Monday, February 27, 2006

Double dipping for broadband

I haven’t experienced this one personally, but I know people who have. Two people check into a hotel room—husband and wife, business colleagues sharing a room, whatever—and each has his or her own laptop. One jacks in, signs up for the $9.95-per-day service, does his work, logs off. Then the second person jacks in and is asked to pay again. Each computer has a different MAC address and the hotel—many of which would charge for each flush of the toilet if they could—takes advantage of that to get double broadband fees for one room.

Dan Gillmor writes about this and notes that savvy Macintosh users can network their Macs to share a connection. As for me, I carry an Airport Express, the Apple WiFi device that’s about the size of a wallet. I’ve probably provided wireless broadband to a dozen or so people in rooms near mine. It works with a Mac or a Windows machine, given that the WiFi specification is a standard.

Hat tip to Geek News Central.

Posted by Shel in • Hotels
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  1. How about getting double broadband fees for the same person? This happened to me in Billings, MT a couple of years ago. I had to give two presentations on the same day in two different conference rooms.

    Now, I had free broadband access in my room upstairs but, “so sorry, our conference rooms are handled by an outside vendor and we’re not responsible for them.” Excuse me but when I looked the conference rooms were still physically located in the hotel...but I degress.

    So I call up the service vendor who happens to be located in California, btw (I started getting this small pain in the pit of my stomach) and talked to three people, up to the highest supervisor I could reach on that phone call. I was assured that not only would I only be charged one, outragous fee, but that the system would recognize me when I logged in the second time from a another room. (You just KNOW where this is going don’t you?)

    First presentation goes off without a hitch. Then I head uptairs for the big presentation at the conclusion of a formal dinner where I was one of reasons the guests had been invited and wined and dined. I set up during the cocktail hour and...wait for it, wait for it...no connection!

    I call the vendor’s technical support number only to find that the lone rep is on his way home because IT’S AFTER 5:00 AND THE COMPANY IS CLOSED FOR THE DAY! (This was a Wednesday, btw) He does agree to stay and try to troubleshoot the problem with the hotel tech person on call. (At least one person in that miserable company understood the term customer service)

    Alas, all the kings horses and all the kings men could figure out what the problem was and the shortest path around the problem was to have my credit card hit again. Which added insult to injury when, after successfully debiting the amount, it STILL DIDN’T WORK.

    The ever helpful hotel staff at this point had a brilliant suggestion - let’s pack up the entire dinner and move it four stories downstairs to another conference room. Of course it would have taken at least an hour to transport the dinner and guests, our hosts were hardly jumping up and down with joy over the prospect of an hour delay in their program and, of course, I would have had to pay a THIRD TIME to get high speed internet access...assuming it would have worked.

    Shades of the Ridpath! <shudder>

    Craig Jolley  on  02/28  at  07:25 AM

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