I sent an e-mail to Marriott about this, and received an interesting reply. Of course, it doesn’t really pass the sniff test, but the fact that they even replied to me says volumes - it’s damage control time:
"Thank you for contacting Marriott. We appreciate the opportunity to provide you with information.
We understand there have been concerns regarding our position on the FCC petition filing, perhaps due to a lack of clarity about the issue. To set the record straight it has never been nor will it ever be Marriott’s policy to limit our guests’ ability to access the Internet by all available means, including through the use of personal Mi-Fi and/or Wi-Fi devices. As a matter of fact, we invite and encourage our guests to use these Internet connectivity devices in our hotels. To be clear, this matter does not involve in any way Wi-Fi access in hotel guestrooms or lobby spaces.
The question at hand is what measures a network operator can take to detect and contain rogue and imposter Wi-Fi hotspots used in our meeting and conference spaces that pose a security threat to meeting or conference attendees or cause interference to the conference guest wireless network.
In light of the increased use of wireless technology to launch cyber-attacks and purposefully disrupt hotel networks, Marriott along with the American Hotel & Lodging Association on behalf of the entire hotel industry is seeking clarity from the FCC regarding what lawful measures a network operator can take to prevent such attacks from occurring. We feel this is extremely important as we are increasingly being asked what measures we take to protect our conference and meeting guests and the conference groups that are using Wi-Fi technology in our hotels.
If we can be of further assistance, we invite you to reply to this email.
This reply is on their site, and referenced in the article. I have a full explanation further up in the comments, but if Marriott wants to take this stance, then they need to withdraw their petition and refile it. The petition has no such limits, and they paid a fine to settle an investigation and agreed to monitoring of all their American properties over blocking a personal hotspot and related activities.
No, the mitigation software they use is savvier than that. There’s really no good defense agains “deauth.” It’s a significant flaw in Wi-Fi protocols that the denial of service aspect has never been solved.
Could be solvable by signing the deauth packets, and doable by a kernel patch on both the client and the accesspoint. (Another of the plethora of reasons to have kernel sources and unlocked bootloader.) Violates the specs, but many codified standards started as ad-hoc standards that evolved from scratch-an-itch patches.
The 802.11n and 802.11ac are MIMO, able to discriminate between signals coming from different directions. Also known as “smart antennas”. Essentially they have several antennas (typically 2 or 3) that act as a phased array, and, like electronically steerable radars, can shape the antenna pattern (beamforming). That increases the throughput (you can use multipaths to your advantage by sending different data by different signal paths), and you can reject signals coming from wrong directions.
Make it a bit more. Toilet is often further than 10 feet from the windowsill.
That’s where the problem was, before beamforming, and even then it was not that bad because the signal weakens with the square of distance. You may suffer some speed degradation but given that in the mobile hotspot scenarios you are limited by the uplink speed anyway, it is not even an issue, much less a critical one.
