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« Comparing Pure VoIP, VoIP over Wi-Fi | Main | Milpitas Network Launches »

December 19, 2006

Spotty Coverage Afflicts Business Travelers

The New York Times builds a story out of anecdotes that rings all too true: There aren't any numbers in this piece about how frequent business travelers find gaining Internet access a hit-and-miss proposition--do 50 percent of travelers surveyed by firm X have trouble in most stays? We don't know. But the stories presented are quite familiar. Although I haven't traveled much in the last couple of years, I've found that regardless of what a hotel promises, the truth is often sketchier. Two of my officemates, who produce book events, spent a couple of hours on the phone in a four-star Manhattan hotel recently trying to get online with the in-room service. They wound up at a Starbucks close by, instead.

It's odd that Wi-Fi is singled out; marginal connections are often an issue, but the problems I see are in authentication and network operation, not in signal strength or physical medium issues. The reporter also claims, "most large hotel chains work with dozens of Internet service providers, some of them small local operations, leading to an inconsistent service experience for guests." That's news to me, but it could be accurate. Hotels that manage their own access, such as chains that offer free service in their budget and medium-range properties, may be turning to local providers instead of building their own operations or working with a national services firm, like arms of Motorola, IBM, or HP, or with an hotspot infrastructure builder like iBahn (mentioned) or Wayport.

3 Comments

This is why I signed up for Verizon's broadband wireless a few months ago. It is just too frustrating always wondering if Wi-Fi Internet access will work.

It's curious how they solved this issue at the MGM Grand hotel in Vegas, where I stayed during this year's DEFCON - they basically placed a D-Link access point under the table in each room, and plugged the existing ethernet cable into it. It could have been a DWL-G700AP or similar, but since it was placed inside a metal casing it was hard to see.

I didn't check if they tuned down power levels to avoid interference, but I could only see 4 or 5 APs from my room, which could confirm this.

Maybe this could be a solution - with prices of APs dropping rapidly, turn each room into a mini-Faraday cage (or knock down the power of the AP), and put one in each room. Everybody happy!

WiFi Internet access have a bad reputation often but this is mainly due course by inexperienced operators and bad choice of equipment.

When it comes to hotspots and hotel internet access the one thing I generally see they all have in common is for most part great signal in the building but they are using poor gateways with no QoS, bandwidth control and virus blocking and this coupled with the use of a DSL circuit or a Cable Internet connection of poor quality or to low speed.

A hotel where you have 10-15 customers that have uncontrolled access to the internet they will literally rip the internet connection to shreds if just one or two of these are either running filesharing applications or are virus infected.

I hold training classes at different hotels and teach routing which means we will be 20-27 "geeks" at the hotel and many times we have no problem sinking the network completely but we tend to play nice and usually I always arrive early and I see minor impact on the network while we are there but a single computer that comes on that is operated by someone less computer skilled (virus infected or where the teen have installed a fileshare app) can kill many networks.

Many hotels are using a company to handle their internal networking and install as well gateway and handle many hotels but they use whatever internet access they can get and tend to avoid expensive T1 services and similar and stick with cheaper DSL and Cable services that are half duplex. That is usually where things fail the connection from the hotel out to the internet due to poor choice of connection to the hotel and uncontrolled traffic on the network.