Given the amount of tweaking I've had to do on my home network to get the Portal to run smoothly (see here and more to come on this in Part 8), I did not have high expectations for playing the Portal away from home. Over the past few months, I've had a handful of opportunities to play it while on the road, and I must say I've been pleasantly surprised by how well it has worked. However, there is one big exception to this, a problem I've run into more than once while trying to play away from home.
The Portal worked well at my dad's house, as well as a rental cabin in the middle of nowhere in southern Illinois. My dad has quick internet at his house, similar in speed to the internet I have at home, so I expected it to work there. I didn't test the internet speed in Illinois, but presumably it was not too quick given the remote location of the cabin. It worked pretty well there. I had infrequent quality and frame rate drops due to low internet connection warnings, but they were brief and resolved without losing connection to the PS5, and thus didn't interfere with gaming.
While playing on individual networks away from home has worked well, the one location where I've ran into trouble is hotels. The reason is captive internet. Most hotel networks require a login through a web browser, and the Portal does not have a web browser. This is a major oversight, in my opinion, and hopefully it is something Sony can fix through a software update. There are a couple of ways to get around this issue. One is through a concept called MAC spoofing, a process that is complicated and likely beyond anyone's capability unless they are highly educated in the nuances of networks. The other way around it is to create your own hotspot. This is a simple process on the iPhone. I've tried it twice and didn't have much luck either time, unfortunately. In Cincinnati, I couldn't even get the Portal to connect to my hotspot. While in Texas, I was able to get the Portal to connect but experiences very poor performance with multiple disconnections from the PS5.
To be fair, I knew about the lack of web browser and thus the difficulty with connecting the Portal to captive networks prior to buying the device. If I traveled a lot and was planning on using the Portal specifically for travel, I might have not purchased it because of this and instead purchased a Steam Deck. However, I primarily use the Portal at home, and about half the time when traveling stay in rentals not hotels, so I was willing to sacrifice consistent hotel connections with the Portal. Interestingly, one of the hotels we stayed at in Texas had a conference network that didn't require a password. I was able to join that network without any trouble and played the Portal just fine, without any disconnections or network performance issues.
In summary, I've been pleasantly surprised by how well the Portal works away from home. I've had no or minimal trouble on individual networks, some of which were not overly robust. I think my success in these situations points to the importance of having a good network setup for the PS5 itself. My hotel experience with the Portal has not been positive, however. The lack of a way to connect to captive networks is a major oversight by Sony, one that I would assume is big enough to make people contemplate not buying the device. Hopefully Sony can fix this through a future update.
Addendum (6/20/24): It's as if Sony was reading my mind. Within a week of publishing this post, Sony announced than an update for the Portal was being released which includes functionality to support connecting to public Wi-Fi! I can't wait to try this out, so more to come in the future after I have a chance to give it a try.
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