[Networking] zowwie:
hotel broadband observations

I find that if I stay at the more up-market brands like Hilton or Sheraton or Mariott they nickel and dime you for everything, typically broadband will set you back ten bucks a day.

However if you stay at their slightly less expensive partner brands like Fairfield, Courtyard or Hampton inn, you get the points for the up-market places (or airline miles) and the internet tends to be free.

At least in the US hotels are pretty densely concentrated around freeway interchanges or business districts and sometimes the wifi signal from one hotel bleeds over into another. Its been interesting to see how this has evolved over time. The conversation would often go like this...

Customer - "Do you offer broadband wifi here at Brand X?"

Clerk - "Well, WE don't offer it but Brand Y next door does. Typically if I put you in a room on that side you'll probably be able to pick up their signal just fine." Translated, the connection is going to be very weak and you're going to say the heck with it and dial up - or try to use GPRS/EDGE and thats not typically going to work very well because in-building coverage with GSM1900 is lousy unless you happen to be near a window on the side of the building closest to the cell site. (It's even lousier because of the Wizard's antenna design!!)

The upshot of this has been the hotel chains with broadband have caught on that their neighbors will leech off of them, thus they have passwords that change every week. They don't do encryption because that would make the poor front desk clerks bleed out their ears, its more of just getting your MAC address on an access list in some manner. Broadband is included but they keep the customers next door at Brand X from coming along for the ride by giving their customers a little card with a sticker and that week's password. At authentication, which naturally only works best with IE because apparently the developers haven't heard of bloody firefox in most cases... it appears that your MAC address is stored for 24 hours and then you don't have to authenticate again until about the same time the next day. Some of them appear to be far more sophisticated, don't require a password, and appear to triangulate your room location in some manner - I'm totally guessing but I bet the access server polls all of the access points to see which ones can see traffic from your MAC address but that's just speculation.

In my experience my T-Mobile MDA (HTC wizard) will sometimes authenticate to hotel networks and sometimes not. It's usually not a signal strength problem, its that the IE browser thats installed in Windows Mobile 5 isn't quite up to running whatever script is authenticating you. If the PDA is all you carry, you're totally dependent on the web page the hotel uses for authentication happening to work correctly on your handheld device. If you're at one of the up-market places that nickel and dime you for everything you're still going to have to authenticate to their internet server over a wired connection and that may or may not work on your handheld. It also may or may not work over the NAT'd connection you get with a wireless router and if you need tech support you better be pretty darned able to B.S. them into thinking you're using a PC with Windows XP. It also completely varies from property to property, don't expect consistency in this area across one particular brand of hotel.

If you only carry a handheld 802.11x device and a wireless router, you better set a strong password and encryption key on it lest some other hotel guest changes your network name to "owned" and/or they download something they ought not to and the data trail leads back to your room's port.

When I arrive at a hotel and plug in or connect my 802.11x through my laptop, I hold my nose and launch IE until I get put on the access list, then I can typically launch firefox and kill the IE pig out of memory.