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Marriott to Add Wi-Fi in 400 Hotels
matt writes "InfoWorld reports: Marriott aims to provide WLAN (wireless LAN) access at 400 hotels in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., the company said. It will collaborate with wireless service provider STSN to offer the service in hotel lobbies, meeting rooms, restaurants and other public spaces, complementing its current in-room high-speed access."
conentional Highspeed service in more of their hitels.
I hope the FBI's prepared for all the terrorists who can get on the internet now!
Just add a GPS, and your employer will know you're at the bar instead of the conference room.
I was using a wireless connection in my room at the Marriott Financial Center in Lower Manhattan two weeks ago. Or maybe I was on a network belonging to some poor schlep in the office building across the street who left his access point wide open. Don't recall seeing it on the room bill so that must have been the reason. Hey, buddy, if you're reading this, thanks! I'll be back soon so keep it going for me. And if I may be so self-serving, please boost the power or relocate the antenna a bit closer, standing by my window got tiring after a while.
Having stayed at a few Marriott's with the wired in room access, it is everything that it is advertised as. Fast, stable, and easy to setup, just open a browser and click a button. They even let you check your front desk messages and bill on the hotel intranet website. I also found the pricing fairly reasonable at $10 a night, less than a PPV movie.
But, as I have a wireless network at home, wireless access has really grown on me. I have always assumed that concrete walls and metal doors make hotel wide wi-fi access for in room use more expensive, it would be very welcome. Has any hotel implemented such a system, or are there any other technical limitations that I have missed that make implimenting such a system too difficult?
Wife: "Honey, I was just going over our credit card report, and I saw six separate charges to the Marriott hotel in the past week. Are you having an affair?"
*silence for a few moments*
Husband: "Technically? No. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take the laptop on a, uh, business trip. I'll be back in an hour."
I don't feel terribly bright. I am at a hotel right now, and the first thing I did was get on the hotel highspeed internet connection provided by Arescom. They seem to have an interesting system here. Every other hotel that I have stayed at has either provided a RJ-45 jack on the wall (e.g. Wayport) or a special box connected to the phone system (e.g. STSN). Here, they actually provide a DSL modem in every room. Well, just as I posted that comment, I looked up at my menu bar and noticed that an 802.11b network was at full signal strength. Turns out that they do provide a wireless network for in room use that was not mentioned anywhere in the hotel information. As I am on the 4th floor and have full signal strength, I know it can't be bleed through from the lobby, so this is quite interesting. I have never stayed at a hotel that provides such access, and I have to say, I like it.
Most hotels I go to already have wired lan in my room and that's good enough for me. I'm no uber-geek that has to have lan access in the hotel pool. If you're at the bar, and you have a PC (and not looking up pr0n) you're a loser. In conference rooms, you're supposed to be listnening to one guy speak, not watching a live stream of a football game. Onlythe speaker should have internet for demos etc... and one lan cable never hurt nobody.
Wireless is useful for people who roam around and need internet access everywhere they go. If you're in a building like a hotel with rooms setup for specific purposes you are not going to roam around much. If you're like me you'll spend lots of time in one place, move to another place and spend lots of time there, on to the next place etc...
Marriott, just because it is wireless doesn't mean it's better. Make sure this is what people are asking you for before you venture off in this direction.
This is involving a physical RJ45 cable connection, not Wi Fi, but I believe this example is telling of what you can expect from Marriott. I stayed at the Greenbelt Marriott in Greenbelt, Maryland recently, and had my laptop.. a Dell Inspiron 8000, with Windows XP installed on it and a 100Mb NIC. Runs fine, and I use it on my home network usually. So anyway, I go to the desk initially, and ask them if they provide internet access. The woman at the desk said they did, and that it was $12 for 24 hours of access. I ask when the 24 hours started.. and she replied it started when I first used the connection. Well, I connect my computer to the unmarked LAN cable leading from the back of the TV.. When I open my web browser it gives me a page effectively saying "Network access is charged in blocks, from noon to noon. If you agree to pay $9.95 for access up till the next 12pm, click here!" .. Well, it was about 12:30pm or so, so I figured it wasn't too bad and I agreed. I didn't like the fact that I would be charged for time I was away at a conference and not using the laptop, but $10 is not that big a deal for a nice T1 connection while I'm bored. I started using it.. the network was rather slow. It felt like I was using a 56k modem. So I messed around for 8 minutes and went off to my conference. I got back about 9pm later that night and started using my laptop again. The network connection no longer worked! I was about to release and renew my DHCP address, and ping the gateway, but otherwise, I had no internet access! I saw a number in the hotel room.. "call this for any networking problems!" ..I end up talking to some guy who tried a lot of very basic troubleshooting tactics on my computer, and eventually gave up after about 2 hours, just telling me to go to another room. Mind you, I liked the 14th floor room I was on..nice view, and everything else was satisfactory. I didn't want to risk a crappy room on the 8th floor, but they assured me it was the same, just lower down, and I figured I'd be too distracted with the internet to notice the view, so I agreed. I asked the desk clerk to not be charged for my internet usage for this "24 hour period" as at most I'd be getting 15 minutes of usage in. After a few more painful minutes of waiting for the manager, he gladly said I could use the internet for free and then I hung up and waited for my new room key to be delivered.
