There is a technical basis for concern, although ultimately the problem is of the hotel's own making.
You simply cannot have 500 mifi-type devices transmitting data (along with the hotel's actual WAPs) in the same room without major problems. There are only three non-overlapping channels for 2.4Ghz 802.11b/g/n, and mifi devices that I'm familiar with pick a "good" channel on startup -- they don't limit themselves just to the three non-overlapping ones.
5GHz is better, and the decreased ability to pass through walls is likely desirable here. However, your mifi is still broadcasting in 2.4GHz, and wifi clients will fall back to that if they don't like the quality of the 5GHz signal. OS X, for instance, is very finicky about using 5GHz on an SSID that broadcasts for both 2.4/5. Right now I'm approximately 6 feet away from my AP, and my laptop has switched to 2.4GHz.
Ultimately though, this whole mess is the fault of the hotel's poor implementation. If their wifi was free or low cost, and worked well, then why wouldn't everyone use it? That people are using their mifi devices says they are being ill served by the existing solution, not that they were just dying to pay AT&T more money and carry around yet another black plastic brick. By providing crappy service, these hotels have created the problem they're complaining about. Either don't do it at all (and save money / hassle to boot), or do it right.
I would just push for the FCC to release more bandwidth then, so there is no overlapping. Lobby for that instead of making a loophole that will be abused in every possible way.
Wifi's modulation schemes aren't the best for the real-world 2.4GHz spectrum. They work really well in the lab, and mildly well in the real world. Getting rid of Wifi and replacing it with something else could make unlicensed wireless networking more reliable. LTE-U seems like the way forward here, though it seems there are some industry barriers in the way. (If you make LTE chips and sell them all to cell phone carriers, and they tell you they don't like LTE-U, you probably won't be in a hurry to start selling LTE-U chipsets. Pure speculation.)
That said, 5GHz Wifi does pretty well. There is a misconception that 5GHz doesn't go through walls, but that really has no scientific basis (2.4GHz and 5GHz radio signals are pretty much the same; 60GHz doesn't go through walls, but that's an order of magnitude higher frequency). The problem with 5GHz Wifi is that only some channels allow 2.4GHz-equivalent power levels, and access points are really dumb about auto-selecting them. So if you think 5GHz doesn't go through walls, try changing to a high-power channel. 149 is a good one to try, as it's high-power and has adjacent channels to steal for 80MHz 802.11ac. (The low channels are about 20x less powerful than the high channels. That's why people think 5GHz doesn't go through walls. Those low channels don't.)
That's interesting about the power levels per-channel. In my case, I actually WANT the not-going-through-walls experience. In an apartment (or hotel room), the goal is just to get as much coverage as you need, not to blanket three floors down.
Smarter power level selection on APs (specifically consumer grade) would be nice. If all of your clients have acceptable signal strength, ratchet down, otherwise try ratching up, etc. If nothing else, it would be nice if manual control was possible (e.g. Apple removed transmit power selector from AirPort Utility).
There's also the problem I mentioned with OS X (and possibly other clients) being biased towards 2.4GHz. I have to create separate SSIDs for 2.4 and 5 GHz at home, and some devices live on one and some on the other. Otherwise, I'll see occasional periods of really terrible performance with 2.4GHz, presumably because of interference (I can see 20+ SSIDs from my living room).
Yes, clients are very bad about choosing the best connection for themselves. Access points can work around this by delaying probe responses on 2.4GHz relative to 5GHz, or by doing full-on band-steering (though it has to know that the target device is 5GHz-capable, which is hard).
Really, WiFi is a mess, and it's up to the access point to restore sanity if possible. You're sort of doing that by hiding 2.4GHz under another SSID. (I do the same thing at home. I have a couple of devices that are 2.4GHz only. I can't wait until I can finally turn that off.)
Little tidbits of knowledge like this are a big part of why I love HN. Now to go disable B/G on my home wifi and change the channel while wishing that home wifi routers shipped with low power-levels selected by default vs. the current situation of ISP-provided and out-of-the-box gear blasting out max power in every single apartment in my neighborhood, causing AirPlay to be unreliable across the living room.
