Which London hotels do not require a password for wifi?
 

I'm trying to identify which London hotels do not require a password for wifi. Most require a name and room number or honors code. This works fine for my personal laptop, but not my work laptop and I'm planning to work for a week. I recall a few don't. Doubletree Riverside, perhaps?

I think my alternatives are working off a mobile hotspot from my phone and can get a UK sim to do this. I know this not a tech forum, but if people have other ideas, I'd be v grateful. Thanks.

Why doesn't it work for your work laptop?

The work laptop has additional security that's not compatible with what I understand are called 'challenge screens', ie where you enter details or a code.

Radisson Edwardian hotels in London offer registration free wifi, which works fine and I might book there. But I recall staying at one or two London Hiltons before and where I noticed there was no password and thought that that could come in handy. But now can't remember, which ones...

Also consider buying one of those cheap portable routers (I like the GL-iNet devices, have several- take a look at the "Travel Technology" forum, too). That way you have the router associate to the hotel's WiFi, then on your personal device (laptop, phone, iPad) you connect to your router, then you bring up the webpage on the personal device then authenticate to the hotel. Because the hotel thinks the router has associated OK, any devices you have connected to the router (work laptop, streaming stick, other devices) are also authenticated automatically.

Devices run like $30 and if you get a battery-operated one it'll work on airplanes too.

You could use your personal laptop and spoof / change it’s MAC address to match your work laptops (note down your original MAC address first). You can then connect to the internet in the hotel to pass the captive portal / log in screen. Once you’ve passed this you can change your personal laptops MAC address back to its original. Your work laptop should be able to connect after this.

https://www.groovypost.com/howto/cha...indows-10-why/


*Edit* Easier route might be to to ask the hotel to white list your work laptops MAC address. I’m sure they have a network admin or engineer somewhere.

How about asking your work IT department for a work around? Surely they understand that sometimes people need to use a hotel wifi to do work.

Given that most networks with captive portals are unencrypted (if they're WPA2, for instance, it's easy to link standard WiFi auth to the property management system), the intention may be to prevent hotel/coffee shop WiFi from being used.

OP, even some of the hotels that don't require a username and password for WiFi still present a challenge screen for you to press CONNECT.

The above is excellent advice. I have one of these and use it extensively for connecting to hotel and inflight WiFi in order to share the connection with multiple devices.

If you don't want to get one of these you can achieve the same thing with an Android device. Connect it to the WiFi and then share the WiFi with your laptop.

Let me give you an advice.

1. login to the WiFi (which requires a challenge)
2. Open command line (CMD in windows and Terminal in Mac)
3. Type ‘ipconfig’ on windows or ifconfig on mac
4. copy the IP of the default gateway (e.g: 10.0.0.1)
5. open a browser and go to https://10.0.0.1
6. You will be presented with a challenge that most likely will not get blocked by your corporate police.

This is what I have to do with my work laptop.

Don't forget wired connections may be available as well, which does not require login usually.

Thanks all for the really great advice above. I suspected there may be some other ways, but tech is not my strength...

Yes, I have about a work around. They suggested creating a hotspot from my work phone. But for a week, I thought that might be excessive. and clunky

Exactly.

My usual advice is to use a site that never uses SSL and it usually will then redirect you to the login page.
http://neverssl.com

http://x.com/ works just as well, but I think the issue is that the work laptop doesn't allow the browser to access non-SSL pages

I stayed at the Doubletree Greenwich a few days ago and the wifi didn’t have a challenge screen (no password either).