To whomever commented that Disney knows the value of keeping people happy so they provide free wifi(although they charge for everything else)…. WRONG! Maybe in DisneyLAND, but in DisneyWORLD, there was no connectivity at all! Not even a pay per night connection. I had to tether up the bb for the entire week. For what you pay there, they should provide you with the connection and a loaner thinkpad for your time there!

Hi!
Just a comment about FREE wifi in hotels south of France.
As a consequence of a 2006 antiterrorism law that passed in France, all hotspots, including hotels, have to file the wifi clients and keep the connexion logs for two years. The cost of the hardware and software ranges from 1500 and 3000 USD.
Those who offer the wifi for free are certainly not law abiding hotels!

oh yes and if it needs to be said at our local motel it’s FREE WiFi FREE coffee free lids. despite the extra cost to motels I think charging an additional fee is unreasonable. that’s my opinion. my point is to be nice to your front desk people and that those hotels that offer free WiFi –it’s not as easy to offer as some might think. the good motels want your business and are trying very hard to get it.

as far as wireless security–get real. I don’t know about how it is elsewhere but we are talking wireless OPEN hotspots in most hotels I’ve been to that are at best password protected through the browser. often there is a wlan hard line in the lobby which is better, but still. an open hotspot whether in a coffee shop or motel is never ‘secure’.

It’s also possible that some masked do-gooder has hooked up their personal router to their paid-for room internet connection to provide some personal or public wifi access. If it wasn’t explicitly stated by the hotel desk, I might be a little cautious about using such access points. They could also be honeypots setup by unscrupulous hotel guests, which could be used for anything from simply tallying how many people would blindly connect to an open wifi spot to network and password sniffing.

One thing I’ve found as well on HSDPA is that the speed can be significantsly affected by your location and likely number of other users. I work sometimes in our office in Edinburgh and the network is pretty zippy but slows to a crawl between 12 and 2pm, I assume when there’a a lot of people doing some social surfing on their lunchbreak.

In another office, which is a bit more remote and in a less densely populated area, I get superb responsiveness and surfing speeds all day long.

I work in a quality inn. yes it’s a problem. first we have to understand that most individual motel are independently and locally owned. there is often an extreme resistance to add amenities unless the national brand requires it or area competition mandates it. then in some cases there is a generational gap in that older folks tend to change more slowly. ten years ago internet access was not so important. then there are support problems. guests are going to automatically assume that the low paid 8to 9 dollar an hour front desk clerk be a computer expert along with being a travel agent a secretary a weatherman a bellhop security a bookkeeper–a WiFi trouble shooter. maintenancecancan’t fix it when it breaks. our local hotel here I’m proud to say has WiFi. there are several rooms that are blacked because routers just got old. 2 years old and the motel has to have everything redone because the tech we purchased before is obsolete. and let’s face it small family owned businesses in this economy are cutting back. also realize that small businesses are quicker to change than the corporate models. its all singing to the choir to me. WiFi is more important to many of us than TV. at the quality inn where I work we are tag having it done–yes and finally lids for the coffee in the lobby too.

I guess I dont see the value in buying hotel wifi.. I use my verizon aircard and as much as I travel I would spend more on the motel wifi than i do on my aircard service each month. For 99.9% of what I do it is more than fast enough. And I dont have to screw with the weird speed changes and web logins that many hotels have.. too much trouble for very little gain.

I thought I would respond to this from the hotel perspective of things. My situation is unique since I’m in the wilds of Yukon, Canada, but from what I know, most hotels are older buildings. It’s been a pain to install wireless networks into our two hotels, and since we don’t have an IT department, it gets expensive too to pay another company to do it.

The other danger for hotels is bandwidth usage. Cafes can get away offering free net usage because most people are there only for a coffee or two. Hotels have to worry about 100+ internet connections leeching overnight on bit torrent. On a poorly designed network, those costs can sky rocket.

It’s not enough to tell hotels to install wireless networks because they’ll try to throw some consumer model wireless routers up to say “we have wireless internet”. Rather, the tech community should go help these hotels create the networks cheaply, securely, and put in safe-guards to help protect them from bandwidth pirates.

The Harbor Court hotel on Steurart Street has free Wi-Fi & a free cocktail hour!

I recently stayed at a hotel where I paid iirc 10 pounds/five nights for in-room wifi. The speed sucked, to put it mildly. Then on my next stop, the wifi in the hotel was super-speedy, but only in the lobby, and the wired Internet in the rooms was also super-speedy. Both were free. I was wishing I had packed my travel router in the last one, though.