Think this is pretty absurd move by the hotels as well.
fwiw though, I believe a bunch of the higher end hotels can't implement free wifi, because they set up Wifi a while back and got locked in to contracts with the companies that set it up for them--which haven't expired yet.
I don't have any knowledge of contracts that hotels might have for wifi, but it strikes me as strange that this is the way the hotels are going about dealing with that situation.
Hotels first started deploying wifi in what, 2002-4? How long were these contracts exactly?
If they contracted with a firm to provide bed linens, and haven't seen the performance of these linens in service, would they sign 20 year iron-clad deals? If their customers complain that the per-night cost of the linens are equal to buying them, or hate them to the point of bringing their own sheets, would they still stick to their guns?
Would they appeal to the Federal Sheet Commission for help blocking third party sheets?
Or would they say "this isn't worth it"? They're in the business of accommodating guests, not antagonizing them. So then find a way out of this contract or just eat the termination fee. After all, if the deals are so bad, the minimum + a reasonable modern deal may break even or come out ahead. Every contract has a way out, particularly when performance goals are not met, and I'm just skeptical that an entire industry of multi-billion dollar companies got so thoroughly taken for a ride by upstart wifi installers in 2003.
The hotel industry is pretty fragmented. Most hotel chains are franchises run mainly by independent franchisees. The quality of hotels varies wildly depending on location, even within the same brand/chain. There isn't as much oversight or centralized management as one might think. The hotel industry is also big on low wages, high employee turnover and pushing people in and out of the door as quickly as possible. Proper implementation of wifi is an afterthought. The experience is usually better in 4-star or higher hotels, but those come at a premium.
I can't really speak to their quality, but I do find it interesting how different tiers of hotels price their in-room wifi.
High end charges, low end is free or non-existent, and then there's a mid-range where it's specifically called out as a free amenity and quality is pretty decent (Kimpton, Joie de Vivre, etc.). The theory that I've seen passed around is that high end hotels know that you're good for it, and their clients are accustomed to various upcharges already.
It also seems to be extremely uniform for different hotels in a chain; e.g. I have never seen a non-conformist Hyatt that doesn't charge.
There is a solution to this problem. It's called bankruptcy after which someone buys the hotels assets without the debts and other obligations. The new owner can then set up a sensible free WiFi service ( and charge that old WiFi company a reasonable fee so they can some in and remove their old and highly valuable infrastructure).
"Marriott and the hotel association say that if the commission rules against them, some hotels might prohibit guests from checking in with Wi-Fi devices or restrict such equipment from some parts of their properties, a move that would only alienate their customers."
IOW, it has nothing to do with "protecting customers from roque networks" as mentioned elsewhere in the article. No, they simply don't want you using equipment that bypasses their usury for WiFi use.
"In October, the F.C.C. fined Marriott $600,000 for preventing customers from using their own Wi-Fi devices at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville. The commission said the hotel was charging people attending and exhibiting at a conference $250 to $1,000 per device to connect to the hotel-operated Wi-Fi service. Previously, the F.C.C. prohibited Boston’s Logan International Airport from blocking Wi-Fi networks set up by airline clubs."
It's pretty heavily implied by the article that this it intended to prevent circumvention of exorbitant rates.
And also that it's intended for conference exhibitors, where exorbitant rates for every little additional thing in a booth is part of the deal. A $100 wastepaper basket, for example.
Now, if it were up to me they would just price the booths at a fair price per square foot rather than try to make a profit on "extras."
You tend to find this kind of pricing structure in industries where consumers don't want to pay fair up-front prices. Transportation, Keurigs, video games, phone apps, to some extent wireless cell service. You're forced to provide basic access to your service at rates that don't allow you to make a real profit. So you try to make it up in extras.
Customers mumble and grouse, try to get by on the minimum level of service, but it's really their fault. You don't have to pay the exorbitant extras, when I fly, I find the lowest fare I can find and limit myself to a small bag with the bare essentials. I do my homework. I don't mind it at all because I'm getting a service I want at a lower price, that I might not have been able to afford otherwise.
Not to mention that one can tether via Bluetooth or USB in addition to WiFi hotspot. How are they to distinguish between someone using their hotspot via either of those two transports? I don't see them having a technical means that could distinguish someone USB tethered to cell phone using its data plan from just a cell phone using LTE data.
