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One thing that I noticed, is that the more expensive the hotel, the worst is the WiFI. Same applies when I have to pay for WiFI - the more I pay, the worst it i

• maccard 12y ago
  > Whereas 5 star hotels that usually charge $14.95 daily have the worst. The people that stay in these hotels normally aren't paying for the rooms (business trips for instance), so the company will pay the cost of the wifi for the duration of the stay without question
  • dbecker 12y ago
    I used to be a frequent business traveler... and while I didn't mind the charge, poor speed/reliability was enough to avoid a hotel on future visits.
  • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    5 star hotels aren't really for most business travels though. I mean, if you are an exec ya, but usually you just get a 4 star Hilton at best. 5 star hotels are for rich people who won't notice. 5 star resorts usually ding you for lots of things, its how they make money (travelling next week to Thailand, psychologically prepared but at least the internet is free).
    • maccard 12y ago
      > 5 star hotels aren't really for most business travels though. I mean, if you are an exec ya, but usually you just get a 4 star Hilton at best. 5 star hotels are for rich people who won't notice. Ah, I know that. (WEll actually, I don't. Ive never stayed in a 5 star hotel before). but, I was just making the point. > 5 star resorts usually ding you for lots of things, its how they make money (travelling next week to Thailand, psychologically prepared but at least the internet is free). Thailand is fine for that. I stayed there last year, (around this time) for about a month, and stayed in 4 star accomodation most of the time for less than 30 bucks a night (euro) for two people, and we always got breakfast, wifi, and towels. My advice is book one night in a hotel, and go in to the reception and ask how much it is to stay on. You'll normally get 3-400 baht off. Now I want to go back to thailand..
      • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        Good resorts in Thailand are at least $200+ a night, though you can get beachside bungalows in Koh Chang for $40/night.
  • cnst 12y ago
    That kinda depends on the company policy. I'm a systems software engineer; I've had a fly-in interview with Goldman Sachs in NYC in 2010 from grad school (I was cold-called by a third-party recruiter company through LinkedIn or something), Goldman has placed me in Embassy Suites next door to their office -- supposedly, they even own the whole hotel. The internet was 9,95, and I was explicitly told that they won't pay [to their own hotel] for my internet. (The hotel stay itself was billed directly to their account, but internet access was excluded.)
    • fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
      You could panhandle for ten the bucks. OTOH, no company that expects a person to read or send an email, or do any other internet-ish thing can expect their employees to subsidize their business while on a business trip.
      • uncleruckus 12y ago
        My company pays for me to have tethering on my iPhone so I not really supposed to also expense internet at a hotel. Of course this is fine for doing work stuff like email, but when you're in a hotel for 4 days it's nice to have Netflix, which obviously is not ideal on a tethered cell connection.
• dheera 12y ago
  I was once in a Marriott that gave free Wi-Fi to Apple devices and charged all other devices. I didn't know about the Apple deal till a colleague on the same trip told me he was getting it free on his Macbook Pro. Needless to say, I spoofed my MAC address and User Agent and got it free as well. Not sure which one it was actually checking, but probably the latter. Anyway, something to be aware of.
  • DanBC 12y ago
    Good tip but is it sensible to admit to several criminal offences on a public forum?
    • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      IANL, but that probably isn't illegal.
      • DanBC 12y ago
        A hotel says "free wifi for Ape devices. Everyone else has to pay". A hotel guess decides to misprepresen. What device they have. The only reason they misrepresent their device is in order to avoid paying the charge. I'm not a lawyer but that feels pretty clearly like fraud.
    • JadeNB 12y ago
      Surely spoofing the user agent is unobjectionable at worst, and spoofing the MAC address perhaps only mildly discouraged? I can't imagine its actually being illegal (but, then again, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking for unexpected illegalities).
      • DanBC 12y ago
        Well, it depends what the hotel policy is. If it's "free wifi for Apple devices" then there's some kind of fraud happening. The fact that the hotel is incompetent in preventing that fraud by relying on UserAgent seems less important than intent of user when changing UA string.
• saryant 12y ago
  Most of their customers don't care. They're either not price sensitive, expensing it or have some form of status with the hotel so the fee is waived.
  • joezydeco 12y ago
    Business travelers expense it and really don't care about the price.
    • saryant 12y ago
      I would wager most are staying at chains where they hold status and don't have to pay either way.
• pjmlp 12y ago
  Same experience. I can't believe that such high quality hotels have such low standards for internauts. Every time my company schedules a stay in such hotels, I happily downgrade my stay to somewhere else.
  • aragot 12y ago
    Hotel chains are in a far worse situation: I stayed twice in a Novotel and I had to pay for a crap wifi, I'll never cross their path again.
• mpwn 12y ago
  we had this exact convo @ lunch today. The worst is the double charge for "Turbo" bandwidth. No one charges for bathrooms why charge for WiFi the incremental cost per user is less.
