I recently worked for an ISP providing service to some Marriott resorts. This is my opinion and in no way representing either company, but this is exactly what Marriott is trying to do. Marriott is not using any sort of wifi jammer like the author is suggesting; in fact such devices would block their own wifi signal.
The most typical problems with wifi in resorts comes down to construction; most of these were built years before wifi was a consideration and are constructed in a way such that even with commercial APs you will get a very poor signal even with the APs in each unit. There's one such property I know of where guests only get wifi in the one room with the AP and out on their balcony and no where else in the hotel besides the pool & lobby.
Also they often use authentication pages that mean you can't get on with a device without a browser...but when you have 200 guests sharing a 100Mbps connection, you don't want someone hooking their Xbox or AppleTV anyway.
Actually, 200 guests on a 100MBit connection is probably not a problem. At a nearby university they have a 100MBit connection for 1000 students plus teachers, and it holds up reasonably well. (Of course, unless the hotel bought an overbooked connection with only a theoretical max speed of 100mbit)
Even though we're a major vacation destination, people seem to want to stay in and watch movies or play online games on their expensive vacations. There's basically always a minority of users ruining the connection for everyone else.
Watching movies and playing games away from home does sound like a nice vacation to me.
Ruining is subjective - many hotel wifi networks were provisioned for 2002 style access of web and email, not 2012 where one's mom streams gigs of video. This is why I appreciate the move to free basic wifi and paid premium wifi at some hotels.
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I recently worked for an ISP providing service to some Marriott resorts. This is my opinion and in no way representing either company, but this is exactly what Marriott is trying to do. Marriott is not using any sort of wifi jammer like the author is suggesting; in fact such devices would block their own wifi signal.
The most typical problems with wifi in resorts comes down to construction; most of these were built years before wifi was a consideration and are constructed in a way such that even with commercial APs you will get a very poor signal even with the APs in each unit. There's one such property I know of where guests only get wifi in the one room with the AP and out on their balcony and no where else in the hotel besides the pool & lobby.
Also they often use authentication pages that mean you can't get on with a device without a browser...but when you have 200 guests sharing a 100Mbps connection, you don't want someone hooking their Xbox or AppleTV anyway.
Actually, 200 guests on a 100MBit connection is probably not a problem. At a nearby university they have a 100MBit connection for 1000 students plus teachers, and it holds up reasonably well. (Of course, unless the hotel bought an overbooked connection with only a theoretical max speed of 100mbit)
Even though we're a major vacation destination, people seem to want to stay in and watch movies or play online games on their expensive vacations. There's basically always a minority of users ruining the connection for everyone else.
Watching movies and playing games away from home does sound like a nice vacation to me.
Ruining is subjective - many hotel wifi networks were provisioned for 2002 style access of web and email, not 2012 where one's mom streams gigs of video. This is why I appreciate the move to free basic wifi and paid premium wifi at some hotels.
If they all started watching HD YouTube videos all night long, would the link be saturated?