The New York Times ran a story two days ago, also picked up by Glenn Fleishman over at WiFi Net News, about how hard it is sometimes to get connected at hotels over their WiFi networks. Some travelers even report a failure rate of 50%, in comparison with 5% in wired connections. Support is usually directed to a hotline run by the hotspot operator, which results in a rather frustrating experience.
I have also seen it all, hotels with only WiFi in the lobby and wired connections in the rooms (Hotel Fox, in Copenhagen), others with very spotty coverage that reached only certain rooms, getting connected to another hotel’s WiFi across the street, then realizing it was free and only asked for a room number and surname, while your own hotel charged you a fortune, and so on.
My best experience was during DEFCON 14 in Las Vegas, where we stayed in the MGM Grand hotel. These guys went over the top, and installed an AP in every single room!. It was bolted underneath the table, inside a metal case, and the deprecated Ethernet cable was connected to it. A quick scan revealed that I could only see about 4 or 5 networks from my room, and only two with a half-decent signal, which makes me believe they turned down the power of the APs so as to avoid interference problems.
Wouldn’t it be great if with falling hardware costs, other hotels would do the same thing? To avoid interference between rooms, apart from channel variations, one could either turn each room into miniature Faraday cages, or turn down the power of the AP to a minimum.