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

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.

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.

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

really 100-200kbs???? do you live under a rock?...might just well use dial up

I think the point of this was that unlimited use wifi is being hogged by Ipad

Nothing wrong with a tiered service - just make the prices reasonable! ($20 for a day pass is ridiculous)

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.

And you can't even game with the 20$ sub!

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

"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.

Sadly, this is all I can get from my home internet - not everyone lives on a fiber trunk like you do.

It's not the tablets, it's the smartphones.

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?

Not all of us can afford large or unlimited data plans....



In the US, you'll never reach 56K, as there's a 48K line cap....unless that was removed in the last few years...

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.

IPADS & the Internet in General has killed more than just Free Wifi.
Lots of Retail Stores have died or are dying and right in your town.
How many empty Storefronts do you see ?

All I do with a tablet is browse or Facebook or maybe youtube 480p. Whereas with a real computer its more like 10GB steam games or 1080p streaming

So basically they are complaining that people using their "Free" service is ruining it for everyone.

They may market it as a free service but it is not by any means Free, It is included in room fee.

kb = kilobit
KB = kilobyte

kbps or kb/s or Kbps or Kb/s = kilobits per second
KBps or KB/s = kilobytes per second

1(one) kilobyte = 8(eight) kilobits

So if you take the full 56kb/s of a 56K modem that would equal 7KB/s.

Wire speeds and transmission speeds for digital communication are almost always listed using bps or b/s (bits per second). The data storage industry typically uses Bytes to reference the amount of data something can store. However, many popular OS's, web browsers, and download managers will show you the download speed using Bytes per second (KBps) instead of the network transfer rate which would normally use bits per second (Kbps). The reason for this is because people see and expect that they are downloading a file of a given size and that file is measured using Bytes and not Bits. Most people know what the Kilo, Mega, and Giga means, but they would get lost when trying to figure the conversion for Bit to Bytes as well. So if you download a 100MB file using a 56K modem at max speed it will show you that the file is being saved at a rate of about 7KBps and it will take about 3 hours 58 minutes and 6 seconds to complete the download.

So anyways, the point is that 200kb/s is only about 4 times faster than dialup (56kb/s). This obviously is still far better than dialup which is usually also prone to added latency from packet loss caused by numerous external sources.

Also, not sure what Alidan was getting at. With a 45M down/5M up connection a hotel could run 100 devices at 450Kbps down/50Kbps up. Now this is also assuming that they would all be running at that max speed all the time. Since this doesn't happen, you could easily support 200+ devices by limiting the per device transmission rate to 5Mbps down/384Kbps up under most normal conditions. Of course you probably wouldn't even need the limit in a lot of cases. It would only be necessary to keep the few that would abuse it and use all the bandwidth they can the entire time and ruin it for others.

i devices are hogging bandwidth, just charge them per 100mb's fees similar to the pay per view movie fees.
would like this to be a major uproar to the point it puts features into devices that remove ads esp video ads instead of having to install 3rd party software there should be a button to disable ads just like pop ups and telemarketer prohibitions to cell phone users.

connections have gotten a lot faster over the years. They can spend close to $1000 a month for a 1000mbit up/down connection which is more than enough for a hotel.

the reason why hotel internet sucks is because most hotels are run by people who understand very little about technology.

just like with consumer internet your pricing will rarely be updated to market value. Thus their dual T1 connection (3mbit/s up and down) will be shared by all customers and cost more than a gigabjt fiber connection.

(just like how you get the Verizon DSL customer with 768k download and 256k upload that is paying $60 a month because they never redid their internet package from when they originally signed up in 1998)

What kind of Hotels are we talking about here? Because as someone whos in a family of hotel owners, I've NEVER heard about such complaints. I guess what I'm trying to say is the one "opinion", aka Garrison's, in this article is not really a concern for hotel owners. In comparison, paying extra for the next tier is a minor expense.

Today, when even the cheapest Wi-fi routers feature advanced bandwidth management for at least 20-30 heavy downloader clients at a time, I fail to see what the hotels' problem is. If the total internet bandwidth is divided equally, then iPads and "other smartphones" will get the same internet speed. Only iPad users will suffer, if they really do need 4-times more bandwidth than smartphone users.
Cost? Let's say that a hotel room costs 100$/24h, so how much does the Internet connection cost, if the owner is complaining about free Wi-fi? 10-20 dollars/day?
Something is terribly wrong with the internet infrastructure, if rational people start saying things like David W. Garrison did.

Wanted to also add that proper QOS can solve most saturation issues.

my aunt runs a pizza/ coffee shop and offers free wifi to customers (to keep the signal from spilling out too much, I set up downward facing parabolic antennas above the ceiling.

During times of restivities/ any events that gets many people outside, I showed her how to go about switching to cable "B" (2 sets of wires, 1 set goes to the antennas in the ceiling and the other goes to 2 9dbi antennas positioned for max coverage) (the ssid always advertises the shop)

Doing this causes more people to crowd around the shop which increases business.

During a good day with the expanded coverage, you can have nearly 60 people on the wifi at any given time (especially since the connection can be used by some near by apartments). The total connection speed is 20mbit/s down and 20mbit/s up.

The QOS shapes the upload and provides certain hard limits on downloads. To avoid using the more CPU intensive l7 filters than needed, more basic filters are applied. Port 80 and 443 have 2 stages of filters, smaller transfers under 500KB have full speed
transfers above 500KB are limited to 1.5mbit/s

L7 skype and other voip services have a higher priority than web traffic.

l7 for flash and other streaming content is limited to 10mbit/s up/down

p2p traffic while not blocked, is limited to a global 1mbit/s (allowing it to still work but it can quickly become useless for anything more than tiny files if many people try to use it at once)

The whole wireless network has a rate limit of 17mbit/s up and down (the extra padding prevents bandwidth saturation that causes pings to skyrocket so even when the network is seemingly packed, ping times are still in the 5-10ms range and web traffic is still very responsive.

The router housing all of the QOS rules is behind another router which is the main router that has it's own QOS. There are 2 routers behind the main router, this allows for both a public network and a private network where people on the public network cant monitor data on the pricate network. Since both secondary routers are connected WAN to LAN, each router gets a DHCP address assigned to it. The main router has a very basic QOS where the public router has an overall low priority and the router for the private network is excluded from all bandwidth shaping so if a worker decided to do something bandwidth intensive, it will quickly take bandwidth from the public network.


this is a simple public -private network that a hotel can implement and provide customers with "free" access that wont slow to a crawl when a ton of ipad users are on it.

Actually dialup modems used 10 bits per byte (start and stop bit) so a 56k modem would get 5.6KB/s in theory. They usually only connected between 36k and 48k tops with 44k being most common iirc. So you're nearly doubling the average speed of a dialup modem with your math.

As soon as I saw the provider (iBahn) I can speak from experience that the "advertised" high speed bandwidth is closer to dial-up. Running the speakeasy bandwidth test routinely gets me results in the 50kbs range (when it even responds).

Unless a bunch of the guests are doing major downloads or streaming high def video, there is a major lack of available bandwidth.

wow...so much hate....this article should say....Apple is taking over ....love it or hate it, it's happening