Brazen Attempts by Hotels to Block Wi-Fi

The hotel industry is pretty fragmented. Most hotel chains are franchises run mainly by independent franchisees. The quality of hotels varies wildly depending on location, even within the same brand/chain. There isn't as much oversight or centralized management as one might think. The hotel industry is also big on low wages, high employee turnover and pushing people in and out of the door as quickly as possible. Proper implementation of wifi is an afterthought. The experience is usually better in 4-star or higher hotels, but those come at a premium.

Wifi's modulation schemes aren't the best for the real-world 2.4GHz spectrum. They work really well in the lab, and mildly well in the real world. Getting rid of Wifi and replacing it with something else could make unlicensed wireless networking more reliable. LTE-U seems like the way forward here, though it seems there are some industry barriers in the way. (If you make LTE chips and sell them all to cell phone carriers, and they tell you they don't like LTE-U, you probably won't be in a hurry to start selling LTE-U chipsets. Pure speculation.)

That said, 5GHz Wifi does pretty well. There is a misconception that 5GHz doesn't go through walls, but that really has no scientific basis (2.4GHz and 5GHz radio signals are pretty much the same; 60GHz doesn't go through walls, but that's an order of magnitude higher frequency). The problem with 5GHz Wifi is that only some channels allow 2.4GHz-equivalent power levels, and access points are really dumb about auto-selecting them. So if you think 5GHz doesn't go through walls, try changing to a high-power channel. 149 is a good one to try, as it's high-power and has adjacent channels to steal for 80MHz 802.11ac. (The low channels are about 20x less powerful than the high channels. That's why people think 5GHz doesn't go through walls. Those low channels don't.)

pCell (if it really works): http://www.cnet.com/news/is-pcell-the-holy-grail-of-wireless...

You tend to find this kind of pricing structure in industries where consumers don't want to pay fair up-front prices. Transportation, Keurigs, video games, phone apps, to some extent wireless cell service. You're forced to provide basic access to your service at rates that don't allow you to make a real profit. So you try to make it up in extras.

Customers mumble and grouse, try to get by on the minimum level of service, but it's really their fault. You don't have to pay the exorbitant extras, when I fly, I find the lowest fare I can find and limit myself to a small bag with the bare essentials. I do my homework. I don't mind it at all because I'm getting a service I want at a lower price, that I might not have been able to afford otherwise.

Capitalism is wonderful.

See also ‘The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem’ by Joel Spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/08.html

[…] When you try to ask complicated questions and explain that your conference has a lot of techies, they say, yes, we understand, we have A-number-1 internet access, no problem very good. When you say, “Yeah, but have you configured your DHCP server so that it has more than the default 254 IP addresses available to hand out,” they have no idea what on earth you’re talking about, and of course it turns out that they had some vendor, a company you’ve never heard of, provide their internet access. And half the time, that vendor installed a DSL line from the local telco and hooked it up to a LinkSys WRT54g they got at Costco, then installed some kind of crappola welcome-screen software just to make it even worse, and then disappeared. […]

Hotel managers aren't plumbers either, yet they seem to handle running water in their rooms without much of a issue. The problem isn't that they are hotel managers per se, the problem is that hotel managers tend to be older and so unable/ unwilling/unaware to adapt to new technology. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the quality of wifi has a strong correlation to hotel manager age for hotels that aren't part of chains.

Chain hotels, on the other hand, can fix this problem through the normal franchise methods: Determine best practices for the entire chain, and then provide standard instructions and help for each franchise.

But as you point out, the IETF and NANOG have openly documented how to set up hotel wifi that doesn't suck. It doesn't take any technical experience whatever to hire a WiFi firm and instruct them to set up a system the same way that the IETF did it.

Thankfully some enterprise equipment (I can only speak of Meraki access points) can detect such attacks. So, you could localize (to a degree) where such an attack was coming from based on the AP locations.

There are two approaches for hotel Wifi.

One is to make a network that's so good people will pay to use it.

The other is to make a network that's average, but intentionally make other networks worse, so that people will pay to use yours.

Since you're reading HN, I imagine your strategy is the first. Hence, you don't see the need to interfere with other users of the spectrum.

Enterprise access points typically look for APs that are not theirs but are using the SSID and send deauths for that. That's an actual legitimate use of deauth. (If you're using encryption, then a rogue AP can't impersonate the real network without knowing the encryption key. But public networks tend to be open for convenience. So some trickery is necessary to provide a little extra safety for users.)

Wifi clients are notoriously awful at roaming. You would think they would prefer the strongest signal, but they seem to select randomly, no doubt depending on driver/firmware versions and bugs. If you've ever used an enterprise WiFi network where roaming works, it's because the APs talk to each other, make a selection as to which AP is best for you to talk to, and then deauth you from the APs that you shouldn't be talking to. So deauths are actually essential to making Wifi work well. The problem in this case is that Marriott is going above and beyond industry best practices and is just trying to kill _everyone_'s Wifi, presumably for their own financial gain. That's a violation of FCC rules, so they're trying to have the rules changed.

Meanwhile, I can just operate my network under Part 97 instead of Part 15 and it would still be illegal for them to intentionally or unintentionally interfere. Though Part 97 Wifi is a bit of a grey area.

Are you implying the hotel market isn't competitive?

I don't know about the US, but I remember a European hotel investor claim that he usually only invested in hotels after they'd been through 3-4 bankruptcies, because it was first then that the price and debt load had dropped enough for the hotel to have a decent shot at becoming profitable.

Those suggestions were just a alternative example of things a hotel could do that would be along the same lines as blocking wifi, where the impact is more extreme but the principle is the same.

I think if any hotel did those things, it would anger people enough to assemble and boycott the hotel. However the wifi thing they can just about get away with from a customer point of view, because you can kind of 'live without' internet in your room for a while, where as phone calls and water maybe not.

Oh and the barrier to entry to run a hotel is high, but the barrier to entry to provide clean and comfortable accommodation at a reasonable price is quite low. Long before AirBNB, holiday lettings of apartments (as I call them you may call it leasing/renting) have been popular. More income to the landlord, and the tenant saves money vs. hotel.