Captive portals: where marketing copy meets RADIUS reality

Marketing wants seasonal banners; security wants short sessions and tight isolation. The failure mode is two parallel projects that meet on opening weekend.

We keep a single policy studio artifact: legal-approved copy on the left column, RADIUS attribute notes on the right. When copy changes, engineering sees the exact attribute deltas required, not a screenshot in a chat thread.

KR-facing flows add another seam: carrier-delivered SMS OTP behaves differently across MVNOs. We bake fallback paths and honest latency notes into the runbook instead of pretending every handset behaves identically.

The maintenance habit matters more than launch day brilliance. Quarterly copy reviews catch expired promotions that still reference winter sales in July—small, embarrassing, and easy to prevent with a calendar invite.