iPads (and Other Tablets) are Killing Free Hotel Wi-Fi

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The iPad is the issue here? Really?

I managed a large Canadian hotel chains free WiFi service for a number of years and the issue has nothing to do with what devices are being used. The issue that most hotels chains buy the cheapest, slowest 'high speed' connection available and think 1.5mbps will suffice for 300+ users and refuse to upgrade to something faster.
 

joytech22

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Well instead of limiting data, they could shape speeds..
I mean data is no issue, it's not like they are on 500GB plans or anything for the entire building.

Shape the speeds to like 100-200kb/s or something per device. They do the same at my college and I think that holds more people than most hotels.
 

nebun

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these so called hotels need to stop being cheap and upgrade their hardware and bandwidth...room rentals are way to expensive anyway.....wait isn't there a thing called LTE...whe on earth would you want to connect to wifi? my LTE Rezhound constantly gets over 16MBs....show me a free wifi that can even get 1MBs
 

nebun

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[citation][nom]joytech22[/nom]Well instead of limiting data, they could shape speeds..I mean data is no issue, it's not like they are on 500GB plans or anything for the entire building.Shape the speeds to like 100-200kb/s or something per device. They do the same at my college and I think that holds more people than most hotels.[/citation]
really 100-200kbs???? do you live under a rock?...might just well use dial up
 

cadder

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Free WiFi is an amenity and an essential one for hotels to provide. As such they have to consider that in their pricing just like they do water utility cost and electric utility cost. If they start charging for it, people will go elsewhere. I detest paying for WiFi at hotels because some places where I've had to pay for it, the service has been next to worthless. My iPad is 3G so I would rather pay for a whole month of 3G service at its slower speed than paying per day at a hotel, and if I have a choice of several different hotels, I would never choose the one that didn't offer free WiFi.

A normal home internet service is something like $60 a month tops, which is $2 a day, and this service can handle at least 3 wireless devices at a time. So if a hotel can't handle $0.66 per day of cost for a room that will rent for $50-200 a night, then they need to be in a different business. If they start charging, and they will probably want to charge $7.95 to 11.95 per day, then the public will run away from them and force them to go into a different business.

There are isolated markets such as Las Vegas, where all of the hotels charge for WiFi so you just have to pay it. If their market ever declines and a few hotels decide to provide free WiFi then the dam will break and all hotels will have to do it.
 

xx_pemdas_xx

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[citation][nom]hokkdawg[/nom]Nothing wrong with a tiered service - just make the prices reasonable! ($20 for a day pass is ridiculous)[/citation]
And you can't even game with the 20$ sub!
 

Camikazi

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[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]really 100-200kbs???? do you live under a rock?...might just well use dial up[/citation]
You realize that 200kb is still about 10 times faster then dial up yes? Dial up might say 56k but you rarely average near that, it's usually much lower.
 

AMD X6850

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[citation][nom]Camikazi[/nom]You realize that 200kb is still about 10 times faster then dial up yes? Dial up might say 56k but you rarely average near that, it's usually much lower.[/citation]

56k dial up is about 7kb/s (56k = 56 kiloBITS, not kilobytes).
So 200kb/s internet is almost 29x faster than 56k dialup.
 

rhodenator

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some reason my comment doesn't appear to have made it...

so again, for about $150/month a business can get around 150Mb/sec download with about 15Mb/sec upload. Add on top of that bandwidth shaping and QoS. I think there's no justification for any tiered or increase in pricing. Also, mobile devices (ie; cell phones) can already match and beat tablets in Wi-Fi transfer speeds. Hotels are just trying to charge extra for something they see more people using, another way to make more money. Me no likely.
 

alidan

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[citation][nom]cadder[/nom]Free WiFi is an amenity and an essential one for hotels to provide. As such they have to consider that in their pricing just like they do water utility cost and electric utility cost. If they start charging for it, people will go elsewhere. I detest paying for WiFi at hotels because some places where I've had to pay for it, the service has been next to worthless. My iPad is 3G so I would rather pay for a whole month of 3G service at its slower speed than paying per day at a hotel, and if I have a choice of several different hotels, I would never choose the one that didn't offer free WiFi.A normal home internet service is something like $60 a month tops, which is $2 a day, and this service can handle at least 3 wireless devices at a time. So if a hotel can't handle $0.66 per day of cost for a room that will rent for $50-200 a night, then they need to be in a different business. If they start charging, and they will probably want to charge $7.95 to 11.95 per day, then the public will run away from them and force them to go into a different business.There are isolated markets such as Las Vegas, where all of the hotels charge for WiFi so you just have to pay it. If their market ever declines and a few hotels decide to provide free WiFi then the dam will break and all hotels will have to do it.[/citation]

ok, lets assume what, 20 rooms per floor on a 20 floor building, those numbers are low, but sake of discussion.

i pay about 90-100... lets make that 100$ for about a 45mbit down and 5 mbit up. i would say an acceptable internet speed is about 100kb up speed, so divide that up for 5 rooms comes to, about 900kb down and 100kb up. that comes to about 8000$ a month on internet, but im going on buying 80 home lines, most likely you cant do that with a hotel. and again its also not likely that you will get 400 lines that are all decent speed out of the deal.
 
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[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]really 100-200kbs???? do you live under a rock?...might just well use dial up[/citation]
What more do you need while staying at a hotel? It's not like you're going to download HD movies or play online games. For browsing it's enough (except maybe 720p YouTube).
 

slipdisc

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"the iPad consumes four times as much data as does the average smartphone"
Well thats a given considering most people don't bother to tether their smartphones to a motel's wifi access point because they already have cellular data and they will only typically be there for only a short time. Most ipads however, REQUIRE a wifi connection in order to do anything web related.
 

igot1forya

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[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]really 100-200kbs???? do you live under a rock?...might just well use dial up[/citation]
Sadly, this is all I can get from my home internet - not everyone lives on a fiber trunk like you do.
 

shqtth

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Problem that iOS does not use compression on webpages gzip/deflate.

The idiots at Apple forgot to put in this feature, or they did it so cell phone companies can make more money from 10% more data usage?
 

sykozis

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[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]these so called hotels need to stop being cheap and upgrade their hardware and bandwidth...room rentals are way to expensive anyway.....wait isn't there a thing called LTE...whe on earth would you want to connect to wifi? my LTE Rezhound constantly gets over 16MBs....show me a free wifi that can even get 1MBs[/citation]
Not all of us can afford large or unlimited data plans....

[citation][nom]Camikazi[/nom]You realize that 200kb is still about 10 times faster then dial up yes? Dial up might say 56k but you rarely average near that, it's usually much lower.[/citation]
In the US, you'll never reach 56K, as there's a 48K line cap....unless that was removed in the last few years...
 

Cache

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They could just do the easy thing and ban iPads from access on the free system. Sucks to be an Apple user, but if bad apples are spoiling everything else, make them pay for access.
 
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