Hotel Group Asks FCC For Permission To Block Some Outside Wi-Fi

alphadogg writes The FCC will soon decide whether to lay down rules regarding hotels' ability to block personal Wi-Fi hotspots inside their buildings, a practice that recently earned Marriott International a $600,000 fine. Back in August, Marriott, business partner Ryman Hospitality Properties and trade group the American Hotel and Lodging Association asked the FCC to clarify when hotels can block outside Wi-Fi hotspots in order to protect their internal Wi-Fi services. From elsewhere in the article: During the comment period, several groups called for the agency to deny the hotel group’s petition. The FCC made clear in October that blocking outside Wi-Fi hotspots is illegal, Google’s lawyers wrote in a comment. “While Google recognizes the importance of leaving operators flexibility to manage their own networks, this does not include intentionally blocking access to other commission-authorized networks, particularly where the purpose or effect of that interference is to drive traffic to the interfering operator’s own network,” they wrote.

Comments

Re:I don't quite get this...

[beelsebob]

2.4GHz is a band in which all radio communications are authorised by the FCC as long as they stay within certain limits. One of those limits is that they don't interfere with other radio communications.

Section 15.5 "required to cease interference"

[raymorris]

Operation on 2.5Ghz is authorized by part 15 of the FCC rules. Within part 15, there are a number of subparts, including subpart 5:

        If a Part 15 transmitter does cause interference to authorized radio communications,
even if the transmitter complies with all of the technical standards and equipment
authorization requirements in the FCC rules, then its operator will will be required to cease
operation, at least until the interference problem is corrected.

http://transition.fcc.gov/Bure...

Re:Fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no they shouldn't be allowed to do this on their premises. If they want to sell wifi to their customers, fine, but a customer brings a mobile wifi hotspot they are paying for themselves, they should not be blocked in using it. They won't be utilizing the hotel's wifi at all anyway, so why should the hotel with their shitty wifi setup be concerned? Oh I know, it's because they lost out on that customers $100-$1000 fee for accessing the hotel's wifi for the conference.

Hotels only want this for monetary gains it's for absolutely nothing else, period, end of story. Anything else the hotels claim is pure, 100% bullshit.

Additional background

[twitnutttt]

A few things are worth noting about the original case. Marriott agreed in a plea deal to have improperly used "containment features" of FCC-licensed equipment to block Wi-Fi hotspots, and this was performed in conference facilities, not the hotel. https://www.fcc.gov/document/m...: "Marriott Hotel Services, Inc., will pay $600,000 to resolve a Federal Communications Commission investigation into whether Marriott intentionally interfered with and disabled Wi-Fi networks established by consumers in the conference facilities of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee, in violation of Section 333 of the Communications Act. The FCC Enforcement Bureau’s investigation revealed that Marriott employees had used containment features of a Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland to prevent individuals from connecting to the Internet via their own personal Wi-Fi networks, while at the same time charging consumers, small businesses, and exhibitors as much as $1,000 per device to access Marriott’s Wi-Fi network."

Re:Interesting

[Holi]

Actually your microwave is an ISM device and takes precedence over the unlicensed usage. Your devices have to accept interference from ISM devices the reverse is not true.

Re:Interesting

[linuxrocks123]

You'd be wrong. The FCC has repeatedly stated that passive shielding is perfectly legal, and, yes, it would block emergency communication. It's your property; why shouldn't you be able to block radio signals from entering or leaving your own property? Unlike active jamming, you're not hurting anyone else's reception.

It might be a good idea to prominently place signs saying "cell phones don't work in here!" to avoid losing a lawsuit if someone dies in your theater because they couldn't dial 911, but that would be a civil not criminal matter anyway.

Re:Interesting

[dgatwood]

That search for the lowest place without rats in the toilet is why they do bs like this... they have to compete on "price" and then once you're in make up their money on crap like charging you for internets. Works the same way with airlines, and that's why airlines suck now.

See, that's the opposite of my experience. I've never seen a $50-per-night hotel that didn't offer free Wi-Fi. It's the $300-and-up-per-night hotels that charge $15 a day for Wi-Fi. These same hotels also charge five bucks for a tiny little can of Pringles, four bucks for a soda, etc. Basically, they assume that anybody with enough money to stay in those hotels also can't be bothered to walk downstairs and across the street to the gas station to buy a soda.

And the more expensive the hotel, the more likely they are to use a complex Wi-Fi system that requires you to sign in through a captive portal, breaks in fascinating ways, and is horribly unreliable. The cheaper the hotel, the more likely they are to just toss up a halfway decent trunk line connected to a handful of off-the-shelf Wi-Fi base stations, and be done with it. Guess which one actually works reliably? (Hint: It isn't the complex, expensive systems used at the high-priced hotels.)

As for when hotels should be allowed to block Wi-Fi, the correct answer is "never". It is never acceptable to deliberately cause interference with properly licensed hardware operating in a normal manner. It is illegal, unethical, and any hotel doing so should get buried in fines so high that nobody else ever even thinks of committing such an act in the future. Now if those Wi-Fi hotspots are operating incorrectly and causing interference, it is within their right to use passive mechanisms to track them down and ask the customers to stop using them. However, the burden of proof falls on the hotel chain to prove that those hotspots are, in fact, not operating correctly, and that the problem is not caused by the hotel's Wi-Fi network being set up incorrectly (which it almost certainly always is in any of the sorts of hotels that would attempt such jamming).