Hotspot billing
Customers pay by mobile money and get network access without anyone touching the router.
A Kenyan ISP offering hotspot access needed customers to pay and get online without an agent handing out vouchers or a staff member touching the router for every connection.
- 01
A billing platform wired directly into the access layer: MikroTik for the network hardware, FreeRADIUS for authentication and accounting, M-Pesa for payment.
- 02
A customer pays by mobile money and gets network access automatically — no voucher, no manual approval step.
- 03
A background worker manages the session lifecycle so access starts and stops on schedule without staff intervention.
- 04
The router itself sits physically in Tharaka Nithi and is managed remotely from Nairobi over a private WireGuard tunnel, so hardware access doesn't require a site visit.
Real interfaces, not mockups.
Keeping the money and the network in sync
FreeRADIUS's accounting tables (radcheck, radacct) are the source of truth for who is actually online, while payment and subscription state live in the application database — two systems that have to agree with each other in real time for access to feel instant. Real payment references carry a distinct prefix, which made it straightforward to separate genuine customer transactions from test data during rollout and keep the production ledger clean from day one.
to network access, unattended
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