I think people on this board do not understand the complexity of wifi. The fact is there is a small spectrum for wi fi and the vast majority of devices aim at the low end of the spectrum. If you check individual device sites, you will actually see comments where users have conflicting problems with mobile wifi related to such issues. Many of you just assume your experience is merely universal and that just is not the case. From city to city the situation can vary greatly as well as the costs. I can understand the concerns of mobile wifi users but many of you did not read what interference your device is causing. One device may be really low key and cause no issues but the next one is a screaming monkey. Seriously, many mobile wifi hotspots are poorly and inconsiderately placed. Considering the numerous devices that can connect to wi-fi, the problem of interference is significant. Many of you are scapegoating the hotels but if they offered no wifi at all, you would still have issues with mobile wifi hot spots conflicting with each other.
Glenn, so what do you do if the hotel chooses not to offer wifi and you can no longer get wifi access because there are too many Wifi hot spots in the hotel from other users?
Glenn, but it does not operate when people are doing more than email. Again, there are a large variety of devices and applications impacting this matter.
You mean, like, on the bedside table?
I recently stayed in a hotel in Budapest, canât remember the name. Posh nice one, but the wifi sucked HARD. For which the girl in the reception sincerely apologized. The hotel had a LOT of accesspoints that were clogging the spectrum hard, and when I connected and ran wireshark for a while, I got only a little traffic going actually through. (Sadly I did not save the recorded traffic nor the âwarbeddingâ network scan (which did not show any meaningful signal from guestsâ personal hotspots except my one) so I donât have a reference.) Probably they were addressing the network issue by adding accesspoints and making it worse.
In that atrocious RF environment, my personal cellphone hotspot worked like a charm.
Thank you for your post.
Thank you for your attitude.
What you, Drew_Sullivan, fail to understand, is that Marriott can already employ a very simple solution that does not require an FCC rule change.
If a customer brings a poorly behaved WiFi device on their property they ask the person to turn the device off. If that does not work they ask the person to leave. If that does not work they have the sheriff escort the person off the property.
Presumably the people at Marriott are smart enough to realize that solution. Which leaves us with this simple fact: their FCC filing has nothing to do with WiFi but everything to do with greed.
Iâm sorry, but you donât have the technical experience or regulatory knowledge necessary for it to be useful for my participation in this forum to continue to respond. This is all very well characterized, and the kinds of questions and arguments youâre making play out very rarely.
This is simply not accurate.
The hotel industry does not care if you use hot spots in your room. They are concerned about multiple hot spots being used in the same conference room.
Then why did you bring up MMOGs? Do you see a lot of that at business meetings?
Not under the current regulatory framework, they shouldnât.
The current rules allow me to transmit on the ISM bands from anywhere Iâm allowed to be, so long as I do so in a way that complies with Part 2 rules.
Personal hotspot users on Marriott property are following the rules. Marriott, by causing harmful interference, was not following the rules.
Marriot is doing something really stupid here. They are hoping to cash in on conventions and make a ton of money, and they will, for about 4 months. Then conventions will clue in, and move to different hotels. They will never see a convention again.
Stupid buisness moves in search of short term gains have become common in corporate America since the devolution of wallstreet to computers. No one is minding the store anymore. The people doing this are hoping to get a gigantic profit based bonus, then move on before the business collapses.
Itâs happened before. The advertising companies petitioned to relax the advertizing rules for children so thy could do things like animate lego and barbie to make them sell better, and what they got was a generation of children who do not trust and will not watch ads. It was a known problem. Advertisers were the ones who put the strictures in place origionally because they saw it happening back in the 1950âswith breakfast cereal ads.
mariott needs to be stopped for itâs own good.
Marriott does care. And they paid for itâŚ
Which means, in the case of Marriott, you just lied.
I receive an email from a colleague that I am not going to reproduce, but itâs someone who produces events at hotels all the time who reached out to Marriott and was pointed to their PR statement (which is linked in the article). Hereâs what I wrote back, so I can point other folks to this in the future.
Marriott is being 100% disingenuous in their PR statement.
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They were fined for blocking a guest in his room who was savvy enough to sort this out. He was using a personal hotspot.
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They paid the fine to settle an investigation and agreed to compliance reporting across all of their American properties.
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The petition doesnât distinguish in any way between any kinds of gear, and talks about general network management as well as specific security issues, none of which are entirely addressed by using âdeauthâ to block devices. In fact, the petition calls out having control over guest rooms and other parts of their facilities.
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The petition in fact also seeks to have the FCC agree to give up authority entirely over this form of rogue AP blocking by affirmatively ruling it isnât interference, which would then prevent any enforcement by the FCC over whether any company on its property blocked personal hotspots or other devices, or where they did. There would be no oversight.
If Marriott is serious about what theyâre saying, they need to withdraw the current petition, and refile with a far more limited scope and with better technical accuracy, as the petition is full of basic mistatements of technology that are designed to make the problem seem worse.
As I note in the article, Marriott and others are 100% able to have a contract requirement that says exhibitors and meeting-room users cannot use any Internet connection except on personal devices (forget guests, which is a whole other set of privacy laws). They can use their existing mitigation technology to identify and precisely pinpoint use. They can cancel contracts, charge people, and throw them out for contract violations. Thatâs all totally legal!
They just canât, currently, pollute the Wi-Fi environment to enforce physical property rights over airspace, which is a very very new doctrine on their part, and very bad as a precedent.
If you are a Hilton customer, you may want to write to their PR office to express your disapproval.
Jacqueline Toppings Director, Brand Public Relations, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, hiltonpr@hilton.com
In my email I stressed that; 1) this is an intrusion of guestâs privacy and autonomy and 2) that I am a frequent work traveller and since hotel wifi is never consistent enough for work, I either need to be able to supplement hotel wifi with my tether or find other accommodations.
If I get a response, Iâll post it back here.
Given my very corporate-y job, I can appreciate Ciscoâs position on the matter. Given that, thereâs absolutely no reason any consumer level provider like a hotel should be able to just snuff out public (or privately owned) airwaves. If I want to hook up a rabbit eared black and white television to get around the crappy Mariot-vision network, that should be my right. Companies we support avoid hotels for conference rooms like the plague given the absolutely horrid state of their network connectivity, as we had to set up our own hotspot to achieve our necessary ends. I generally avoid hotels and go to rentals these days for the exact same reasons. Mariot has lost control of the on demand movies and porn, and they need to come to terms that they will no longer be able to profit off of that revenue stream in the future unless they actually compete on a service level.
Dude, you got it backwards. I was referring to the individual guest rooms. It is the large conference rooms where there are issues. There is a write up on Recode.net
If you ignore the fine they paid, the behavior they were responding to, and the text of their petition. Sure.
The âwrite-upâ is the text of Marriottâs PR statement, which is contradicted by its petition, with some general overview and no new information. (Same PR statement is covered in this article.)
Excellent. That makes it even easier for Marriott personal to expunge people who are operating interfering devices. Just one more reason they do not need an FCC rule change.
The petition comes from the hotel industry.
