Sixth Freedom

Every time I visit a hotel it seems to take an age to access the billing page for web access. Why is this and is there a way round it? Many thanks in advance.

Sixth Freedom

BUMP!

If it helps, I use a Mac Book Pro with Safari.

ScottC

What kind of "Way around it"? If the page is slow, the page is slow. And nothing you do will speed it up.

The only other way around it, is to bring your Internet. Use a MiFi or other 4G device, and you won't need to deal with slow hotel WiFi again.

Only other options would be to clear your cache and hope it was something odd on your computer.

bitburgr

And I would believe that if the billing page is slow, the "rest of the internet" will be slow, too.
Great advice if it's an option for you.

gfunkdave

Could just be that whatever server is hosting the billing page/handling the billing infrastructure is overtaxed. Perhaps several hotels use the same one. Perhaps it's not ideally configured or hosted. If it's slow and the internet in general isn't once you get on, then perhaps you just bring a wifi router so you only need to sign up once, and then you can forget about it.

emrdoc

That's not necessarily true.

HDQDD

Ahhh, the "captive portal" (industry term for redirecting traffic to a page that you have to authorize thru). I too have noticed that most hotel captive portals are overworked. I suspect that's because they're running on top of a hotel router/firewall which isn't really designed to handle a bunch of simultaneous web requests. In a perfect World it would run on a proper web server that was designed for that load...

You would be wrong. Once you're past the captive portal than the speed is regulated by the size of the pipe(s).

gfunkdave

There are no pipes. It's a series of tubes!

bitburgr

Then I have really bad luck at just about every Marriott.

But I understand what you are saying.

Sopwith

Remember they used to teach you in school that elections move at the speed of light? The internet has proven beyond any doubt that it's not true!

Need

I usually have a different problem. Once it gets to the page it would load fast, but the problem is that it won't redirect to the page. If I just connect to the WiFi, sometime it would open my browser to the billing page and it would be fine. But most of the time I would have to open up the browser and nothing would load. If I try to go to yahoo or google, it may or may not load the billing page. That's on a windows laptop. It is usually much easier on an iPad where it will ask you to go to the Sign-In page as soon as you are connected to the WiFi.

And being the "man" of the house, I have to repeat the above process for my wife's ipad, iphone, laptop, my son's ipad, laptop.. and if the sign in page does not have multiple days.. I have to do this every day for the week long vacation....

BobbySteel

Wirelessly posted (Blackberry8700c: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; HTC6525LVW Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.117 Mobile Safari/537.36)

Generally they do some sort of dns level redirect to forward you to their page. So a slow server handling dns forwards as well as the page serving probably is the root cause. The dns forward alone is likely a primary source of that latency.

ScottC

Thing is, most of the hardware at the hotel is designed to talk to an authentication server somewhere else. And this means that a brand like Marriott might have 2500 routers all trying to communicate to a Radius server 1000's of miles away, not designed to cope with all of these requests. Also, their billing backend is probably not designed for this either. As I said earlier, there is no way around it. Thankfully, once authenticated, you don't need to deal with this bottleneck any more.

HDQDD

Most hotels I stay at (Marriott and Hilton properties) I usually get around 2-3Mbps. At Marriott they have the "faster" connection option that you can pay for (or free for elites), but in my experience, it's just as fast (slow) as the normal connection.

What really scares me about hotel internet is that they redirect all your traffic through shady third parties (like superclick) who I'm pretty sure use it to collect and sell marketing data on hotel guests. This is why I tunnel all my traffic to/from my home VPN.

I couldn't find much online, but here is an article the briefly mentions superclick:

http://www.sans.edu/research/securit...rclick-privacy

HDQDD

I've seen that on occasion too. Also I notice some hotels seem to take a really long time to issue DHCP IP Addresses. In some cases, I've had to wait minutes...