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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Have used their travel wifi product back when hotel wifi was a strange beast. Wouldn't expect to need it now eSIM and ubiquitous internet travel pricing means the hotel wifi may be the LEAST valid path to access things.

I have a free give-away mikrotik unit in the same price bracket (literally free: they were both conference give-aways) it's physically smaller and it runs what appears to be their mainline code. Say what you like about microtik for quality, they provide pretty much every knob and frob you could want.

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I’m working on a hotel right now. And I’ve gone to great lengths to make the wifi more secure. Everyone on their own VLAN. Separate PPSK for each room. Credentials are randomly generated and not some ridiculous pattern of last name and room number or similar. We built our own custom access control system, with what at the time was the strongest keycards we could find (mifare desfire ev3), I’m really trying to make a hotel who’s security isn’t such a joke.

As long as I can bind more than one device in my room, and as long as I can "see" the devices amongst themselves, I'd love this. I can imagine people who want inter-room access but they can live through proxies offsite. If I want to do in room sharing, I need in room wifi.

Gets hard when you bring "smart" TV's to the table. They're going to need to expose into this system somewhat 'credential-free' but if you do it off MAC address then a determined user could disconnect, find MAC, clone ...

It would still be wiser to tie your own router into the hotel system as a gateway, and keep your own PAN behind that.

I stayed at a clinic once, and all the smart TVs were on the same network.. I wonder what would've happened if I streamed a video from my phone to another room's TV.

Yes we allow in room multiple devices and casting to the room TV. The TVs exist in each rooms separate VLAN.

Inter room communication between group bookings is in the works but it’s complex to say the least.

How do you distribute credentials to residents?

My Macbook is permanently locked out of Cox's hotspot system (used in some U.S. hotels) because the password was given to me on a tiny label which I couldn't read as a blind person except through OCR, and the OCR was wrong a few too many times.

Do macs not spoof their macid (heh) everytime they join a network? I thought android (and windows?) did that already?

They do, by default. You have to override it on a per-network basis to disable this behavior.

We push a QR code to their TV as well as send them an SMS after check in.

What fun is that? It used to be fun to `net send` little notes to strangers in hotels.

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