  • mkenyon 12y ago
    I understand your point, but I wanted to mention that other countries do charge for bathrooms (even NYC charges for public washrooms), so you can use a better example in the future!
• terhechte 12y ago
  Oftentimes, the reason for this is that those hotels were particularly early in offering their guests internet access but then bought into a draconian external service provider with awful service, high fees, very long contract duration, and slow speed. Usually, when I'm in an expensive hotel with awful (paid) internet, I speak up and they explain this to me. The last hotel where that happened explained to me that management bought into a internet contract in 2005 that will last until 2015 at which point they plan to simply rent their own DSL. But until then they're, by contract, obliged to offer their guests only their contract partners awfully slow internet. Just like in business, small companies / hotels can move faster.
  • joeframbach 12y ago
    Here we see in a smaller scale what a lack of ISP competition does to a region. This is basically what many municipalities bought into in order to afford Comcast's infrastructure 15 years ago.
  • ejr 12y ago
    I can corroborate this. I did a network setup at a B&B that hadn't had any wi-fi since the place got internet. We bumped up their ISP plan to proper business class and got an upgraded router to boot. I ran wire from it to each floor via existing conduit and set up APs. No middle-man slave master for internet and certainly anyone else can service the setup after I was done. No other contract except their ISP. Everyone was happy. A neighbouring place just a few turns away had wireless quite early from some archaic monster and they charge a hefty fee too. I have better reception on my cell when I'm in a low valley than at that place - 2 bars max. All the guests were huddled in the lobby.
    • jonesdc 12y ago
      Hey EJR, I am new to HN so not sure how to message you outside this thread. Do you have any links that could point me in the direction to do some of my own network setup at home? I'm just a beginner but would love to start learning and fix some stuff
• Kittynana 12y ago
  Last time I was in San Jose, I was surprised by how terrible the WiFi was at the hotel I stayed at. You could tell most of the guests were programmers, yet I could barely get 96k. And I specifically asked for a room close to the router. I guess maybe the boom in Silicon Valley means hotels can fill rooms without having competitive WiFi?
  • spydum 12y ago
    Could it simply be higher ratio of bandwidth hungry wireless consumers just saturating their reasonable network?
  • r0m4n0 12y ago
    So true... I've stayed at the fairmont in SF and San Jose, both of which charge $15 for slow internet (unless you opt for the club where they usually bill you anyway and use your information to bombard you with ads). They even charge for the crap gym haha. I tend to steer clear now
    • marincounty 12y ago
      The Fairmont put in wifi in the ninties, and let the dust collect. I worked at that facade. The Swiglets were too cheap to upgrade. RIP dad!
• yeukhon 12y ago
  My experience is the smaller the hotel, be it 3 stars or 5 stars, the wifi is generally better. So population is also a problem. Though you can argue that a big 5 star hotel should provide exceptional service compared to a big 3 star hotel. That's true. But thought I'd throw my 2 cents.
• rahimnathwani 12y ago
  If you're an employee travelling on business, your company might have a per-night budget for hotel accommodation. If your budget is $150, then you can't stay in a $160 hotel. You _can_ probably stay in a $150 hotel which charges $15/night for internet access. You'll expense the hotel (within the budget) and expense the internet access fee (reasonable expense whilst travelling). The hotel gets an additional customer. The employee gets to stay at a slightly more expensive place than the official budget allows. The employer loses. I'm ignoring the speed/latency/packet-loss etc., of course.
• epsylon 12y ago
  They talk about this in one (hilarious) episode of the Jeff & Casey show: http://mollyrocket.com/jacs/jacs_0004_0011.html http://mollyrocket.com/jacs/jacs_0004_0011.html Jeff: Okay, this is weird. I can’t seem to connect. Casey: Oh, okay. Jeff: So, one of the things where you connect and then you have to go to the webpage… Casey: Oh, right, make sure that you pay your $15 a day or… Jeff: Yeah, exactly. I call them downstairs and they’re like, “Yeah, the system that takes the orders for the [inaudible 15:00] was down,” not the internet, the chip where they just want to charge you the bullshit. This was a $400 a night place, mind you. Casey: Right. Jeff: It’s not cheap. Casey: Oh, yeah. This is what I said. This is what I just said on a recent episode of Jeff & Casey… The one with the whale actually, the whales when we were talking about Blackfish… I said the more you pay for your hotel room, the more likely you are to get fucked on the internet. If you pay $50 a night for your hotel room, you get free internet. You get… If you pay… If the cost of your hotel room is less than what you pay per month in internet charges at home, you will get free internet… Jeff: If there are bugs, you get internet. Casey: Right. Yeah. I don’t know how that’s possible but that is the truth.
• netcan 12y ago
  Working even further down the line, free wifi even in tricky locations was the universal standard in hostels 10 years ago.