Marriott blocking private wifi again
 

My wife is staying at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown. Today while she was attempting to use her Verizon LTE "my-fi" hotspot in the hotel she found that it was being interfered with. To the point that it was delivering 0.0 throughput. The following is the sequence of events as I understand it:

1) DW observed that LTE data service to her phone was working just fine, so clearly it wasn't a Verizon network or signal strength problem.

2) DW phoned Guest Services to to inquire if the property is attacking wifi hotspots, as certain Marriott properties have done in the past and been reprimanded by the FCC for doing.

3) At least one unnamed employee told her off the record, "Of course they're blocking your wifi. They want you to pay for theirs."

4) Another employee observed that since my wife is Gold she had free access to the hotel wifi anyway. DW explained she needed a more secure network, i.e. her private LTE hotspot, for transmitting sensitive information.

5) DW escalated and escalated, eventually receiving a call from Marriott's Director of IT, who denied that Marriott had interfered with her wifi hotspot. Coincidentally her wifi hotspot ceased being blocked moments before the phone rang.

I do not have a perfectly clear picture of what happened as I am currently 2500 miles away (at a different Marriott hotel, natch). I will update this if my understanding of the facts changes. But as of now, this situation reeks of wrongful behavior and duplicity.

Or jumping to conclusions.

I've been living with the vagaries of Vz service for quite a while. If long periods of very poor throughput indicated active service blocking, there are a lot of businesses going out of their way to block my service.

I stayed at that Property last week and can verify I had no problems with my AT&T so maybe just a brief connection issue?

With respect, your evidence is weak, and in all probability the issue was with Verizon or with the device. When the cellular network is congested, some devices will get full speed, others very slow speed, others zero speed. Did your wife try to set up a personal hotspot on her phone? Why couldn't she connect to VPN over the hotel's wifi?

My husband is there tonight and is not having any trouble with his ATT hotspot.

A larger sample size would help a lot. There could have been many reasons why she was not able to connect and proving the property was blocking signals will be tough. The one employee's statement may have been a smart a** remark made not knowing the consequences. The timing may be coincidental like people that insist upon continuously clicking the mouse when an app is not responding.

Attempting a connection via the cell phone might have been a good alternative. When I'm on the train, I use the single power outlet for my laptop and plug my cell phone into it for power. As long as I'm plugged in anyway I use USB tethering to provide the network connection. There is no reason to be putting another signal out there tempting someone.

Weren't all of the props who were blocking wifi doing so in their conference facilities?

Of the two I read about, yes, they were convention properties. However, radio signals rarely understand room boundaries or even property boundaries. Any use of such devices should be considered illegal and not allowed regardless.

If OP's wife wants to file a complaint with FCC, that's fine. She's got zero evidence and it would appear from the miniscule sample here, that her problem was isolated and thus not the product of misconduct. But, she's free to complain.

What? Where did you ever hear or read this? This is not how bandwidth works or will ever work. What does congested mean? The only time bandwidth seizes to move is when there is faulty hardware. If your modem/MiFi device works down the street fine and in your room at 0.0 rate, something is certainly blocking that device from receiving data, maybe not the hotel but something is in the way. Removing faulty hardware from the conversation point that is.

That's my experience in downtown metro areas. A group of us will have the same phone on the same network; some will have (seemingly) full speed data while others can't load google.com. Then, later in the day when it's less crowded, we'll all have full speed data.

Towards the first point above: I've had both the Verizon phone and MiFi hookups. The phone does not work as well. I wanted it to work - one less device to keep track of - but it doesn't. After having the MiFi for a month, switching to the phone for a couple months, and going back to the MiFi, I can tell you setting it up on the phone doesn't work. My understanding is it has something to do with Verizon only allowing one function on the phone at a time, as opposed to AT&T's system allowing two.

Towards the second point above: It is easier for me to connect to my VPN through the MiFi than through a hotel's system in many cases. Our VPN just, for whatever reason, doesn't like some of the hotel connections, and just plain won't work when some of the systems get crowded. While I've had this happen with the MiFi, too (hello Delta SkyClubs) it is more likely to happen using a hotel's WiFi, IME.

Depending on the Mi-Fi model, it could support a variety of cellular spectrum bands, some of which have better in building penetration than others (although VZ LTE has generally good in-building penetration). Also, being Mi-Fi's are notorious for spitting out channel interference when a lot of them are in a small area (As may be the case here) - talk to anyone who lives in an apartment building.

There are several apps (Android and IOS) which will show all networks, channels and signal strength. If the Marriott is blocking WiFi channels that could be an issue. The apps will also show non-broadcast SSID's.

My understanding is they were using software to grab all of the DHCP addresses on your 'rogue' network so you couldn't get one on your MiFi device. If you're tech savvy you could disable DHCP and use a static IP address.

They were spoofing the Mifi and telling the client to disassociate from the mifi, not eating addresses. This is actually incredibly common in wireless networks, it's a crappy grey area.

Say your mifi is operating on the same channel as the hotel AP, (there are not a ton of available, non-overlapping channels in the most common 2.4 GHz band) and everyone around your room is complaining that they can't get on the wifi. The hotel can knock your system down with de-auths to help free up that portion of the spectrum.

I've had 2.4 G cordless phones, microwaves and cheap bluetooth devices all cause huge issues for my wifi users. I know of an organization that had an issue from a busses passing by using a wireless transmitter to trip the traffic light that completely overwhelmed the entire 2.4 GHz spectrum while passing by.

The issue is the crowded, shared spectrum. Sure, hotels using these tools to generate profits seem questionable, but these tools do have legit purposes.