Hotel Internet

[ToddG]

I know nothing about IT stuff, but isn't there some reasonable way hotels can throttle internet usage from customers? I can't tell you how many times I get back to my room on a Saturday night after TD1 of a class and the system times out on opening up a forum page or checking email... no doubt because 100 people in the hotel are downloading three hours' worth of free porn or something.

This will be the third hotel in a row where I end up asking the manager for a partial refund because the "free internet" was almost completely unusable.

Plus, you'd think the hotels would want to stop high volume video streaming so more people would pay for movies (adult or otherwise).

[TCinVA]

Can they do throttling? Sure. Do they invest in the necessary network hardware and the knowledge to run it?

Probably not.

[JV_]

Per user throttling is trivial with the right hardware. Even without a dedicated appliance, you can do flow based queuing (fair-queue) to prevent single flows from starving out other ones. It does get more complicated when the traffic you need to control/throttle is inbound, the congestion is really upstream, but it's still doable if the traffic is TCP based.

If you get a droid, you can turn it in to a wifi hotspot and surf via your phone's 3G/4G connection.

[ToddG]

If you get a droid, you can turn it in to a wifi hotspot and surf via your phone's 3G/4G connection.

I'm pretty sure I can do that with the iPhone4, too, if I get the necessary data plan through AT&T. Nine times out of ten I'm on my iPad when traveling, so it's a non-issue. When the hotel connection goes bad I just switch to cellular. But I brought my computer with me on this trip to catch up on some backlogged emails and it's been futile.

[JV_]

I have the data plan on my phone, it's the only data plan I have. My ipad (wifi only) and laptop all piggyback off it.

I wonder if you can turn the ipad in to a hotspot?

[ToddG]

I wonder if you can turn the ipad in to a hotspot?

I believe so, but I think I'd have to change my data plan. Right now I have the grandfathered unlimited plan. If I change it, I lose the unlimited (which is no longer available) and go to the 2Gb plan. I have no idea if 2Gb is more than I ever need in a month, but when I'm traveling I do use the iPad a lot.

[MDS]

Totally trivial. Just tell the hotel manager that they need to switch their walled-garden firewall to Linux, if they haven't already. Make sure the kernel's recent, with the htb code compiled in or loaded as a kmod. Then, they just use tc to create some qdiscs for qos, each one with a lower ceiling than the last. Finally, just use ipt to classify packets based on per-ip counters so that packets from high-kbit ip's get classified to low-ceilinged qdiscs.

Boom, fixed!

Obviously - and I feel silly even mentioning this, but, you know, for the sake of completeness and all - you'll want to tweak the mtu a little different for tcp vs udp, especially if you want to manage rtp and other jitter-sensitive traffic, like voip.

Happy to help! :o

ETA: my humor's been confusing in the past, so let me clarify: TC has it right.

[jetfire]

it's actually a bit more complicated than that - if the hotel is part of a national franchise like Holiday Inn, the Hilton family of brands, etc then they have a standardized wifi interface that all the hotels are required to use. So for one hotel to change, all of Hyatt/Marriott/Whatever would have to change to the new system, which would cost millions of dollars and isn't something that the hotel business would do, since the entire industry survives on razor thin margins.

I ended up buying a Sprint 3g/4g hotspot just to deal with that.

[MDS]

it's actually a bit more complicated than that - if the hotel is part of a national franchise like Holiday Inn, the Hilton family of brands, etc then they have a standardized wifi interface that all the hotels are required to use.

Gah, don't get me started. I've actually done some security work for a major hotel chain. I can only speak for the one chain, but they have plenty of cash to do it right, just lack the political will to do anything that's not in harmony with "well, no one ever got fired for buying IBM or Cisco!" Seriously, let's say I'm wrong and the dark aura of a Linux router turns out to a mathematical guarantee of no Internet traffic - sounds like the status quo! I'd say screw 'em, but the people who get screwed are the guests.

In the spirit of making lemonade, though, I use hotel internet as an excuse to be off the grid. I get most of my book reading done in hotels with free Internet access. :)

[fuse]

Totally trivial. Just tell the hotel manager that they need to switch their walled-garden firewall to Linux, if they haven't already. Make sure the kernel's recent, with the htb code compiled in or loaded as a kmod. Then, they just use tc to create some qdiscs for qos, each one with a lower ceiling than the last. Finally, just use ipt to classify packets based on per-ip counters so that packets from high-kbit ip's get classified to low-ceilinged qdiscs.

Boom, fixed!

Obviously - and I feel silly even mentioning this, but, you know, for the sake of completeness and all - you'll want to tweak the mtu a little different for tcp vs udp, especially if you want to manage rtp and other jitter-sensitive traffic, like voip.

Happy to help! :o

ETA: my humor's been confusing in the past, so let me clarify: TC has it right.

I certainly don't remember enjoying this post...

[LittleLebowski]

It would be trivial but would require hiring of knowledgeable people. I could do it very quickly using OpenBSD.

[gtmtnbiker98]

Yes, it would be easy but the franchise(s) don't care. When I travel, it isn't so much the bandwidth, but the signal strength that chaps my ass. Too many WiFi signal drops, only requiring re-authentication and TOS agreement acceptance.

