Hotel Wi-Fi

[deanwebb]

It's not all the same, even at the same chain... Right now, I'm summering in the Hamptons, as in I used my Hilton points from business travel to get deals on Hampton Inns all over the USA. Nice rooms, free breakfasts, good deals.

My experience with their wi-fi, though, has been unusual. At some, my PC struggled to get on. Others, it got on, but with some effort. At this current one (newest hotel of the chain we've been at thus far), it just hopped right on. At the last hotel, my wife's phone had a devil of a time getting Internet, but I was pretty OK with it an my PC.

What really makes me scratch my head is that all the tricks I used since I started the trip - switching from attwifi to hhonors (or vice versa) if one didn't take right away, opening a site in IE if Chrome wasn't responding with a login page, hitting the IP of a site instead of a URL, turning off my local web proxy - weren't needed here in Cincinnati. I went to a web page, immediately got redirected, and that was that. I did not expect that much variety in wireless networks in just the one chain.

[Nerm]

I stay in Hampton Inn's about 90% of the time and have experienced very similar results.

[deanwebb]

Glad to know it's not just me... got two more to go, so the games will continue.

[Dieselboy]

The Hilton I stayed at in Sri Lanka used ubiquiti AP's. They were everywhere, literally. The deployment was so dense that a lot of them were not powered up. I didn't have any issues with connectivity though, except there was something on the network trying to get to a TFTP server and there were a couple AP's on the same channel causing interference and loss. But otherwise, wifi was pretty good there.

Issues like you mention can be a number of things like:
- wpa with aes or wpa2 with tkip
- channels above 11 being used
- multiple APs on the same channel

*captive portal not working correctly due to
- DNS ACL not correct or something up with the initial DNS query from the client, may be a cache from before
- browser issue

I was in Dubai airport and they use a Cisco WLC with captive portal. I couldn't get the captive portal to load and because of that I was not granted internet access. I can't remember what I done but I eventually got it to work with constant playing around for about 5 minutes.

In another scenario I was staying in a hotel on Sunset Boulivard in LA, and the hotel wifi there wasn't free. I managed to load up wireshark and do somethings there and then my pings to 8.8.8.8 started working. Free wifi

[wintermute000]

You guys will be absolutely amazed at how cheap the hotel industry can be with tech. Second only to retail IMO.

They can and will spend gazillions on physical renovations but their IT is usually are bare bones / cheap and nasty as you can get.

I've done entire floors before using linksys and netgears.

I've also got war stories from another one where they were so cheap we had to double jumper two analogue phones to each room (and yeah too cheap for SIP handsets, duh), this would periodically mess up the port and helpdesk would be logging into one every day to bounce random port that was reported faulty, fun times.


TBH unless you're travelling overseas, I fail to see the big dealio with wifi, everyone has HSDPA/LTE and phones that can tether.

[deanwebb]

TBH unless you're travelling overseas, I fail to see the big dealio with wifi, everyone has HSDPA/LTE and phones that can tether.

Except me.

Back to the discussion, I think the failure of a captive portal ACL is the most insidious one, because it's going to work for plenty of clients and then there's like 10% of them where it's WTF? It is an issue for the individual device and then it isn't at the same time... very frustrating.

[Nerm]

You guys will be absolutely amazed at how cheap the hotel industry can be with tech. Second only to retail IMO.

They can and will spend gazillions on physical renovations but their IT is usually are bare bones / cheap and nasty as you can get.

I've done entire floors before using linksys and netgears.

I've also got war stories from another one where they were so cheap we had to double jumper two analogue phones to each room (and yeah too cheap for SIP handsets, duh), this would periodically mess up the port and helpdesk would be logging into one every day to bounce random port that was reported faulty, fun times.


TBH unless you're travelling overseas, I fail to see the big dealio with wifi, everyone has HSDPA/LTE and phones that can tether.

Been there, lived those horrors. The company I used to work for had several hotel clients and they were terrible to do work for because they were so cheap.