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here in Scotland, I always have a handful of Huawei USB 3g modems. Useful for home-office broadband as a backup (plugs directly into the Vigor Draytek router); I have one in a battery backed portable wifi hotspot (which is great for camping or whilst on the road) and usually a few in my bag when I'm out on client site. I use them with Fedora Linux; they work very well out of the box through networkmanager.

Top tip, use an external antenna and you'll get much better performance.

(usual EU mobile coverage disclaimer) but I have a 3G booster antenna on the roof of my van that I use at mountain bike races. I then bridge it to wifi and the whole lot works off the van's leisure battery (a second battery) topped-up with some solar panels. it quite often will bump up to 3G if you are on the edge of 3G reception where a phone/3G dongle can't.

No offense... but judging by your wording, the hotel should really hire a professional. Mark my words: this will turn well for neither you nor the hotel.

I agree this is not something you should attempt without professional advice, you have a nightmare in the making here.

Have you thought of using internet over mains wiring?

There are plug packs that that plug into a power socket and have a network connector on one end .

http://www.solwise.co.uk/net-powerline.htm

This would give guests close to the ease of use of a wireless network without the headaches of security concerns and wireless dropouts.
You could then set up a small wireless network for the lobby and common area.

many people bought the Huawei U220 USB data modems a couple of years ago and use the T-Mobile service just for data. These were sold as "broadband replacement" services and cost GBP25/month on contract. There's no way I'm paying that much for 500Mb pcm. My data volumes usually are in the 1.5Gb per month for work and the odd yum -y update that sneaks by unnoticed.

I have one plugged into my Draytek Vigor home office router as a backup for when the broadband service goes down - it has a Solwise high gain antenna attached to it. I also have one plugged into my work Linux laptop ("it just works" with network manager).

TFA referenced in the TFA says: "Browsing means looking at websites and checking email, but not watching videos, downloading files or playing games."

WTF? I was sold "mobile broadband" - it's a data service, nothing is mentioned about browsing at all.

I installed a pair of EOC3220s for my sister-in-law, who was in a similar position -- just out of range of ADSL but within line of sight of a friend who had it, and no cable for miles around in their case. The units are dead easy to install and configure, and have worked like a charm for the last nine months. Just one thing -- it was really handy to have a 9-pin serial null modem cable to reset one of the units, so I'd recommend picking one up just in case. The installation I did spans a distance of just over 1km, and seems to work in all weather without a problem.

We were looking at outdoor wireless bridging equipment and the EnGenius kit is stable and remarkably cheap, 1/5 of the price of CISCO outdoor panels. I've just installed two building to building bridges using a pair of of these NET-EL-EOC-3220PLUS16 and it is rock solid. The web interface is good and will show you the signal strength which helps with positioning - horizontal or vertical mounting makes a huge difference. They also come complete with PoE injectors which makes powering them easy.

Prism based cards should JFW with the prism54 driver. Be careful though, as many cards which once were Prism 2.5-based, aren't any longer - which is why Solwise list the chipsets in each of the WLAN cards they sell.

The Itex Apollo 3 PCI ADSL chipset. They released binary only drivers for the 2.4.16 kernel: and then went bust. Very frustrating for those of us looking for a cheap PCI based broadband solution.

Iv'e done some preliminary poking around with my copy of the binaries and it seems that ITEx were pretty sloppy with the binaries and left a lot of symbol table in that wasn't needed, thus making reverese engineering via objdump et al pretty easy.

I don't have time to work on this myself, but I'm willing to kick off a sourceforge or savannah project with what I have already - if anyone else is interested.