Originally Posted by
mrfussion
I have a VoIP phone I occasionally take with me when traveling. I did it more years ago when international cell phone rates were silly, but there are still times I need more functionality than a cell phone can provide for work calls. The phone does not allow you to go out to a website to authenticate. Most upscale hotels have an engineer onsite who will come up and add the MAC address to their system for the length of the stay. This way it stays connected and I do not need reauthenticate repeatedly. In a few instances there will be no engineer onsite and it has to be done via telephone with the company who manages the hotel internet. When they see the phone they understand that there is no work around. Would they do it because you simply don't want to re-login on your laptop, I have no idea ...
Hyatt did this for my daughter's Nintendo Switch several years ago; it could not do the captive portal auth so it was stuck. I just called the help line and they allowed that MAC for the duration of the stay. That's why I had mention that in the first post; I know I could call and ask, but I don't like hassling them about it, especially when it's a bunch of devices. Sounds like not a good technical solution other than a wireless router and then just one device has to auth it each 24 hours and all the other devices will keep on working.
Not sure of your phone vendor, but I had to do that once long ago with a Cisco phone model when I knew I needed the conference abilities while on the road. I've since moved to their Jabber-based software phone which is able to talk to my employer's network via Cisco's Expressway VPN, which the soft and hard phones use. There may be a similar software solution you could use to avoid that hassle of carrying the hard phone if you're still doing that. Audio quality remains great too.