6 ms·

FWIW I have seen this in practice at other convention centers (not owned by Marriott). We attended a convention (as an exhibitor) this year in MN and had to sp

by coleca 12y ago

FWIW I have seen this in practice at other convention centers (not owned by Marriott). We attended a convention (as an exhibitor) this year in MN and had to spend $10k for 3 days of Internet connectivity over WiFi. Your choices were to pay (this was the cheapest plan, others went much higher), or use your own. If they caught you using your own, they would block you and shut down your booth at the convention. Their rationale/justification was that because WiFi at scale (40k attendees, couple hundred exhibitors) the MiFis and other hotspots are using the bandwidth that the exhibitors have paid (a lot of money) for and caused issues with their demos (which the attendees paid entry fees to see). Convention centers operate in the world of unrealistically high pricing that is rarely seen outside of airport newsstands . For example, they wanted to charge us $3k for renting a 42" TV for 3 days. We ended up just buying a 27" Thunderbolt display and saved a ton (and had a nice monitor to give to one of our devs after the show).

AndyNemmity 12y ago
I work conferences, and this is totally true about unrealistically high pricing. Although I've never seen paid WiFi... there's usually 2 sets, a public Wifi, and a Wifi for internal for demos.
- nanidin 12y ago
  At CES, the company I worked for actually piped wireless signals directly from antenna to antenna with coax cable (or whatever it is that carries the signals from wifi) in order to reduce/eliminate the interference from thousands of other nearby devices.
ansible 12y ago
Their rationale/justification was that because WiFi at scale (40k attendees, couple hundred exhibitors) the MiFis and other hotspots are using the bandwidth that the exhibitors have paid (a lot of money) for and caused issues with their demos (which the attendees paid entry fees to see). These high-end WiFi systems are expensive to install and administer. But that those prices they were charging, they've paid for the system in, like, the first day. Maybe by lunch time. Conference stuff in general is crazy.
jaynos 12y ago
Yup, conventions are the world of $100 to vacuum a 10'X10' space.
dctoedt 12y ago
> the MiFis and other hotspots are using the bandwidth that the exhibitors have paid (a lot of money) for EDITED: In the U.S., all RF bandwidth is administered by the FCC for the benefit of the public. AFAIK, even if there's a "traffic jam" in the local WiFi spectrum, private parties don't get to unilaterally block off the WiFi bandwidth and charge for access. That'd be like a shopping mall's dealing with its Black-Friday traffic jams by setting up toll booths to block the adjoining public highways and charging vehicles to go through. (My original comment referred to cell-service bandwidth, which of course isn't the only problem, as @coleca correctly points out.)
- coleca 12y ago
  I agree with you, but I was talking about the WiFi bandwidth not your 3G/4G bandwidth. There is only so much airspace for all that WiFi traffic when there are tens of thousands of devices using the same spectrum in such a small enclosed area.
  - kd0amg 12y ago
    I was talking about the WiFi bandwidth not your 3G/4G bandwidth Spectrum is spectrum. Convention centers don't own WiFi spectrum any more than they own cell phone spectrum.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Well, that's the downside of using an unlicensed band. Nothing says you can't get a license for a restricted band and set up shop there, then the FCC will help you shut down interlopers instead of smacking you down when you try to do it yourself. Of course, getting the appropriate equipment will be highly troublesome, but so it goes when you want to control what people transmit.
  - dedward 12y ago
    The distinction doesn't mean anything though. In both cases it is up to the FCC to regulate usage, not you, or a hotel, or a conference organizer. It's not their spectrum to manage, and everyone else has just as much right to use it as they do, event or no event. Deliberate interference of the legal use of the airwaves by others is flat out illegal.
mikeash 12y ago
Were they actually jamming the signals? I imagine that a contract that says, "You won't run a hotspot, and if we catch you doing it, we'll kick you out" would be fine. But actually jamming the radio signals would not be.
- coleca 12y ago
  Yes that was in the lengthy contract. They weren't using a radio jammer, but using techniques just like were described in the article. We tried getting our gear setup and couldn't get anything working, even trying to use Internet connection sharing over Wifi between a Macbook and an iPad right next to each other wouldn't work. Until we got a hold of the network engineer for the convention and got him to whitelist our MAC addresses on their own APs. Then all of a sudden all our gear sprang to life. He told us they were looking for rogue APs and were sending frames to their clients to disassociate. If you were an attendee and not an exhibitor you could use the free public WiFi that was available. But we were warned that was far too flaky to use for product demos and would require re-registration every hour. We also had to use commercial grade APs (like Cisco, Aruba, etc.) that could have the signal strength turned way down so it wouldn't bleed too far out of our booth. The WiFi APs at your local Staples don't usually have this option; they only boost the signals, not lower them.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Thanks, that's really interesting, especially the report of how it looked from your end. I imagine if I was staying at a hotel that was doing this, I'd be driven absolutely mad when my stuff didn't work and I couldn't figure out why.
  - dedward 12y ago
    And very likely.. that act of "forcing them to disassociate" would count as interference... and be rather illegal if it went to court. They have no authority to be able to interfere with your use of spectrum, just as you have none to interfere with theirs.
    - 12y ago
dctoedt 12y ago
> If they caught you using your own, they would block you and shut down your booth at the convention. Sounds to me like an unlawful tie-in, in violation of the anti-trust laws.
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  Tell it to the Teamsters...
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    Labor unions have an explicit antitrust exemption.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - chris_mahan 12y ago
      Do like me. Don't go to conferences. Besides, I much prefer spending time with my son reading Asterix the Gaul comic books.
- ewang1 12y ago
  Just get one of those routers with 4G/LTE uplink and then go back to old school ethernet cords.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Get few of them, borrow to neighbouring stands, charging fairly for data usage, sell them after event. Congratulations - you just made few friends, some good karma and flipped off convention organizers, all at the same time.
    - bronson 12y ago
      Given the shitstorm they threw when they caught me carring a small mat to my booth (turns out I need to pay $100 and wait an hour for one of them to carry it), I can imagine what they'd do if they found cables between booths... I don't picture this idea ending well.
Nullabillity 12y ago
> unrealistically high pricing that is rarely seen outside of airport newsstands All the airport newsstands that I've seen have been free.
diltonm 12y ago
I don't think what they did to you guys was legal: "“Consumers who purchase cellular data plans should be able to use them without fear that their personal Internet connection will be blocked by their hotel or conference center,”" http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014/db1003/DOC-329743A1.pdf http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014... http://www.fcc.gov/document/marriott-pay-600k-resolve-wifi-blocking-investigation http://www.fcc.gov/document/marriott-pay-600k-resolve-wifi-b...