.. fortunately the tap water was drinkable. I did not appreciate being teased. Also, although they gave me tasty little chocolates in the first room, I did not get another two tasty little chocolates when they moved me to the second room. As I left my problems I had with the hotel chain in their "feedback box", the girl at the desk said "I hope those are good comments!" I smirked and hit the road.
Same exact problem happened in that other room too. I call up the front desk (they forgot the shampoo in the second room, plus a lamp's bulb needed replacement as well) and told them of my frustrations. The desk clerk told me I should refer my networking problems to the front desk and they could send up their "engineer". I was relieved, saying how tired I was, and they end up sending in this kid who seemed like he barely made it through high school and maybe played Everquest for a while. He was clueless. After letting him mess around with my laptop for half an hour and complain on the phone to someone, I kicked him out and went to sleep. I tried restarting the internet connection repeatedly during my 3 day/2 night stay. It started working again a few minutes before I was about to leave. Grrrr. Other problems during my hotel stay... they're not that great at hosting a conference. The conference rooms were cold till the last hour or two of seminars, and the food catered to us was always the same, each of the three days. They also leave a nice looking, refreshing bottle of Evian spring water in your room, with a little tag on it saying "drink me and pay $4.50"
Our company installed wired high-speed access to one of the Marriott's (Richmond, BC, Canada), and we used Linux and Perl to do it!
Check in, plug in, and surf!
Of course, no matter what web page you try to go to initially, you get redirected to our page saying "you're in room 101, click here to pay $10", but after that page, you can surf to your heart's content; iptables 'REDIRECT' rules!
(Well, ok, there are some free pages with local information... oh, and the microsoft update website... but *that's it*)
We've set up printing through a web page; just print to a file, and upload the file. Anything else would involve changing settings on your laptop, and we'd get blamed for anything that goes wrong, so we don't wanna go there, do we?
And if you need a 'real' ip address (not NAT), the front desk can click on a button and give you one. That's just for folks with cranky VPN setups. Sigh...
It'll be interesting integrating wireless access, since we can't use SNMP to determine what room you're in (and therefore who to bill), but hey, we'll *find* a way to make it work!
They can stop by the Marriot on the way to secret trials/interregations, pick up some suspected terroists/any citizen AND have a fine continental breakfast!
Stripping Americans of their civil rights never tasted soooooo good!
One cracker to spend the night, one cracker to break them, one crack to rule them all!
Marriot's new slogan: you think war drivers are dangerous, they overnight in our hotels...
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Marriott has ofcourse a site of his own, with a news section, including the press release about the wireless access.
Linux hosting for $2.50/mo
This sure would explain the growing amount of homeless people with laptops occupying the benches around the hotel
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Sometimes you're sitting in the bar chatting to work colleagues and making notes for a presentation the next day.
... this way you can just meet people in the bar of the Marriott, update your files and then go back to your cheaper hotel somewhere else!
Sometimes you just want to open your PDA and check your email without having to use slow and expensive cellphone connections.
Sometimes it's nice to be able to catch up on all the latest information over breakfast before heading in to the training class
And sometimes it's nice to be able to sit next to the pool and listen to classic comedy, science fiction and drama on BBC Radio 7, while you're on the other side of the planet.
It's not something I'd use often, but WiFi is a standard and if it means I basically can just open my laptop/PDA and surf the web/read email/logon to my corporate VPN and pull down the latest reports etc. without having to go hide in my room and spend time fighting with one of the several different "high speed" connections different places around the world offer (or not) then that would be great.
It's especially good in Europe where each country has a different phone socket so you either have to carry a bag of different adapters with you, or hope the hotel has phone handsets with a standard US plug for dialup
I was just in a Holiday Inn and they had FREE high speed internet access for computers with an ethernet card. It was frankly amazing. No extra fees.
The only other computer access I've seen in hotel rooms are those cruddy TV-based web browsers. Frankly, they are worse than useless. And they usually charge $10/day.
WiFi would be nice, especially if I could check my e-mail while I was in a boring conference seminar, but I don't see the benefit for most hotels. Except for resorts and conference centers, I don't need WiFi in the hotel bar, or in most crummy lobbies.
But whatever a hotel decides, they should make it free for hotel users. Making it an extra profit center will stop many from using it, making it a freebie means I will never stay anywhere else.
My father is a blogger.
I, for one, would not pay $10/night from my own pocket, and I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to reimburse that expense.
Yet if they just bumped their prices by $2-$3 per night, it would be no problem with the boss and a pretty big incentive to stay there.
And besides making more money from more guests, they would make more money from the service directly, unless more than 20-30% of their guests were doing the $10/night thing (which I doubt).