I'm excited to share that Uspot, a relatively new captive portal package developed for OpenWrt, is being actively improved as part of this year's OpenWISP Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2025).
With this project idea we aim to make Uspot a viable replacement for CoovaChilli, which is no longer under active development. However, a few features that are heavily relied on in OpenWISP deployments have been missing so we are working with the uspot maintainer to add these, the most notable ones being:
- Support for RADIUS accounting interim-updates and traffic counter customization (e.g., swapoctets).
- Support for RadSec (RADIUS over TLS), including setup documentation.
- Bandwidth limitation features, both static and RADIUS-based (WISPr attributes).
- Data consumption limits using RADIUS attributes like ChilliSpot-Max-Total-Octets and CoovaChilli-Max-Total-Gigawords.
- Improve documentation
More details about the goals can be found in the GSoC 25 Project Idea page of OpenWISP.
These additions will bring Uspot much closer to feature parity with CoovaChilli, enabling its use in large-scale deployments, especially in OpenWISP deployments.
If you're interested in following the progress, the work is happening openly in the Uspot GitHub repository: https://github.com/f00b4r0/uspot/.
We welcome feedback, testing, and suggestions from the OpenWrt community. If you're interested in testing the new features or want to contribute in any way, feel free to reach out!