by coleca 12y ago

AndyNemmity 12y ago

I work conferences, and this is totally true about unrealistically high pricing. Although I've never seen paid WiFi... there's usually 2 sets, a public Wifi, and a Wifi for internal for demos.

nanidin 12y ago
At CES, the company I worked for actually piped wireless signals directly from antenna to antenna with coax cable (or whatever it is that carries the signals from wifi) in order to reduce/eliminate the interference from thousands of other nearby devices.

ansible 12y ago

Their rationale/justification was that because WiFi at scale (40k attendees, couple hundred exhibitors) the MiFis and other hotspots are using the bandwidth that the exhibitors have paid (a lot of money) for and caused issues with their demos (which the attendees paid entry fees to see). These high-end WiFi systems are expensive to install and administer. But that those prices they were charging, they've paid for the system in, like, the first day. Maybe by lunch time. Conference stuff in general is crazy.

jaynos 12y ago

Yup, conventions are the world of $100 to vacuum a 10'X10' space.

dctoedt 12y ago

> the MiFis and other hotspots are using the bandwidth that the exhibitors have paid (a lot of money) for EDITED: In the U.S., all RF bandwidth is administered by the FCC for the benefit of the public. AFAIK, even if there's a "traffic jam" in the local WiFi spectrum, private parties don't get to unilaterally block off the WiFi bandwidth and charge for access. That'd be like a shopping mall's dealing with its Black-Friday traffic jams by setting up toll booths to block the adjoining public highways and charging vehicles to go through. (My original comment referred to cell-service bandwidth, which of course isn't the only problem, as @coleca correctly points out.)