I would love to see them try to turn down people who have devices capable of being a WiFi hotspot. That would be, at least, all AT&T customers not on the unlimited plan? Hotels, don't be silly. You would never do that.
I find it humorous their solution is to block other people's wifi. How about you just provide wifi that doesn't suck? Stayed at a Hilton in Memphis that I think had 10gbit uplink. It was fast enough that I wouldn't have even considered tethering instead. In most hotels, you're lucky to see 1mbit worth of speed at less than 500ms latency. With a connection like that, it's literally highway robbery if they're allowed to block access points.
If I'm traveling for work and need to download an ISO overnight, and I'm unable to because they're blocking it, it should be criminal.
Forgive my lack of a source, but I read a while back that hotel wifi is often so bad because they signed short-sighted contracts in the past that locked them in to these terrible data rates for many years. And now they pass that terrible deal on to their guests.
[…] When you try to ask complicated questions and explain that your conference has a lot of techies, they say, yes, we understand, we have A-number-1 internet access, no problem very good. When you say, “Yeah, but have you configured your DHCP server so that it has more than the default 254 IP addresses available to hand out,” they have no idea what on earth you’re talking about, and of course it turns out that they had some vendor, a company you’ve never heard of, provide their internet access. And half the time, that vendor installed a DSL line from the local telco and hooked it up to a LinkSys WRT54g they got at Costco, then installed some kind of crappola welcome-screen software just to make it even worse, and then disappeared. […]
Hotel managers aren't plumbers either, yet they seem to handle running water in their rooms without much of a issue. The problem isn't that they are hotel managers per se, the problem is that hotel managers tend to be older and so unable/ unwilling/unaware to adapt to new technology. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the quality of wifi has a strong correlation to hotel manager age for hotels that aren't part of chains.
Chain hotels, on the other hand, can fix this problem through the normal franchise methods: Determine best practices for the entire chain, and then provide standard instructions and help for each franchise.
Don't oversell their plumbing ability. I stayed at a pretty expensive hotel (unfortunately built in the 1970's when the world became stupid with respect to construction) where the toilet exploded. I heard this gurgling noise, went to check it out... and there was old faithful!
The maintenance guy told me when the place was full, if people flushed simultaneously, "bad" things would happen.
Wifi is a similar thing. Best practice for Wifi is "it depends". You need to hire somebody with a clue and do surveys. Hotels have been traditionally build around sound and fireproofing, and the methods used to achieve both make Wifi difficult in some places.
At cookie cutter, modularly built hotels (ie. Hampton Inns, etc) Wifi is very uniform in quality.
I' a bit disturbed by your open bigotry. You would never say "that hotel was bad value because JEWS". Why do you think it's acceptable to say "tha. Hotel wifi is bad value because OLD PEOPLE"?
But as you point out, the IETF and NANOG have openly documented how to set up hotel wifi that doesn't suck. It doesn't take any technical experience whatever to hire a WiFi firm and instruct them to set up a system the same way that the IETF did it.
This was brought up in a recent HN thread (that you just found).
The way it feels to me, forgive the profanity - it's assholes that got screwed by other assholes. Signing up for such "short-sighted contracts" is stupid, but offering those in the field of fast-changing technology (and not upgrading them when the technology changes to the point of the contract being ridiculous) feels... evil.
I find it hard to believe that lobbying the FCC is cheaper than paying lawyers to engineer their way out of those contracts. With the crazy fees mentioned in the article for wifi access (seriously, $1000 per device?), it's not hard to see that their "protecting users" line of arguing is BS when there is such a clear profit motive.
Also, I totally don't get their strategy here, since it's not like there aren't other hotels which are nicer / cheaper / better-suited to conventions than Marriott. Really hope that they lose a lot of business for trying to pull such a stupid, petty trick to increase profits. In combination with their push to "remind you to tip their maids" so they can pay them less, I'm really excited to watch them burn.
Pardon me if I'm skeptical that a multibillion dollar company the size of Hilton Hotels can't strong arm a local ISP into caving on a contract. The cost of a lawsuit alone would cause whoever said ISP is to shit their pants and give them whatever they want.
