Awful 'high speed' hotel wifi

[Rainmaker]

We stayed at a Holiday Inn Express after needing to make a short notice overnight stay at the other end of the country. My wife's 19 year old cousin had suddenly died and we attended his funeral.

Anyway the HIE advertise 'free high speed wifi', so although not expecting wonders I took along my MBP for the night time. I'm a night owl and hate sleeping away from home, so I knew I'd be glad of the distraction.

On getting to our room and opening a wifi analyser I was pleased to see there were half a dozen repeaters on channels 1, 6 and 11 and the signal was very strong. Excellent. They were all 2.4GHz but with building penetration being the goal I didn't think anything of it.

Then i connected. Oh dear. Wireless G with 20MHz channel widths, and a connection tx rate of 11Mbps. It then fell to 1Mbps and didn't pick up. Speed tests came back at 0.5Mbps down and 0.6Mbps up. I would never use a shared/public wifi 'naked', so after testing I connected to my VPN which actually improved things slightly (0.x Mbps extra only though).

I noticed at the captive portal login that they offered an 'enhanced' service for £5. A bit miffed at being advertised free 'high speed' wifi and actually having to pay for proper access, I paid the £5. I logged out, then back in, selecting the now-available 'enhanced access' button instead of the 'free wifi' button.

Um... no difference. At all. I even tried the various other repeaters just to be safe, but no joy. Web pages timed out, nothing would load, YouTube was just a big fat 'nope' and... well I went to sleep. I did happen to notice also (more worryingly) that the wifi users weren't segregated from each other. Hell even pfSense lets me do this for free so it should be enabled on a corporate public wifi. Every PC on the network was open to me, and thus mine to them (yay strict pf firewall filtering on my machine).

I emailed the chain owner (HG) and got a reply back that completely ignored the wifi issue. I replied and pressed them, and got a 'Oh, sorry about that we don't know why that's the case. We can give you free points if you sign up for our rewards card and let us share your details with third parties globally' (seriously!).

Rather annoyed at their attitude tbh. It's not like they're cheap either compared to the alternatives. Anyway, I wondered if anyone could shed any light or had more insight?

Their wifi services are run by these guys and their rather meagre spamtastic looking website. I was particularly pleased to see that they advise companies to use their wifi service to 'Harvest Email and contact information for mailshots'.

Unfortunately mobile signal was a no-go (for 4G tethering) and the next day, despite a four hour drive home, I was never so glad to get back to my lovely 160/12 service lol.

 

[Caged]

Not sure why you paid the extra as you had already identified that your speed issues were caused by the environment and not any limitations further up the chain. That RSSI is pretty awful.

 

[Rainmaker]

Not sure why you paid the extra as you had already identified that your speed issues were caused by the environment and not any limitations further up the chain. That RSSI is pretty awful.

Because at 0.5Mbps symmetric I assumed (wrongly) they'd just applied super harsh caps on free users to push the paid upgrade. I only started digging (and taking screenshots for a complaint) when I paid and realised that was just how awful it was, period.

 

[bledd]

Dude, someone died and you're groaning about wifi? Get your priorities straight!

 

[Rainmaker]

Dude, someone died and you're groaning about wifi? Get your priorities straight!

Dude, someone I met for five minutes four years ago died; and since I'd just had two consecutive kidney surgeries and am a crap sleeper it would have been nice to have something to do for nine hours rather than sit in pain staring at the wall in darkness while everyone else slept!

You're usually more helpful. Sand in your vajayjay tonight?

 

[Steveocee]

So a hotel offering a free service restricts it quite heavily so that it doesn't get obliterated? How shocking.

In all honesty, rather than a post visit email to a customer services team, an on site complaint to the manager would probably have gone a bit further. It's all in hind sight though, yes it could have been done a lot better but these companies are giving wifi internet connection away for free, they honestly don't want to sink money into it as it will never be recouped (even though they offer a premium service for £5).

I'd be asking for the £5 back and just keep in mind never to try not to use that chain again.

 

[Spuddy]

Can I ask what VPN you use on your MacBook? And how does it keep you 'safe'?

Im a bit of a network noob but this could be handy for me as I travel a lot using various hotel's wifi.

 

[Rainmaker]

So a hotel offering a free service restricts it quite heavily so that it doesn't get obliterated? How shocking.

In all honesty, rather than a post visit email to a customer services team, an on site complaint to the manager would probably have gone a bit further. It's all in hind sight though, yes it could have been done a lot better but these companies are giving wifi internet connection away for free, they honestly don't want to sink money into it as it will never be recouped (even though they offer a premium service for £5).

I'd be asking for the £5 back and just keep in mind never to try not to use that chain again.

"High speed internet" equalling 0.5 megs is pretty shocking at £100-odd a night, in my book. Paying for 'enhanced' speed and not getting it doubly so. As per the OP I did email them already, and they literally said they didn't know why the speed cap wasn't removed when I paid but the only 'refund' they will offer is points on a loyalty card I don't have, but they will bestow upon me if I reply in writing to agree to them sharing my email and home address/phone etc with 'third parties globally for the purposes of marketing'. Um... no thanks.

As I said I was more curious to hear from anyone with actual experience, especially regards the so called enhanced service as I've been led to believe it should have been magically uncapped. Judging by the stats I don't see how in retrospect.

Can I ask what VPN you use on your MacBook? And how does it keep you 'safe'?

Im a bit of a network noob but this could be handy for me as I travel a lot using various hotel's wifi.

I'm genuinely not being fatuous by linking you to Google here, but THIS will help get you started. There are so many different articles, companies etc I wouldn't want to be accused of leading you on or whatever (especially as I have affiliate accounts with some of them).

Essentially a VPN, even one back home to your own network, grants you security from man in the middle attacks which are fairly rife on public wifi. As you saw from my OP I had access to every PC on the shared network, and that's without even opening some of the very many naughty tools available to capture people's logins, banking details, etc. It provides you an encrypted 'tunnel' through the network once you've connected, meaning the wifi hotspot - and those on it - only see your encrypted tunnel and nothing else. Your real traffic gets routed via the VPN end point, which is either your home network, a VPS or a commercial VPN provider (which has its own extra benefits like anonymity, geo-unblocking etc).

 

[Caged]

Purple Palace Wi-Fi is honestly up there with some of the best hotel Wi-Fi I've ever used. The free service is more than acceptable, and an upgrade to something Netflix-oriented is a fair price.