FCC Gets It Right
CNN reports that Marriott was fined $600,000 by FCC for blocking guests’ Wi-Fi.
Marriott was the hotel for a conference in Nashville and they blocked the ability of people at the conference to use their personal cellular ‘Hot Spots’. They claimed it was to protect the Internet and not to make money from the $1000 they charged vendors or $250 that they charged individuals to use the hotel’s WiFi [Yeah, right].
The fine was for interfering with cellular service.
There are legal ways of jamming cellular service that are used by hospitals and others with valid concerns about cellular interference with instruments and necessary equipment, but they require an FCC authorized device and prior notification. Marriott apparently ramped up the power on their WiFi system to ‘drown out’ other WiFi signals.
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Nope, they didn’t ramp up the power on their WiFi system, instead they sent rogue “disconnect” messages to interrupt the WiFi connection. Apparently they are running software that will force disconnects of unwanted WiFi connections from their own access points (how they enforce their charges for their access points, apparently), and discovered that it will also force disconnects of unwanted WiFi connections with *other* access points because apparently the low-level WiFi protocol does no authentication of the origin access point when it gets a disconnect message. So then they added some access points that did nothing but frequency-hop and send disconnect messages to any WiFi connection that wasn’t going to one of their “official” access points.
This of course is “jamming” as defined by the FCC, and thus illegal — it’s deliberately interfering with radio transmissions that have nothing to do with you and are not interfering with you (since WiFi is designed to operate on shared bandwidth). But hey, we don’t need regulation of things like this because the magic of the free market will make them stop doing it, just like it stopped child labor and black lung disease [/snark].
Hmm, doing it they way they did made it even more obvious that they were jamming. Over powering could be covered as an ‘innocent equipment malfunction’. They have also attracted the attention of the Canadian regulators who have issued a caution but don’t have a complaint to work with.
Isn’t it nice when a regulator does something right? It’s so rare these days! And usually by accident. This was done right I think. 🙂
I guess ‘Marriott’ isn’t high up on the ‘Friends of Politicians’ list! LOL
The regulators didn’t have much of a choice, as the complainant figured out what Marriott was doing, and it was too obvious for the FCC to ignore. They probably took one of their tech vans out and looked at the area to see what was going on, so they had a record of the violation.
When I was in law enforcement they visited our base station in response to a complaint about interference. They determined the problem was with the frequency accuracy of the complainant’s equipment and not with our transmitter. They were dinged for infringing on our frequency, but we didn’t actually notice because our equipment filtered them out.
I still remember back in the 1970’s when the FCC actively enforced things. Then Reagan took over and virtually eliminated the enforcement division ’cause we don’t need no steenkin’ regulations, just a 500 ship Navy complete with 40 year old battleships, yo. Over in the ham radio arena, hams are very upset because they have done the hard work of identifying “jammers”, unlicensed operators who buy ham rigs from one of the big mail order outlets and then use their new ham rigs to make ham frequencies as unusable as CB radio is nowadays, and then the FCC doesn’t give them the time of day when they give the FCC everything the FCC would need to successfully prosecute the jammer, including the name of the rogue operator, his address, the location of his radio equipment, a complete log of his transmissions, etc. And on the rare occasions that the FCC does issue a fine, the rogue operator just ignores it and doesn’t pay the fine, and the FCC does nothing about that either.
So color me *very* surprised that the FCC took this action against Marriott. Marriott must have peeved someone with a ton of political clout and more lobbyists on staff than Marriott has, that’s all I can figure…
The incident was at a convention/conference at a Marriott and people may have been flooding telcom customer service lines over their failing WiFi. It may have been the telcoms who filed the complaint or a vendor at the conference.
Yeah, we got our visit after we bought a new radio system in the 1970s and started running at the full authorized power level to maintain comms despite a lot of reinforced concrete in the environment, which was the main reason for the new system.