If there's any kind of popup modal—they're doing it wrong. If there's any kind of pasword—they're doing it wrong.
If you are a startup that things you are "helping" hotels by helping them monetize their wifi or something, please pivot.
How do we spread the word?
Expensive chains require a terms of service to cover the liability of illegal goings on with use of wifi.
Cheap hotels don’t really pay too much attention to that and so the wifi is simply a password given at the front desk.
To tell you the truth I would require people to have sign a TOS as well if I had a hotel.
These businesses are highly regulated and inspected. For cheaper hotels if they get sued they can just sell or walk away from it and still be alive.
Back in my home country I gave free wifi to some people in the village. And at some point I had to take it away.
So many people started to gather around the front of my house that it became annoying. Some people even started to come into the property. Suffice to say I shut it down soon. Then everyone hated me.
It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Nothing is free.
Interesting. Did you consider just setting up free wifi routers across the village so they didn't have to congregate in one place?
Would make for a good essay or video.
they've been made
thousands upon thousands of times
people don't want to pay for things they've decided they're entitled to
I now have it traffic shaped to a tiny trickle of bandwidth, but enough for a casual passerby to check their email/Facebook, send an iMessage, or get some map data, but nowhere near enough to stream or download anything unless you have extreme patience.
Why don’t they bury this in the terms you agree to when you book the room? Also, what liability can the provider actually incur in this situation? Seems like corporate paranoia.
In high speed trains the wifi might also be stabler than your phone because the system behind the wifi is designed to work with the high speed you are moving at.
This is not something you can rely on however. Take it as a bonus if it works.
and yes its actually surprinsingly enforced. I remember reading an article a few months ago where café's owners had to pay hefty fines for not implementing those "safety" measures.
> It's fairly simple; there is a captive portal where you have to enter your phone number, phone number that ends up being validated by sms.
They have similar requirements in China, and they do exactly the same thing there.
https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...
It’s not a money maker for them, I doubt they care.
Some wifi access points (like the ones from cities) make you create an account though.
(more seriously, they could make it very annoying until you verify, like let you connect for a few minutes only, or at very low speed. Still, yes, and I guess this is a major reason why they don't make people verify their email address)
The persistence of stupid captive portals etc. is an intentional move by the hotel, coffee shop, wherever. Their marketing department values your eyeballs + any data you provide as part of sign up. It's stupid because you're trying to get online, you don't want to experience this friction, but it's a "customer touchpoint" and the venues don't want to lose it.
Source: have built large Wi-Fi networks for 15 years, helped develop Passpoint support on Android, ran large U.S. coffee shop Wi-Fi, ran citywide Wi-Fi in NYC.
The one thing they do have to do is make you accept terms and conditions, and that almost always seems to be the primary driving force on these pages.
There are existing supported technologies which solve all of these issues. You can set up a Passpoint OSU solution, route users through T&Cs once and provision their device with a secure credential for encrypted autoconnection in the future. Or build said sign-in into the venue's mobile app. But that requires consensus from the corporate stakeholders (marketing and legal), who tend to prefer status quo.
There are folks working on these problems, both from wireless industry and venue side, and if anyone is really interested in helping I'd suggest looking into the Wireless Broadband Alliance as well as the Wi-Fi Alliance. Passpoint will eventually kill portals but it's taking forever due to these politics.
As for the user experience, why not just give you a personal generated password when you check in? Then they have the info they need, and you just need to enter the password. Both iOS and Android support auto filling SSID and password through a QR-code and NFC, so that's the best solution I think.
In my experience, a lot of hotels already do this.
The more expensive the hotel, the more likely the customer is business traveler and can expense the cost or won’t be too inconvenienced by add-on charges.
As if my boss would be happy to have another thing to expense, lol no. And guess what, you just kicked other potential customers from your hotel
It's a service the hotel (or restaurant, library, etc) is providing to its customers - not any rando who happens to be within radio distance.
Why should you be special and not have to provide some form of authentication that you "belong" there?
There has been a cultural corrosion of the public space and how it is though about in general. For example, libraries don't have "customers". They are services to the pubic with the mission of providing information access. If any place should have free wifi it's a library.
What is this mythical "time" of which you speak?
Internet service providers have costs, and pass them along to their customers
You can dislike that if you want, but it doesn't change reality
You pay for water
You pay for gas
You pay for what you use - as you should
Libraries call their "customers" "patrons" or "members"
Sidebar - your myopic view of libraries as only those which are "public" is telling
>Of course Wifi should be free because your taxes paid for the infrastructure, same goes for energy and water utilities, they should also be provided at no cost to ordinary users.
My "taxes" didn't pay for any of that - it's all done by private industry
But thanks for playing
And what problem are you trying to solve?
I mostly stay in Hiltons. You just enter your last name and room number and you’re in. It’s even an easy enough process with my Roku stick that I take with me that doesn’t have a browser.
Is there any precedence that a provider of open Wifi is absolved of any responsibility for nefarious activities by end-users when their ToS is agreed to?
Expensive hotels have enough going for them (location usually), that they can afford to nickel and dime you because they know they’ll fill the rooms anyway.
For high end hotels, the customer is much less price sensitive, and is more likely to pay for the wifi without thinking about it. Many customers at high end hotels are also business travelers, who don't care about price because they aren't paying for it.
So, basically you the answer is you can't.
> If there's any kind of pasword—they're doing it wrong.
Dare I ask, why? Everyone and their dog understands that WiFi access usually requires a password. Also, the hotel I manage is in a residential area, and we'd rather NOT have neighbors free-loading off our WiFi.
I have the Gl.inet Slate, and when I get to my hotel each week, I just plug that in, maybe log into its admin interface and deal with the captive portal (not always necessary since I usually stay at Marriotts and it use remembers), and then all my devices connect to that like I’m at home. Super seamless.
I need to go through and setup ad blocking and possibly default VPN/Wireguard connection, just haven’t gotten around to that part yet.
Last weekend I stayed at a Hyatt, and the first thing I did when I got to the room was power it up. But I couldn't for the life of me get the captive portal page to load when I was connected through it. It worked fine connected directly to the hotel's wifi, but through the router - nothing. So I gave up. It wasn't worth the hassle.
Also, make sure your router dns settings aren't interfering with the captive portal itself (they hijack your dns and redirect you when they haven't had you login before).
Carrying yet-another-piece-of-equipment is added complexity and confusion I have neither the time nor inclination to deal with
Not to mention between status (automatically conferred by the right card), base loyalty points and the right cobranded credit cards, I can easily get 15%-25% back for future stays.
AirBNB's customers are the hosts. You, the "guest", are the product.
I doubt regular customers know what a MAC address is.