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Ask HN: How do we convince all hotels to just provide free WiFi, no passwords?
I swear to god, the better the hotel, the worse the wifi.
If there's any kind of popup modal—they're doing it wrong. If there's any kind of pasword—they're doing it wrong.
If you are a startup that things you are "helping" hotels by helping them monetize their wifi or something, please pivot.
How do we spread the word?
- derelicta 4y agoDepending where you are, its illegal. For example in France, if you dont keep a register of whoever used your wi-fi, you are in breach of anti-terrorist norms.
- hannob 4y agoI haven't been to France in a while. Is this actually enforced in any meaningful way? Like, you can't go to Starbucks or a shopping center and use their wifi without some kind of identity verification? How does that practically work?
- maximus-decimus 4y agoI imagine they just use their super cheap cellular data plans.
- jraph 4y agoYes. However, at some places, like inside some buildings, you have a good wifi but very bad mobile network reception. In high speed trains the wifi might also be stabler than your phone because the system behind the wifi is designed to work with the high speed you are moving at.
- soco 4y agoMy experience with train wifi is that the wifi signal is great but beyond the portal nothing else works.
- jraph 4y agoI regularly take the train. I've had good experiences most of the times, and catastrophic experiences some of the times. It depends on the location, also. Some lines are better served. This is not something you can rely on however. Take it as a bonus if it works.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- derelicta 4y agoIt's fairly simple; there is a captive portal where you have to enter your phone number, phone number that ends up being validated by sms. and yes its actually surprinsingly enforced. I remember reading an article a few months ago where café's owners had to pay hefty fines for not implementing those "safety" measures.
- tablespoon 4y ago>>> Depending where you are, its illegal. For example in France, if you dont keep a register of whoever used your wi-fi, you are in breach of anti-terrorist norms. > It's fairly simple; there is a captive portal where you have to enter your phone number, phone number that ends up being validated by sms. They have similar requirements in China, and they do exactly the same thing there.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- registeredcorn 4y agoWhat about people who don't own a phone?
- scarface74 4y agoThe worldwide cell phone penetration rate is 91% https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w... It’s not a money maker for them, I doubt they care.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y agoMore government pressure to require you to carry a tracking device.
- scarface74 4y agoYes because without government pressure the 92% of the worlds population wouldn’t have cell phones.
- jraph 4y agoUsually, captive portals make you enter your name and your email address. Many times, you can just put garbage, click ok and you have your internet access. There's no email verification in many places. Some wifi access points (like the ones from cities) make you create an account though.
- mnw21cam 4y agoHow would you verify your email address while you're trying to get wifi access if you don't have wifi access?
- jraph 4y agoYes. (more seriously, they could make it very annoying until you verify, like let you connect for a few minutes only, or at very low speed. Still, yes, and I guess this is a major reason why they don't make people verify their email address)
- anonym29 4y agoSounds like this law makes it much easier to frame people than planting drugs and calling the cops. /s
- bobby1234 4y agoFunny, anti-terrorism to track everyone using wifi, yet known subjects have done repeated attacks all without using wifi.
- danparsonson 4y agoAnd share their bandwidth with any of the surrounding businesses/individuals who don't want to pay for their own?
- dave4420 4y agoWhy do hotels not do this already?
- atwebb 4y agoWhy are drinks more expensive at a stadium or in a 20 oz bottle at a gas station? A mix of captive audience, no other options, and convenience (sprinkle in business travel/expensing).
- PaulWaldman 4y agoSome captive portals require a password, but all seem to require acceptance of their ToS. Is there any precedence that a provider of open Wifi is absolved of any responsibility for nefarious activities by end-users when their ToS is agreed to?
- willidiots 4y agoIt's very rare, but nevertheless the kind of thing that corporate legal teams worry about. That said, there are lower-friction ways to deliver these terms - include them in your check-in paperwork, post them visibly in a public space - but that requires a legal team which cares about reducing user sign-up friction.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mleo 4y agoMost hotels are small businesses. Business ISPs are expensive for the amount of bandwidth that then needs to be shared across rooms. They need ways to limit who is accessing it. The more expensive the hotel, the more likely the customer is business traveler and can expense the cost or won’t be too inconvenienced by add-on charges.
- raverbashing 4y agoHotels in the US seem to play this "corporate expense" BS with wifi, but it's rare to see it outside the US As if my boss would be happy to have another thing to expense, lol no. And guess what, you just kicked other potential customers from your hotel
- jbirer 4y agoI never use WiFi when I am in a hotel because I am most likely traveling and want to go outside and have fun / explore, not browse the Internet in my room.