While the veracity of the claim is untested, it doesn't seem so out there that many hotels that were at least partially forward-thinking may have not predicted the need for a better / faster network in the future...
I was investigating conference locations a few years back, and many people had suggested a local big chain hotel. It was a techish conference, so I inquired about the wifi capabilities. Their 'list rate' (which I was told I could try to negotiate with the regional office) was $25 per personper day. This was outside of whatever charge for "wifi in my hotel room" my guests would pay too.
I said "so.. for 150 people, for 2 days, you want me charge me $7500 just for wifi access whether people use it or not?"
"Yes sir, that's correct".
Yeah, I know, I know, bundle it in to the ticket price, etc, but.... just... there's a line you gotta draw somewhere, and that was it for me. They were off the list at that point.
"But the best way for hotels to deal with rogue networks is to inform law enforcement agencies and help them apprehend criminals who are trying to steal information."
That's an absurd point to make. One does not even need to run a rouge access point - much traffic is in the clear, and many MitM attacks can be pulled off just using injection. Even if someone were running a rouge access point, it's pretty difficult to track down an exact location (not very hard to figure out what room it's in though) in a crowd without direction finding gear and special equipment.
They would get much more sympathy as far as security goes if they were only asking for the right to block rouge access points that have the same ESSID as their official ones.
Okay, given that the security angle is a subterfuge, but let's say you run a hotel with a network named "RyansExorbitantWifi" and I set up a WAP named "RyanWifi-Free". I think we both know it's gonna generate some interest. Then I can serve them fake versions of Facebook, Google, and their bank's login pages, which is a lot wider of an attack vector than trying to sidejack via packet sniffing.
Enumerating some possibilities, here are things the hotel can do:
* Deauth jam nothing
* Deauth jam "evil twin" access points only
* Deauth jam above plus access points "similar" to the official wifi (have fun trying to prevent homoglyph attacks)
* Deauth jam all unofficial unencrypted access points (preventing an attack from monitoring probe requests and spinning up matching fake APs on the fly) perhaps with a whitelist of "known" nearby wireless networks to leave alone
* Deauth jam all unofficial WiFi (what they want to do)
There's not really much difference from a security standpoint between those last two, though I suppose someone could set up an encrypted rouge network like "FreeWifi - password is swordfish" and/or make flyers for their evil network.
Basically, I could empathize with them arguing to jam any open wireless networks, but jamming encrypted wireless networks in the name of security is a major stretch.
I do IT for a few hotels and I've never found this feature useful. While I agree it's useful to be able to control RF noise (by annoying someone enough with the deauth packets that they turn off their tethering), it's difficult to differentiate between nearby businesses and homes vs. someone tethering on-site.
Sounds like someone is/will get a nice business out of selling tiny little "wifi killer" devices that just continuously sends deauth's to everyone, that can be plugged into some well hidden outlets somewhere when you're not happy with them...
Thankfully some enterprise equipment (I can only speak of Meraki access points) can detect such attacks. So, you could localize (to a degree) where such an attack was coming from based on the AP locations.
Enterprise access points typically look for APs that are not theirs but are using the SSID and send deauths for that. That's an actual legitimate use of deauth. (If you're using encryption, then a rogue AP can't impersonate the real network without knowing the encryption key. But public networks tend to be open for convenience. So some trickery is necessary to provide a little extra safety for users.)
Wifi clients are notoriously awful at roaming. You would think they would prefer the strongest signal, but they seem to select randomly, no doubt depending on driver/firmware versions and bugs. If you've ever used an enterprise WiFi network where roaming works, it's because the APs talk to each other, make a selection as to which AP is best for you to talk to, and then deauth you from the APs that you shouldn't be talking to. So deauths are actually essential to making Wifi work well. The problem in this case is that Marriott is going above and beyond industry best practices and is just trying to kill _everyone_'s Wifi, presumably for their own financial gain. That's a violation of FCC rules, so they're trying to have the rules changed.
Meanwhile, I can just operate my network under Part 97 instead of Part 15 and it would still be illegal for them to intentionally or unintentionally interfere. Though Part 97 Wifi is a bit of a grey area.
