I'm looking forward to the day when I stay in a 100$/night hotel and I don't have to pay for my fricking internet. Every motel/hostel has it for free as it should. To me charging for internet (in hotels/resturatns) in 2012 is the same as charging for using the shower or lights.
I run iodine[1] on my server. Maybe it's illegal, maybe it's a grey area - I don't care.
Here in Israel free wifi access is the norm, but in DE? They charge an arm and a leg. Switzerland (if we're talking about Swisscom anyway)? They are _insane_. The hotels already rip you off with prices like there's no tomorrow and charge for internet on top.
I fire up iodine on my client. If it works: Great. The network was obviously created by morons (it could easily be prevented). Morons won't be able to track me down the short while I'm on their network, on a trip, with a mac address like 'deadbeef' or somesuch nonsense.
If it doesn't work? I don't go online and leave to have a couple beers..
If you think allowing unrestricted DNS is moronic, you haven't seen anything ;) One of our major ISPs has paid wifi networks in many cities here in Portugal, but they allow connections to any server on port 443 (HTTPS).
You don't even need a server, there are free VPNs that use that port to ensure compatibility with more restricted networks.
Strongly depends on where you are, apparently. When I was in Berlin, there was free Internet all over the place. In our hostel, the hotel across the street, just about any coffee bar, pub, sandwich stand, pizzeria ... Sometimes you had to ask for a password, other times you could just connect, and other times you had to catch some air network from the place next door.
Or maybe that was just Berlin Mitte?
Though I went to some places near Cologne and I didn't have to donate a kidney to get online either.
Connectivity in the more rural areas can be pretty bad though.
I've to admit my experience in DE is limited to certain ~weird~ places. I _lived_ in CGN and rarely needed wifi outside of my own home. Got no experience w/ Berlin, but I might move there in a year.
My problem in DE was usually related to trips to customers, to the ~end of the world~. In CH it was more prevalent: I stayed in roughly 20 different hotels in Bern so far and most of them, ignoring the decoration from 50 years ago, were charging for internet access. On top of a very high room rate.
It seems there are projects to improve on iodine. Heyoka [1] seemed interesting for a while, but the authors seem to have abandoned it now. If DNS is not an option: You can tunnel stuff via icmp as well. Still looking for a decent solution (needs to work cross-platform at least for the client) as a fallback if DNS is restricted.
And - enjoy, have fun. Don't spoil the fun for all of us by writing an article in a big newspaper about it. :)
It's always interesting how the really cheap accomodation (hostels etc.) have free internet, but the expensive accomodation have expensive internet. It's a great example of price being based on what the market can bear. People who stay in cheap hostels will just go without internet, or stay at another hostel that has free internet. People who stay in fancy hotels don't care about €15 (or the company is paying)
A friend of a friend runs an independent midsize hotel here in Germany.
They used to offer free internet access. Then one of their guests used the connection to download copyrighted stuff.
In due course a nasty letter from a lawyer arrived, demanding payment of around 1000€ and as fighting and losing would have been much more expensive, they payed.
They were unable to recover the money, because there was no way to prove which of their guests at that time was responsible.
The very next thing they did was to shut down the free internet and bring in an outside company to provide it (with per day and per hour fees for the guests).
The reasons:
1) By having someone else legally responsible for the internet connection, they don't have any liability for future copyright violations.
2) All guests are now "helping" to pay back the money they lost.
>They were unable to recover the money, because there was no way to prove which of their guests at that time was responsible.
That's exactly why in all likelihood, they would've won. It's the perfect setup and - in germany - an argument for securing the wlan not better than the default-setting suggests.
I am always surprised by the "there is a chance we might loose and pay more, so we will pay"-attitude that seems to be common in such cases.
I don't know about the current climate for copyright cases in Germany, but I don't think that the board of a hotel chain will have or want any stake in the copyright fight as that is so far from their own business interests.
By choosing to pay €1000 this month they save a lot of money.That small amount of a settlement is pocket change for a hotel compared to the lengthy legal process that may be drawn out for months, and cost them much more and be without a guaranteed win in sight.
EDIT: Forgot that the hotel was independent, but my point still stands, especially for a hotel without the insurance of being in a hotel chain.
You are not wrong. And there was a time when such cases were very unclear, even for those with more knowledge than typical known.
I still think that it would now be a better idea to fight. It's a sure 1000€-loss + the unhappy customers (cause of missing free wlan) vs a maybe-loss and a chance to continue the free wlan. But I understand the tought-process you described, and it was maybe a different legal situation.
I'm assuming there's some kind of protection for ISPs, or it'd be impossible to run one in Germany. Couldn't they apply to the same rules, since they're effectively an ISP?
The idea of ISP protection is to say that some particular other person is responsible, instead of the ISP, so that they can get sued/fined/imprisoned instead. Looks like these guys were not tracking that.
My German isn't good enough to understand those articles, and I'm finding it a bit tricky to understand the Google translation. The jist I'm getting from those two pages is that the access provider isn't liable for what is transmitted if the transfer is initiated by another user.
I think the bit I'm referring to would be covered by § 15 paragraph (4), which Google translates to "To comply with existing legal, statutory or contractual retention periods, the service provider may block the data." I think "block" here means "store", in the sense that the user data which includes "Information on the beginning and end and the extent of each use" (paragraph 1) needs to be recorded (and retained) for a period of time required by a different statute.
I feel like I only understand about 30% of those documents, I might make more progress with a better translation!
Sorry, i oversaw your reply. That paragraph is about what a provider may store, and it is pretty rigid. As far as i know, in practice they save more (that law is not fully followed).
>(4) Der Diensteanbieter darf Nutzungsdaten über das Ende des Nutzungsvorgangs hinaus verwenden, soweit sie für Zwecke der Abrechnung mit dem Nutzer erforderlich sind (Abrechnungsdaten). Zur Erfüllung bestehender gesetzlicher, satzungsmäßiger oder vertraglicher Aufbewahrungsfristen darf der Diensteanbieter die Daten sperren.
This informally translates to:
"The provider may use data about the usage after the usage, if those data are necessary to calculate the billings. He may save those data to fulfill existing deadlines, coming from law or contract"
There don't seem to exist an english translation of that law.
Every motel/hostel that I've been to with free internet has ended up with internet so slow that its unusable. I'm happy to pay for it to be able to access at faster than dialup speeds. As for why they charge it's because they can. Their target markets are already paying a premium for a room so a small extra charge for internet isn't that much of a deal. People looking for the savings of a hostel are just as likely to go to Starbucks/McDonalds for free internet.
Just because they charge does not mean they re-invest any of that in infrastructure.
If you stay at a hotel with paid wifi and it is full of people who are either tethering from their phones or not using the internet then it will be fast.
Stay at a posh hotel where everyone pays out of their expense account and it's likely to be just as slow as if it was free.
Not to mention that you only need one person streaming 1080p to put serious strain on the bandwidth.
To me charging for internet (in hotels/resturatns) in 2012 is the same as charging for using the shower or lights.
You are being charged for the lights and the shower when you pay the bill. Or was that you're point and I missed it?
It will come, give it some time. Hotels (imho) charge one for the internet because it's a separate utility, the onsite staff are not capable of fixing it [1] when it breaks. Which happens a lot. So they outsource it.
When 'internet' is as common a utility as water and light, and as reliable, it will be in the bill, you'll never see it.