- spyke112 4y agoSame - besides 4g/5g coverage is excellent in European countries, where I mostly travel.
- warrenm 4y agoI see you're not a business traveler who needs to complete documentation after dinner, going places with small kiddos who may benefit from some distraction while you're getting ready in the morning, or wanting to keep up with your favorite series on Starz before bed ;)
- mensetmanusman 4y agoDon’t stay at hotels then, only stay at airbnbs/vrbos that have good wifi.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoThat's probably actually a good way to sell "good wifi experience" to hotels: Airbnb does it better and it's easy to compete with that aspect.
- ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y agoI’ve stayed at some AirBNB/VRBO type places with terrible Wi-Fi. How do you know ahead of time which ones have “good” Wi-Fi?
- scarface74 4y agoYes, because AirBnbs with shady host, hidden fees, no housekeeping, you’re expected to have the space spotless, no support of the wifi is bad, half the time the Airbnb is not legally suppose to short term rentals, etc.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoReviews would say those things ideally.
- scarface74 4y agoOr I could just go on my Hilton or Hyatt app and be guaranteed a minimum level of service and consistency and know they are operating legally. I also don’t have to worry about leaving the space spotless and cleaning fees. Not to mention between status (automatically conferred by the right card), base loyalty points and the right cobranded credit cards, I can easily get 15%-25% back for future stays.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoSure, but then you have to pay for Wi-Fi :)
- Overtonwindow 4y agoI've noticed the cheaper the hotel, the more amenities they have, like free wifi. Why? It seems like it should be the opposite.
- BurningFrog 4y agoI think it's as simple as this: At cheaper places everything is cheaper
- jibe 4y agoBig hotel chain will have a legal team, which will demand a terms of service to cover their butt, which will mean a captive portal with a checkbox.
- robcohen 4y agoPretty simple explanation here: The cheap hotel is cheap because that’s the price it takes to fill the rooms up. If they could charge more, they would. Cheaper hotels need more amenities to attract guests, or else they’d be even cheaper to fill rooms. Expensive hotels have enough going for them (location usually), that they can afford to nickel and dime you because they know they’ll fill the rooms anyway.
- ARandumGuy 4y agoThe customer at a cheap hotel is likely price sensitive, and is unlikely to pay for wifi. They'll either use their phone data, or just go without. So the hotel might as well just provide free wifi to compete with other cheap hotels. For high end hotels, the customer is much less price sensitive, and is more likely to pay for the wifi without thinking about it. Many customers at high end hotels are also business travelers, who don't care about price because they aren't paying for it.
- defluct 4y agoAs for the cost, I agree. Just charge me more on the room itself. But in EU and many other countries, you are responsible for knowing who does what through your network. As for the user experience, why not just give you a personal generated password when you check in? Then they have the info they need, and you just need to enter the password. Both iOS and Android support auto filling SSID and password through a QR-code and NFC, so that's the best solution I think.
- Macha 4y ago> As for the user experience, why not just give you a personal generated password when you check in? Then they have the info they need, and you just need to enter the password. In my experience, a lot of hotels already do this.
- erellsworth 4y agoSame way you convince any business to do anything: market pressure or regulation. Regulation to make hotels provide free wifi is never going to happen, not in the US anyway. I have no idea how you could get market pressure to accomplish this either. So, basically you the answer is you can't.
- joemazerino 4y agoNot a good idea considering the security and privacy of open WiFi.
- sp332 4y agoRight, even if everyone knows the password, the four-way handshake makes it much harder to sniff other people's traffic.
- scarface74 4y agoHow do you think having an open access point would provide a good experience to hotel users when anyone can log on? And what problem are you trying to solve? I mostly stay in Hiltons. You just enter your last name and room number and you’re in. It’s even an easy enough process with my Roku stick that I take with me that doesn’t have a browser.
- willidiots 4y ago"Spreading the word" isn't needed. There are plenty of low-friction tech solutions to public Wi-Fi onboarding and the people responsible for these systems know about them. The persistence of stupid captive portals etc. is an intentional move by the hotel, coffee shop, wherever. Their marketing department values your eyeballs + any data you provide as part of sign up. It's stupid because you're trying to get online, you don't want to experience this friction, but it's a "customer touchpoint" and the venues don't want to lose it. Source: have built large Wi-Fi networks for 15 years, helped develop Passpoint support on Android, ran large U.S. coffee shop Wi-Fi, ran citywide Wi-Fi in NYC.