coleca 12y ago
I agree with you, but I was talking about the WiFi bandwidth not your 3G/4G bandwidth. There is only so much airspace for all that WiFi traffic when there are tens of thousands of devices using the same spectrum in such a small enclosed area.
- kd0amg 12y ago
  I was talking about the WiFi bandwidth not your 3G/4G bandwidth Spectrum is spectrum. Convention centers don't own WiFi spectrum any more than they own cell phone spectrum.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Well, that's the downside of using an unlicensed band. Nothing says you can't get a license for a restricted band and set up shop there, then the FCC will help you shut down interlopers instead of smacking you down when you try to do it yourself. Of course, getting the appropriate equipment will be highly troublesome, but so it goes when you want to control what people transmit.
- dedward 12y ago
  The distinction doesn't mean anything though. In both cases it is up to the FCC to regulate usage, not you, or a hotel, or a conference organizer. It's not their spectrum to manage, and everyone else has just as much right to use it as they do, event or no event. Deliberate interference of the legal use of the airwaves by others is flat out illegal.

mikeash 12y ago

Were they actually jamming the signals? I imagine that a contract that says, "You won't run a hotspot, and if we catch you doing it, we'll kick you out" would be fine. But actually jamming the radio signals would not be.

coleca 12y ago
Yes that was in the lengthy contract. They weren't using a radio jammer, but using techniques just like were described in the article. We tried getting our gear setup and couldn't get anything working, even trying to use Internet connection sharing over Wifi between a Macbook and an iPad right next to each other wouldn't work. Until we got a hold of the network engineer for the convention and got him to whitelist our MAC addresses on their own APs. Then all of a sudden all our gear sprang to life. He told us they were looking for rogue APs and were sending frames to their clients to disassociate. If you were an attendee and not an exhibitor you could use the free public WiFi that was available. But we were warned that was far too flaky to use for product demos and would require re-registration every hour. We also had to use commercial grade APs (like Cisco, Aruba, etc.) that could have the signal strength turned way down so it wouldn't bleed too far out of our booth. The WiFi APs at your local Staples don't usually have this option; they only boost the signals, not lower them.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Thanks, that's really interesting, especially the report of how it looked from your end. I imagine if I was staying at a hotel that was doing this, I'd be driven absolutely mad when my stuff didn't work and I couldn't figure out why.
- dedward 12y ago
  And very likely.. that act of "forcing them to disassociate" would count as interference... and be rather illegal if it went to court. They have no authority to be able to interfere with your use of spectrum, just as you have none to interfere with theirs.
  - 12y ago

dctoedt 12y ago

> If they caught you using your own, they would block you and shut down your booth at the convention. Sounds to me like an unlawful tie-in, in violation of the anti-trust laws.

CamperBob2 12y ago
Tell it to the Teamsters...
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  Labor unions have an explicit antitrust exemption.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - chris_mahan 12y ago
    Do like me. Don't go to conferences. Besides, I much prefer spending time with my son reading Asterix the Gaul comic books.
ewang1 12y ago
Just get one of those routers with 4G/LTE uplink and then go back to old school ethernet cords.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Get few of them, borrow to neighbouring stands, charging fairly for data usage, sell them after event. Congratulations - you just made few friends, some good karma and flipped off convention organizers, all at the same time.
  - bronson 12y ago
    Given the shitstorm they threw when they caught me carring a small mat to my booth (turns out I need to pay $100 and wait an hour for one of them to carry it), I can imagine what they'd do if they found cables between booths... I don't picture this idea ending well.

Nullabillity 12y ago

> unrealistically high pricing that is rarely seen outside of airport newsstands All the airport newsstands that I've seen have been free.

diltonm 12y ago

I don't think what they did to you guys was legal: "“Consumers who purchase cellular data plans should be able to use them without fear that their personal Internet connection will be blocked by their hotel or conference center,”" http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014/db1003/DOC-329743A1.pdf http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2014... http://www.fcc.gov/document/marriott-pay-600k-resolve-wifi-blocking-investigation http://www.fcc.gov/document/marriott-pay-600k-resolve-wifi-b...