How This Hotel Made Sure Your Wi-Fi Hotspot Sucked

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The message from the Federal Communications Commission is loud and clear: Do not mess with people’s access to the Internet. That's a lesson it's trying to teach the wireless carriers and, it turns out, hotels too.

According to the FCC, Marriott's Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center intentionally used Wi-Fi jamming tactics on its own guests. The interference made it impossible for people to use their own personal hotspots, leaving Marriott's costly Wi-Fi as the only other option. In response to the investigation, the hotel agreed Friday to pay a penalty of $600,000 and promised to stop its signal-blocking activities.

But that's as close as it has come to an apology.

Despite getting caught in this mafia-worthy shakedown and consenting to pay the fine, the hotel doesn't admit any wrongdoing. Instead, it offers this excuse: We're squashing guests' Wi-Fi because we care about our security and theirs.
Where You Can Go And Disconnect

According to the FCC’s filing, the Marriott location's Wi-Fi-blocking activities were discovered last year, when an event attendee noticed the dead zone in the hotel's convention center.

[A] complainant alleged that the Gaylord Opryland was “jamming mobile hotspots so that you can’t use them in the convention space.” Marriott has admitted that one or more of its employees used containment features of a Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland to prevent consumers from connecting to the Internet via their own personal Wi-Fi networks.

CNN reports that Marriott didn't use a typical wireless-signal jammer, which the FCC defines as a radio frequency device that illegally interferes or impedes with "authorized radio communications." The news outlet spoke to a senior FCC official, who said that staffers used the hotel's own Wi-Fi system to interfere and dampen outside signals.

Either way, the result is the same: All Wi-Fi, other than Marriott's own, was blocked. And its fee for access ran up to a hefty sum—as much as a thousand dollars in the conference center.

"It is unacceptable for any hotel to intentionally disable personal hotspots while also charging customers and small businesses high fees to use the hotel's own Wi-Fi network," FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc said in a statement. "This practice puts customers in the untenable position of either paying twice for the same service or forgoing Internet access altogether."

But the old lodging business has seen newcomers like AirBnB enter the fray and connected gadgets chip away at its profits from ancillary services. Our phones, tablets and laptops can now handle things people used to rely on—and pay—hotels to supply.

For all their cash, the Marriotts of the world might be looking at their vast coffers and wondering how much bigger they could've been, if those devices hadn't stepped in to provide an array of services.

Phone calls (of course)
Premium TV: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and even streaming from your own TiVo recordings easily replace on-demand movies and even some premium sporting events.
Room service: It used to be a treat, but now it seems like a relic in the post-Seamless and Eat24 world.
Laundry and dry cleaning pick-up: Washio, Postmates and mobile sites of local cleaners themselves offer pick-up and delivery.
Honor bar: Apps like Instacart can deliver booze to your door—maybe even for a better value than the overpriced tiny bottles in that compact fridge.
And, of course, Internet access.

Thanks to 4G technology and the mobile carriers' push to build out their networks, hotspots have become viable alternatives for hotel Wi-Fi in many areas of the country. They might even be better, if you're in a busy hotel overloaded with hundreds of guests.

That is, assuming the hotel doesn't put a hit out on your hotspot.