Anecdotally 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 mote

Anecdotally 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.