Starwood Hotels monitors your net traffic
VoIP Watch: Starwood Hotels LodgeNet ISP monitors net traffic, and if it doesn’t like what it sees, it throtles the speed down to 56K (i.e you get to pay $15.00 for dial up).
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I wish more wi-fi providers would do this.
I had a similar thing happen to me at a Crowne Plaza Hotel.
On my Mac PB17 I use Safari and have a single bookmark that opens up approx 15-20 tabs at once for a presentation I give. When prepping for the session I clicked on the bookmark to pre-load all the sites. Within a minute I lost my internet connection. I checkced the Wifi settings, everything looked good. I could ping the router but couldn’t ping outside the network. Must be ‘their’ issue? Perhaps a Wifi issue? I switched over to Ethernet and the same thing, no outside access.
Next step is to try my other Mac and it works no problem. Now I think that it’s a problem with my PB17. For the rest of my stay at that property my PB17 would not access the internet while my other machine worked fine. The next morning I stopped at a Panera Bread and was able to get online fine with my PB17.
I find out after I left that they had blocked my PB17 by it’s MAC address after that initial burst of traffic. I guess I was a resource hog :-)
The future looks bright for MAC spoofing. In the world of high tech, it is always easier to be the “criminal” than the “cop.”