I used to work at a company that provided WiFi service at apartment complexes around 10 years ago. I ended up just assigning every access point a different SSID for each access point to reduce the amount of counterproductive roaming. Some drivers were way better at AP selection than others.
So if they are interrupting my communications, i should be allowed to do the same back, right? Example: Im in a hotel on business and use my mifi-type device for my colleges as my company requests me to do to lower costs. Now, if they block that signal they are interfering with my business needs. So in my book, i should be allowed to block their traffic that is interfering with mine. Or would that be illegal as its on their premises and all that BS...
Not really. You're renting a space from them, and they can dictate what you're allowed to do in that space. I would say the hotel has the right to ask guests to not use these devices in their rooms, but they should not be actively jamming public frequencies or sending malicious packets to these devices.
Just travel to Canada instead and stay at one of the many hotels that offer free WiFi to all hotel guests. This is the way of the future. Especially for those families with multiple devices. Mom and Dad's laptops, tablets and phone, plus the kids tablets...
Read the article again. The issue isn't really about the price for wifi, it's that hotels are blocking the spectrum so you can't set up your own wifi or tether (which is not allowed by the FCC).
Then by the same token they should block cellphones and charge $10 a minute for calls.
Some hotels in Paris tried that a few years ago. The FCC clamped down hard on attempts to block cell phones in the US. To report a jammer, call the FCC at 1-855-55NOJAM. Or "jammerinfo@fcc.gov". Or http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/jammer-enforcement
I could totally see a hotel not allowing outside food or drink even in a room. I was helping run an event at DEFCON this year and apparently the Rio was fining the conference for people in the conference area having "outside food or drink", especially alcohol, and "outside" meant "not purchased from the conference area concessions" - stuff from other parts of the hotel/casino wasn't okay.
If there weren't protectionist regulations that create massive barriers to entry in the hotel industry, neither of those things would be an issue, because any hotel that implemented them would get eaten alive by competitors.
Those suggestions were just a alternative example of things a hotel could do that would be along the same lines as blocking wifi, where the impact is more extreme but the principle is the same.
I think if any hotel did those things, it would anger people enough to assemble and boycott the hotel. However the wifi thing they can just about get away with from a customer point of view, because you can kind of 'live without' internet in your room for a while, where as phone calls and water maybe not.
Oh and the barrier to entry to run a hotel is high, but the barrier to entry to provide clean and comfortable accommodation at a reasonable price is quite low. Long before AirBNB, holiday lettings of apartments (as I call them you may call it leasing/renting) have been popular. More income to the landlord, and the tenant saves money vs. hotel.
Are you implying the hotel market isn't competitive?
I don't know about the US, but I remember a European hotel investor claim that he usually only invested in hotels after they'd been through 3-4 bankruptcies, because it was first then that the price and debt load had dropped enough for the hotel to have a decent shot at becoming profitable.
I'm implying that the more competitive the hotel market is, the less of a problem customers will have with blatantly ridiculous policies like those mentioned.
You simply cannot have 500 mifi-type devices transmitting data (along with the hotel's actual WAPs) in the same room without major problems. There are only three non-overlapping channels for 2.4Ghz 802.11b/g/n, and mifi devices that I'm familiar with pick a "good" channel on startup -- they don't limit themselves just to the three non-overlapping ones.
5GHz is better, and the decreased ability to pass through walls is likely desirable here. However, your mifi is still broadcasting in 2.4GHz, and wifi clients will fall back to that if they don't like the quality of the 5GHz signal. OS X, for instance, is very finicky about using 5GHz on an SSID that broadcasts for both 2.4/5. Right now I'm approximately 6 feet away from my AP, and my laptop has switched to 2.4GHz.
Ultimately though, this whole mess is the fault of the hotel's poor implementation. If their wifi was free or low cost, and worked well, then why wouldn't everyone use it? That people are using their mifi devices says they are being ill served by the existing solution, not that they were just dying to pay AT&T more money and carry around yet another black plastic brick. By providing crappy service, these hotels have created the problem they're complaining about. Either don't do it at all (and save money / hassle to boot), or do it right.