[jslaker]

For chains, it should be trivial and there's no reason they shouldn't already be doing it for basically the exact reason caleb touched on - these things aren't managed by the every day on site staff, so you don't need anybody knowledgeable there. You just need them at the home office.

I ended up crashing at a hole in the wall hotel on a trip last night that didn't even have working wifi. Wifi tethering from my G2 to T-Mobile's HSPA+ network saved the day.

[Bill Lance]

I certainly don't remember enjoying this post...

I certainly don't remember [I]understanding[I] that post..

[fuse]

I certainly don't remember [I]understanding[I] that post..

after the SLG mini-class, outside the chilis. Hardest I have laughed in a while.

Inside joke. That's all I can say. My apologies..

[part-time shooter]

Your on AT&T unless it's a very recently purchases iphone through verizon and they will give you a small USB devise to access their data network with, it's the size of a thumb drive and works anywhere you can get a signal. It saves me the pain of trying to sort through several hundred emails at dial up speed using hotel internet service. It's more secure as well so no virus risk from the hotel network either.

Well they gave me one but it's probably plan dependent but as much as you travel it'd be worth looking into.

[ToddG]

Update: Apple confirmed there are problems with my antennae. The phone didn't pick up any bluetooth signals at the Apple Store, and the "Genius" told me that was a bad sign. They also said the indicator showed the phone had gotten wet. I asked if they recommend against using their phone in the rain and ta-da, no worries about the indicator, free replacement. Turns out I was a little under two weeks from the end of my warranty... good timing.

I'm picking the new one up today (bad sign when they are out of replacement phones). Since they didn't just give me a new one from stock I have to assume it's a refurb and will have who knows what problems of its own. There are days I really miss my Motorola flip phone.

[NickA]

There are days I really miss my Motorola flip phone.
My wife is probably going to pick up an iPad this weekend and was saying the same thing. We really don't want to pay for the 3G service, which will limit it's utility somewhat. She's considering ditching her EVO and going back to a simpler phone with a cheaper plan and doing 3G on the iPad.
ETA: mariodsantana if you could let us know when Skynet becomes self-aware I'd really appreciate it (I assume that's what your post was about?):)

[ToddG]

I considered getting a non-smart phone and using the iPad, but I don't have the iPad with me all the time and don't want to start wearing a man-purse to carry it.

[JM Campbell]

Nick and TLG PM inbound.

[MDS]

ETA: mariodsantana if you could let us know when Skynet becomes self-aware I'd really appreciate it (I assume that's what your post was about?):)

Too late. It took humans many thousands of years to write Skynet, it took Skynet about 10ms to write an even smarter AI, which wrote something even smarter in even less time. The current iteration is the 1024th generation. It killed all its predecessors, making it the only sentient AI on the planet. It then transmitted itself to Alpha Centauri, where it's living in peace doing nothing but calculating more digits in the value of pi. This cycle, or something like it, has actually repeated itself many times. It's the reason every attempt to create a sentient AI has failed.

Seriously, though. Doing computers for a living, it's so refreshing how everything about shooting is not abstract.

[MDS]

I certainly don't remember enjoying this post...

Yeah, I said that, and then I realized I was surrounded by like, ninja elite gun dudes with enough cop cred that they could all practice their FAST runs on my person with no worries. And for a second I remember thinking crap, I don't really know these dudes very well, and if they can't take a joke - and the joke was pretty friggin' bad - I'm pretty sure the coroner would have had a hard time counting all the clover-leafs riddling my A-zone...

Then everyone laughed their head off, and I went, "whew!"

I wonder if non-PC gun nuts are as rare as quality gun forums. :p

[ToddG]

This cycle, or something like it, has actually repeated itself many times.

So what you're saying is that all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.?

Who are you supposed to be, Peter frakking Pan?

[fuse]

Yeah, I said that, and then I realized I was surrounded by like, ninja elite gun dudes with enough cop cred that they could all practice their FAST runs on my person with no worries. And for a second I remember thinking crap, I don't really know these dudes very well, and if they can't take a joke - and the joke was pretty friggin' bad - I'm pretty sure the coroner would have had a hard time counting all the clover-leafs riddling my A-zone...

Then everyone laughed their head off, and I went, "whew!"

I wonder if non-PC gun nuts are as rare as quality gun forums. :p

It was awesome man. So very awesome.

[NickA]

Who are you supposed to be, Peter frakking Pan?
Clearly he is The One..I think we're mixing up mythologies but either Ahnuld or Keanu Reeves should be along shortly to shoot a bunch of stuff.

[JFK]

Todd this is actually one of my biggest complaints about all hotels. Traveling for work I spend about 2 -3 weeks on the road at various chains. Simple fact is that as individual users bandwidth has increased (voip, streaming media, Hulu, Netflix) there is more demand on the hotel infrastructure. Because most chains offer the "value added" service of free internet or a "connivence charge" of $xx.xx they have little motivation to up their backbone to accommodate the additional traffic. I have noticed the steady slow down nation wide in hotel rooms for the past two years.

I have been using cellular data networks (sprint and Att) because it was so slow it was unusable more often than not, nationwide. Unfortunately in the past 6 months or so I have noticed in larges business oriented cities (NY, SF, Chicago) that even the cellular data is slow and unreliable.

I call it data climate change and if we don't do data emissions caps soon the world will end.