- orev 4y agoI’ve seen ads sometimes on airport WiFi, but rarely anything of consequence at hotels, other than a basic splash page promoting the hotel itself. The hotel also already has all your personal information from the booking, so I don’t see how WiFi could be any kind of significant driver of further data collection through a captive portal page. The one thing they do have to do is make you accept terms and conditions, and that almost always seems to be the primary driving force on these pages.
- willidiots 4y agoI didn't say it was a particularly valuable ad space, I completely agree :) But having had these conversations with the people responsible, that's nevertheless the reality. There are existing supported technologies which solve all of these issues. You can set up a Passpoint OSU solution, route users through T&Cs once and provision their device with a secure credential for encrypted autoconnection in the future. Or build said sign-in into the venue's mobile app. But that requires consensus from the corporate stakeholders (marketing and legal), who tend to prefer status quo. There are folks working on these problems, both from wireless industry and venue side, and if anyone is really interested in helping I'd suggest looking into the Wireless Broadband Alliance as well as the Wi-Fi Alliance. Passpoint will eventually kill portals but it's taking forever due to these politics.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
- zer0faith 4y agoMost of us book online any... so uhhh why not just ask for the mac address of the machine, add it to the network on check in, remove it on check out?
- eropple 4y agoGetting a normal user to get you a MAC address would be... challenging. Especially on devices that randomize them.
- zer0faith 4y agoMost those places have an "app" I'm sure someone smart could figure that one out.
- scarface74 4y agoiPhones apps are not allowed access to your MAC. It would allow apps to individually track users.
- sumitgt 4y agoHmm. How would this work for regular non-tech savvy users? I doubt regular customers know what a MAC address is.
- scarface74 4y agoiPhones at least randomly change MAC addresses as an anti tracking measure. Besides, when I travel with my wife. do I really want to have to give my MAC addresses to both of our laptops, both of our phones, and both of our iPads?
- warrenm 4y agoI don't want to preenter a single MAC, let alone the 7 that are coming along for the ride when I and/or my family travel
- anonym29 4y agoAre you sure we can't just keep the systems that ask for room number and last name with no rate limiting that just bills the occupant of that room when they check out? I'm a big fan of those. /s
- dchuk 4y agoGet a travel router. I have the Gl.inet Slate, and when I get to my hotel each week, I just plug that in, maybe log into its admin interface and deal with the captive portal (not always necessary since I usually stay at Marriotts and it use remembers), and then all my devices connect to that like I’m at home. Super seamless. I need to go through and setup ad blocking and possibly default VPN/Wireguard connection, just haven’t gotten around to that part yet.
- joekrill 4y agoI have one of these as well (mine is a different but similar model - GL-AR750S-EXT). But I don't travel often enough, I guess. Because every time I go to use it, it's a struggle to get it to work and I typically just give up. Last weekend I stayed at a Hyatt, and the first thing I did when I got to the room was power it up. But I couldn't for the life of me get the captive portal page to load when I was connected through it. It worked fine connected directly to the hotel's wifi, but through the router - nothing. So I gave up. It wasn't worth the hassle.
- dchuk 4y agowhenever that happens, try going to "example.com" in your browser. that will almost always trigger the captive portal. Also, make sure your router dns settings aren't interfering with the captive portal itself (they hijack your dns and redirect you when they haven't had you login before).
- gh02t 4y agoI've noticed "plugging in" seems to be less of a thing anymore and a lot of hotels seem to be wifi only (or perhaps I can't ever find the ethernet jack but I do look). You can still handle this with a travel router but it's a bit more work.
- warrenm 4y agoI either hotspot my phone, or use the [included] hotel wifi+vpn Carrying yet-another-piece-of-equipment is added complexity and confusion I have neither the time nor inclination to deal with
- eric4smith 4y agoAfter traveling around the world I definitely see the cheaper hotel better wifi paradox. Expensive chains require a terms of service to cover the liability of illegal goings on with use of wifi. Cheap hotels don’t really pay too much attention to that and so the wifi is simply a password given at the front desk. To tell you the truth I would require people to have sign a TOS as well if I had a hotel. These businesses are highly regulated and inspected. For cheaper hotels if they get sued they can just sell or walk away from it and still be alive. Back in my home country I gave free wifi to some people in the village. And at some point I had to take it away. So many people started to gather around the front of my house that it became annoying. Some people even started to come into the property. Suffice to say I shut it down soon. Then everyone hated me. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Nothing is free.
- breck 4y ago> Back in my home country I gave free wifi to some people in the village. And at some point I had to take it away. Interesting. Did you consider just setting up free wifi routers across the village so they didn't have to congregate in one place?
