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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.
I just wonder if the fine that Marriott had to pay actually was large enough to take out the profit that they got from the jamming.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Why is it that the most awful dumpy motels always seem to have free, open and strong wi-fi? Many don't even bother with passwords.
Yet it's the expensive name-brand boutique hotels that always charge for wi-fi. And more often not, it's terrible quality, hard to connect and slow?
And, now we see this happening. This never happens at Motel 6.
Has anyone else noticed this- that overall the cheaper and sleazier the motel, the better the wi-fi?
Heh. Just commented on this on the Gizmodo post an hour ago. Please forgive the copypasta for my first post on Slashdot in probably 5 years.
My organization recently had a conference in a hotel owned by Marriott in a large Southern city. Not only did they want $500 per device per day for any Internet access — wired or wireless — the $12.95/day in-room wifi straight up did not work. They'd take your money before you could figure out it didn't work, of course. And if you ponied up the $16.95 for the "high speed" in-room wifi, it...barely worked. Barely.
We request one wired connection now. And once it's connected and the hotel staffers leave, I set up our own router with our own network. I'm pretty sure that if there was will or pressure on various and sundry consumer protection agencies, the prices charged by many hotel chains — with Marriott properties being the worst of them all — would not hold up in court.
I'll also add that our Director of Events is fairly convinced a new Marriott property in Washington, DC is doing this right now.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
With proper design of the hardware and protocols, congregation of people should be an advantage, as it is right now for the Hong Kong protesters and their mobile devices.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Lately, Slashdot seems to be echoing Hacker News, about three hours late. If you're going to be a scraper site, you have to do it faster.
"or authorized by" you are authorized to use unlicensed frequencies, by that very chapter if you are abiding by those rules, ergo the marriott's AP was not abiding by that rule and therefore technically not permitted to use the unlicensed frequencies which would be the legal grounds for the fine - would it not?
In Meraki's Air Marshal Whitepaper [cisco.com], they explicitly state on page 8 that Unauthorized containment is prosecutable by law (subject to the FCC’s Communications Act of 1934, Section 333, ‘Willful or Malicious Interference’)..
Hmm, according to the whitepaper you linked it says "As containment renders any standard 802.11 network completely ineffective, containment measures should taken in your airspace(emphasis mine). Extreme caution should be taken to ensure that containment is not being performed on a legitimate network nearby and, action should only be taken as a last resort. Unauthorized containment is prosecutable by law (subject to the FCC’s Communications Act of 1934, Section 333, ‘Willful or Malicious Interference’). "
So provided that the "containment" effort took place only on Marriott's property (not a public space), I'm having trouble seeing how Marriott is legally in the wrong. Obviously, it's sleazy (and the FCC found reason to fine them, as well, so what do I know). Perhaps there is an implied right to the public use of the air in a building that, while not freely "open to the public" per se, is also not "closed off" private, either?
Would a retail store be prevented from doing the same thing?
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!