What is it with Marriotts and their wireless setups?

I had a terrible experience with the Marriott LAX in Sep (see last para of my trip report http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum81/HTML/004064.html for gory details if you want -- in essence, my 28.8k modem was about 3 times faster than their supposd broadband.)

Last night, I was at the Marriott Bristol City Centre, and their setup is even worse: There's supposed to be free wireless on the Terrace level, but if you attempt to use it, it takes you to a sign-up screen to pay for it. If you try to continue and pay, it fails (if using a standards-compliant browser) because of them using faulty javascript. If you use IE, the faulty code works ... to the extent that it attempts to go to the next screen and times out with a DNS error!

If it did actually work, it would no doubt work badly. Not only was there the publicly accessible STSN network, but also 2 other networks running WEP. This wouldn't be a problem usually, if it weren't for all 3 networks running on the same channel!!
(And I'm fairly certain they were all in the same area, not from outside the hotel.)

What is it with these morons? They could put a couple of access points in for US$100, pay for broadband and have tiny costs, offering it free. Instead, they are no doubt paying a fortune for servers that are supposed to accept payment, yet don't work and for the IT people who are setting things up badly.

10 times the costs, in order to provide a means for payments to be made, is just stupid. Moreso when the people setting up the systems clearly are out of their depth.