- eric4smith 4y agoWhy do so many people never consider the cost of things these days? Would make for a good essay or video.
- warrenm 4y ago>Would make for a good essay or video. they've been made thousands upon thousands of times people don't want to pay for things they've decided they're entitled to
- sokoloff 4y agoI have an open wifi network at my house. I used to have it wide open until I saw a neighbor using a LOT of traffic on a consistent basis. I now have it traffic shaped to a tiny trickle of bandwidth, but enough for a casual passerby to check their email/Facebook, send an iMessage, or get some map data, but nowhere near enough to stream or download anything unless you have extreme patience.
- jabroni_salad 4y agoJust get everyone on the planet to stop committing crimes on other people's wifi, or at least have the decency to use a vpn. I doubt any hotel would really care about passwords if they weren't getting C&Ds from mpaa/riaa.
- scarface74 4y agoWhy wouldn’t a hotel care that their customers are getting worse internet speeds because none customers are using it?
- jabroni_salad 4y agoHotel wifi being a little shitty is already the status quo with good wifi being an exception to the rule. Customer complaints can be resolved with a tactical 'computers man iunno' at the front desk.
- scarface74 4y agoDon’t you think it would be worse if you add non customers?
- warrenm 4y agoWhat makes you think you're entitled to "free WiFi, no passwords"? It's a service the hotel (or restaurant, library, etc) is providing to its customers - not any rando who happens to be within radio distance. Why should you be special and not have to provide some form of authentication that you "belong" there?
- yummypaint 4y agoThis is a situation crafted by ISPs to ensure everyone has to pay them individually. There was a time when wifi was being thought of more like water fountains in US buildings or public roads. People used to intentionally provide free internet access to others on a broad scale, but greed and fear inevitably took over. We could have ubiquitous open wifi if we chose to, and i would argue we are already collectively paying for the necessary hardware. There has been a cultural corrosion of the public space and how it is though about in general. For example, libraries don't have "customers". They are services to the pubic with the mission of providing information access. If any place should have free wifi it's a library.
- warrenm 4y ago>This is a situation crafted by ISPs to ensure everyone has to pay them individually. There was a time when wifi was being thought of more like water fountains in US buildings or public roads. What is this mythical "time" of which you speak? Internet service providers have costs, and pass them along to their customers You can dislike that if you want, but it doesn't change reality You pay for water You pay for gas You pay for what you use - as you should
- warrenm 4y ago>For example, libraries don't have "customers". They are services to the pubic with the mission of providing information access. Libraries call their "customers" "patrons" or "members" Sidebar - your myopic view of libraries as only those which are "public" is telling
- MopMop 4y agoGovernments and technology companies baulk on about providing wifi to undervalued communities across the world in the name of progress and development. Of course Wifi should be free because your taxes paid for the infrastructure, same goes for energy and water utilities, they should also be provided at no cost to ordinary users.
- yummypaint 4y agoIf you find yourself in a position to organize a conference or large gathering, vote with your organization's money and don't book places with abusive wifi policies, even if it isn't completely free. I have seen Marriott hotels extorting groups for $10k+ for internet access at the last second, for instance. If we stop giving these crooks our money the market will sort it out.
- zevon 4y agoFeels like https://freifunk.net/ https://freifunk.net/ deserves a mention in this thread. It's an association in Germany that works on broad, open access to the internet via Wifi (with optional Meshing functionality). They have, among other things, ISP status - so if you provide an open Freifunk Wifi based on their infrastructure, all/most potential legal troubles go through them and not through you.
- juancn 4y agoIt may be illegal, it also opens up security issues if the network is unsecured. I definitely hate the login pop-ups, I'd rather use a username/password using the standard OS prompt.
- supertrope 4y agoI believe monetizing Wi-Fi is the solution. Most cellular traffic is transmitted while indoors in range of a wi-fi access point. If you could pay e.g. Boingo $15/mo to aggregate paid wifi access then it would be well worth it. Ideally the revenue share would encourage nearly every business to offer a roaming SSID, as ubiquitous as credit card acceptance. https://blog.google/technology/area-120/orion-wifi/ https://blog.google/technology/area-120/orion-wifi/
- slater 4y agoHotel manager, chiming in. > If there's any kind of pasword—they're doing it wrong. Dare I ask, why? Everyone and their dog understands that WiFi access usually requires a password. Also, the hotel I manage is in a residential area, and we'd rather NOT have neighbors free-loading off our WiFi.