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I had heard the explanation at one point that pricey hotels were the first to adopt wi-fi systems and locked themselves into expensive long-term contracts, so t
by mbg721 3y ago
I had heard the explanation at one point that pricey hotels were the first to adopt wi-fi systems and locked themselves into expensive long-term contracts, so they were still trying to recoup the costs even as the tech got cheaper and more widespread. I guess it's been long enough now that that wasn't the real reason.
- myself248 3y agoAnecdotally having been on the road at the time, there didn't seem to be a correlation between price and whether they had it or not. And often the 1½-star motel would just have a single AP in the office serving the whole horseshoe of rooms directly, while the big fancy hotel would need several APs per floor which made it a vastly more expensive and complicated deployment. If the cheap one was acting weird, the desk clerk could just power cycle it and most issues were resolved moments after one phone call. But everybody at the big hotels was afraid to touch it (probably had been instructed not to), and resolving problems took hours or days.
- mcculley 3y agoWi-Fi and Internet access in general killed off an enormous revenue source for hotels: pay-per-view porn. They were very motivated to find new ways to get that revenue back.