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Marriott Fined $600,000 For Jamming Guest Hotspots
schwit1 writes: Marriott will cough up $600,000 in penalties after being caught blocking mobile hotspots so that guests would have to pay for its own Wi-Fi services, the FCC has confirmed today. The fine comes after staff at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee were found to be jamming individual hotspots and then charging people up to $1,000 per device to get online. Marriott has been operating the center since 2012, and is believed to have been running its interruption scheme since then. The first complaint to the FCC, however, wasn't until March 2013, when one guest warned the Commission that they suspected their hardware had been jammed.
Plus... often it's other people's money.
Business travelers just charge it to the company.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The ISM bands are not unregulated. Operations in the ISM bands are not protected from unintentional interference, but the FCC most certainly has the authority to, but chooses to abide by agreements with the ITU deferring to ETSI.
This is exactly what the FCC should be regulating, and not the content of TV or Radio broadcasts. This type of intentional disruption of service should be policed by the FCC.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
...WiFi operates on UNREGULATED spectrum, which means anyone can use, and anyone must accept interference from other users... and we did EXACTLY the same thing that Mariott was doing, for just that reason. ... we also investigated the legality of it, and the conclusion we came to was that it was perfectly legal since it was on unregulated spectrum.
According to that logic, I can come with a router backpack and prevent all users from connecting to YOUR university network. Well, it's unregulated, right? You should accept the interference and you cannot ask me to leave (in fact, I can be on a public place to cause you enough of a headache, so all is a fair game).
How did Google get charged exorbitant fees for briefly recording unencrypted wi-fi traffic from their street view cars while everything they did was on an unregulated spectrum?
There's no such thing as "illegal download"