Unsolicited Questions: Why does the hotel Wi-Fi keep dropping my connection? Part 1

Category: Tech Today

So you booked your affordable but fantastic hotel at Agoda and headed off to paradise. Your hotel has free Wi-Fi in the lobby, lounge and in your hotel room. You decided you didn't need Ethernet anyway. After a rugged day at the beach or in the mountains you log in using the complementary username and password the receptionist gave you. After connecting to the network using your Android or iOS device, you browse the Internet for maybe 15 fifteen minutes and then you get disconnected. Undaunted, you pull up the hotel home page again and log back in. After awhile, the same thing happens and you're ready to scream bloody murder.

I raise my eyebrow whenever some obese Midwesterner is going bat ape in the hotel corridor, at the receptionist or in the columns of Tripadvisor about their hotel's wireless connection. First, high-end hotels won't have that issue (more on this later). You get what you paid for. Second, it's just the Internet. You won't die from Facebook or Twitter withdrawal.

Hotel Wireless Setup

Why does the free hotel Wi-Fi drop and ask you to log in using your hotel username and password again and again? Obviously, this doesn't happen with all hotels. It actually depends on the network administrator and his knowledge of mobile devices. A disciplined and knowledgeable network admin for a hotel will make a compromise between speed, bandwidth and access. Some admins configure the timeout value of wireless connections to prevent users from hogging the Internet or worst downloading or streaming heavily at the hotel. I've actually spoken to a kid at the lobby who said he was downloading torrents while he was staying at a hotel.

Moreover, Android and iOS are gluttons for network access. Eight years ago, most people didn't have a wireless device. Now everyone has a mobile device. Worst, Google/Apple applications are designed to connect regularly to their respective servers whether it's to connect to the Apple store to update applications or check mailboxes in Gmail. Add other bandwidth hungry hogging apps and undisciplined browsing by most tourists and you have a stressed hotel Wi-Fi administrator. The administrator sets the timeout such that as long as a specific application (e.g. the browser) is left idle or specific applications are running at the same time, the mobile device will be disconnected, forcing the user to have to type in his hotel Wi-Fi username and password again. Admins can also configure specific parameters such as the number of applications running and the maximum simultaneous streams active for each network client.

Continued in Unsolicited Questions: Why does the hotel Wi-Fi keep dropping my connection? Part 2