Print a card, sell it at the counter, customer types the code and gets online - no app to download, no bank card, no monthly contract. That's why voucher-based wifi billing is such a common pattern for ISPs and WISPs serving labor accommodations, compounds, hotels, cafes and rural/underserved areas across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the wider GCC/MENA region. Here's how to actually run one on a MikroTik.
Why voucher billing fits this market
A hotspot voucher system removes the two biggest friction points for walk-up wifi customers: identity and payment. There's no signup form and no card details typed into a captive portal on a shared device - just a PIN, printed and handed over at the point of sale. That maps well onto several common deployment patterns in the region: labor camp and compound wifi sold by a facilities operator, hotel/cafe wifi sold at reception or the till, and rural or semi-urban WISP coverage where prepaid, cash-based billing is simply the norm the customer base expects.
It also keeps the operator's side simple - no payment gateway integration required to get started, no chargebacks, no recurring billing to manage. You print a batch, you sell a batch, the money is already in hand before the customer connects.
How it works, technically
Under the hood it's still standard RADIUS - MikroTik's Hotspot service redirects an unauthenticated client to a login page; that page (hosted centrally, not on the router itself) collects a voucher PIN; on a valid, unused PIN the system creates the RADIUS credentials on the fly and logs the customer straight into the router. Two RADIUS pieces make this work: Access-Accept carries the plan's rate limit and session/data cap back to the router, and Accounting tracks how much of that allowance has been used, so a "2 GB / 3 hour" voucher actually expires on schedule.
Set it up (Winbox + CLI)
1. Create a Hotspot-type package. In your panel, a Profile with Type = Hotspot sets the speed, data/time allowance and price for that voucher tier.
2. Generate a batch of vouchers. Pick a quantity, PIN length, and that Hotspot profile - the system creates the batch and a printable PDF sheet (branded with your logo if you've set up a card template).
3. Wire the MikroTik. On the router (Winbox or Terminal - both work identically):
/radius add service=ppp,hotspot address=<RADIUS-IP> secret=<your-shared-secret>
/ip hotspot setup
/ip hotspot profile set [find] use-radius=yes
/ip hotspot walled-garden add dst-host=your-domain.com action=allowThe walled-garden entry matters - it's what lets an unauthenticated device reach the hosted voucher login page at all before it has network access.
That's the short version. The Self-Hosted and Cloud docs each have the complete walkthrough - device setup, NAS, PPPoE and the full Hotspot section including the login-page redirect - with every step given in both Winbox and CLI form. Issuing vouchers day-to-day is covered in the Cards & vouchers section of the Modules Guide.
The exact same RADIUS flow also drives standard PPPoE billing for fixed-line/wireless subscribers on the same panel - most ISPs in the region run both Hotspot vouchers and PPPoE plans side by side, not one or the other.
A few region-specific considerations
- Currency: pricing isn't locked to USD - set your operating currency (AED, SAR, QAR, or any ISO code) during first-time setup, and per payment-gateway if you take card payments alongside vouchers.
- Support channel: the panel has a built-in WhatsApp contact widget, which tends to be the preferred support/sales channel for operators and customers alike across the Gulf.
- Deployment: both editions work the same regardless of where your VPS or server physically sits - Self-Hosted for full data control on your own box, or Cloud if you'd rather not run infrastructure at all.
The fast path
Building this from raw FreeRADIUS, a voucher database and a captive-portal frontend by hand is a real project. ISP Boost ships it as one command that installs the whole stack on a fresh Ubuntu server:
URL=https://get.ispboost.com/install.sh && curl -ksSO $URL; bash install.shFree for 50 users. See the install guide, or skip the server entirely with ISP Boost Cloud.
