Hacker News Reader

Comment by lylebarrere | Hacker News Reader

I wish the FCC could subpoena financial records and to see the price consumers pay for Wi-Fi and the total revenue Wi-Fi sales made for Marriott. I would be willing to bet those numbers would make it harder for Marriott to argue this is anything other than an attempt to gouge captive consumers.

View on HN

Worth pointing out, again, that this is not about charges for in-room wifi, but rather for wifi in larger conference spaces in the hotel.

Which can easily run into thousands of dollars for a weekend, so if an event wants to do, say, live streaming, they do their best to make it impossible for the event to bring its own hotspot and connection.

Do you have a source for that? I read the actual FCC announcement from FCC.gov and it says:

"Marriott employees had used containment features of a Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland to prevent individuals from connecting to the Internet via their own personal Wi-Fi networks, while at the same time charging consumers, small businesses and exhibitors as much as $1,000 per device to access Marriott's Wi-Fi network."

In your room or in the conference center you should be able to use your own Wi-Fi without interference.

Source: http://www.fcc.gov/document/marriott-pay-600k-resolve-wifi-b...

I know many hotel chains have outsourced their wifi handling to third parties, who often gouge the hotels at least as badly as the hotels gouge the customers. So while the Marriott no doubt makes a lot of revenue from wifi I wouldn't be surprised if they make basically no profit.

Then again, those numbers would help in going after those third parties as well.

Marriott's just kicked off a campaign to give free Wi-Fi access to all Marriott Rewards members. Not sayin' it's not a gouge, but there you go.

Marriott Rewards Gold status has already been getting free WiFi for a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com