Why Hotel Broadband Sucks

This happened to me last Thursday morning and has nothing whatsoever to do with linux.

It was 5.30 am. I woke in my hotel room; my head was buzzing with ideas - I couldn't get back to sleep. I decided to get up and do some research on the net. While the laptop was booting I mindmapped the buzz from my head in case it leaked away.

The laptop connected right away to the hotel wireless. I started up Firefox. It redirected right away to the hotel Internet provider's login page. They use antlabs. It was a page with a username and password field: they were already filled with the username and password I had been using a couple of nights earlier when I had got 24 hours' complimentary access on checking into the hotel. These credentials were long expired by now. It said:

"A username and password currently exist on the system for your computer. You currently have some credit left to use. Click 'log in' to proceed."

I had some credit left? I didn't think so. I tried logging in with those old credentials but got a popup telling me:

"The Username / Password you entered have not been recognised. Please check them and try entering them again."

That was probably because they had expired. So why tell me "You currently have some credit left to use."? Anyhow, I didn't have a problem paying for some more. Actually that's not true: I could rant about having to pay for this at all, but that's not what I want to do. On the same login page it told me:

"You may purchase a username and password securely online using your credit / debit card, or at the hotel reception."

There was no link on the web page to purchase a username and password online. But didn't antlabs redirect me to this page? There was no other page I could view...

I spent ten minutes pinging URLs and IP addresses that may or may not have been on the antlabs network to see if there were any other addresses I could access that would give me a way of buying another username and password - but to no avail.

I didn't want to bother the hotel receptionist: at that early hour it would probably have been a night porter who didn't speak any english and who in any case wouldn't have known how to allocate usernames and passwords for the internet. The page also told me:

"If you experience any technical difficulties, please contact: (some number)"

But by then half an hour had passed so I only really had an hour of surf time left before I had to start getting ready for work...

I gave up and drafted this rant instead.

Mr. Antlabs:

1. Like so many hotel internet providers your redirect page sucks.

2. If you're clever enough to pre-populate the username/password field with my credentials, then why are you stupid enough to print a message telling me "You currently have some credit left to use." when my credit expired almost 24 hours earlier?

3. Also, why was there no link allowing me to buy some more time? Why tell me "You may purchase a username and password securely online" when there is no link to do this?

4. And (at the risk of diluting my message) why do you have to charge such high rates in the first place?
Here's the charges the hotel passes onto the guest:
"Anytime 2 hours = £7.00 [30 days valid]"
The rate at least is flexible - you don't have to use it all at once. But that £7.00 rate equates to £7 x 12 x 30 = £2520 per month, or 100 times more than I pay my home internet provider!

I mostly stay in a hotel for one night only, checking in around 6pm and checking out around 8am the next day. During this time I typically surf for between 2 and 4 hours. So what I want is a pass that gives me, say, 2 hours that I can use anytime in a 24 hour period, which I can easily extend online in additional blocks of 2 hours. It needs to be priced reasonably - say, no more than £1 per hour.

If there's one thing that gets up my nose when I'm staying in a hotel (which is much of the time) it's having to pay double-digit multiples of what my home Internet provider charges (and usually what you get is 512kb/s at most).

If there's one thing that gets up my nose even more than that, its a moronically designed redirect page where there is no link to pay for any more time.

Antlabs, go back to school!