Why Do Expensive Hotels Charge for Wifi?

It would be very interesting to see an analysis of internet connection quality at hotels with paid vs. free wifi. In my anecdotal experience, the paid wifi has often been worse. To be fair, paid wifi seems most often to be present at hotels hosting conferences, and the conferences do bring quite a few users... but if we listen to this argument, isn't that the situation that we are paying to prevent?

There's also a budgeting issue. A hotel spending hundreds of thousands of dollars installing wifi is going to want to recoup that cost directly instead of assigning it to overhead, and once they start collecting fees the revenue is hard to give up. A hostel can just add a $50 consumer router to their existing internet connection.

It is because their main customer is there on business, and their company, not themselves is picking up the tab. And if the company is picking up the tab, there is absolutely no reluctance to get the wifi.

And the companies don't care, because the employee needs the wifi to work, so $15 or whatever it is, is a small price to pay for being able to have the employee work remotely, which a decade ago was all but impossible.

When I was a kid, I went with my dad to union conventions, where the union would always put us in the nicest hotel. I'm sure it broke my parents' cheapskate hearts that there was never free breakfast, so we always went to a McDonald's or something nearby every morning.

For example, failure to provise to benchmark. For example, no real statistics or survey. For example, not everyone cares about internet. For example, paid internet is usually not really good...