<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by cordelli:
I was in a Doubletree over the weekend and they have changed their little sign about paying $9.95 per 24 hour period for the internet connection to paying $9.95 per PC for each PC you hook up to their room connection.
Don't know if it's real or not, or if they could even tell if you had more then one on the router, but the signs were certainly different. Also not sure if it goes by MAC address or not, so that if I unplug one machine and put another on, will I get charged again?</font>
I think that a lot of confusion over what the policy is regarding more than one MAC address per room is related more to the topology of the hotel's network, rather than a desire to gouge for more than one computer in a room.
What I mean is that I can imagine a situation where a hotel is wired with the wiring from each room going to regular hubs on each floor, which eventually lead to a central router than handles the DCHP issues, billing , etc. If this is the case, then the router would have no way of knowing which room a particular computer is in, other than what's provided during the login/billing screen. Once that's entered, the MAC address would be the only way for it to associate future traffic with that same session. If a new MAC address appears on the network, the router would have no way of knowing that it was coming from the same room.
An alternative configuration would be to have wiring for each room go directly into a smart router that handled all of the DHCP/billing issues. In this case, there would have to be one for each floor, unless an individual wire was run from each room to a central location.
I have no idea how these things are typically set up, but I think that my first scenario above would be used quite a bit, and would explain the single MAC address policy.