Marriot Back-Pedals On Wireless Blocking

gurps_npc writes "Marriot Hotels had been illegally blocking Wifi hotspots in Nashville. They thought they owned the airwaves inside their hotel and wanted to charge guests for using them. They claimed to be 'surprised' they were breaking the law. Other hotels have complained to the FCC, asking for permission to do it legally. The FCC had fined Marriot $600,000 for their actions, among other things. They have stopped their illegal blockage, in part because of public backlash and in part because the government told them they were criminals.

Comments

Re:An example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1 is to figure out if the WiFi connection is part of your network or not. There are devices that will do this for you.
Step 2 is if it is part of your network, shut down the port is it connected to. That same device can do this for you.
Step 3 is to escort the customer out of the hotel and deny them a refund due to a violation of the TOS, and possibly bill them additional fees based on the TOS if it were signed.

Step 4 is to create a blanket no WiFi access point policy. Using the equipment from Steps 1 and 2, you can pinpoint Rogue AP locations within a few feet. Once discovered, utilize the signed agreement with the hotel to perform Step 3.

Done.

I mean, obviously it's customer offensive, but if you want to ban WiFi to the point Marriott wants to, these are your options. Exercise them.

Actually I was quite happy about them doing it

[goombah99]

I know I'll get hammered for saying I was in favor of what marroitt did but here me out. When I travel, I'm terrified of connecting to hotel networks. I don't really know which of the many possible SSIDs that I see are the bonified hotel network. And since it's normal on Hotel networks to do some DNS redirection to hand you off to the authorization site, you really can trust anything that masquerades in that way either.

Thus I'd gladly forego the trivial inconvenience of them blocking my wifi tether to my phone network (to bypass the hotel network), if they would take charge of their airwaves and block all rogue hotspots in their building. Peace of mind.

Now the litmus test here would be, are they just doing that to make money by taking away something I have for no extra cost (my cell phone tether) or do they really have my interests at heart in squelching hostile wifi hotspots? And that's really easy to figure out. If they allow short range blue tooth then they haven't taken anything away from me. I can still tether just as well as I could before.

So I gain peace of mind and lose nothing of value if they do this. Why should I not like this.

Now I suppose someone could dream up an edge case like say a LAN party or maybe some poor-mans meeting where one fellow is hosting all the others on his little conference room server. But that's so narrow a case ocmapred to the millions of guests all of whom just want a safe casual ad hoc connection to check their e-mail. Lan pary people too cheap to pay for the connection can probably figure a workaround anyhow.