Gossip

Why do hotel hotspots always end up as a ripoff?

You'd think that the Hilton Hotel would understand wireless hotspots. But no: here I am in the Copenhagen airport Hilton, having paid 145 Kroner for a day's Internet connection - and I have no wireless access. It's 8 AM here in Denmark; you won't read this till after I fly back to London this evening.

Here's how it works. You go to your room and there, conveniently provided, is an Ethernet cable. Plug in, start an Internet browser, and you get the opportunity to log on.

You can pay by credit card, or voucher, or enter a subscriber number. Or, sensibly, you can charge the Internet bill to your room. So that's what I did. It worked: the story about Oracle coming to the rescue of phone companies was written before breakfast, using that cable.

Come down stairs, and try to get some work done while waiting for your colleagues, then, and see how well it works. You're presented with the same NetPoint login screen - only there's no acknowledgement of the fact that you've forked out all that money. You have the options, on the wireless Internet, of signing in with a credit card, or a voucher... but for those who signed on in their room, or want to bill to their room, there's no arrangement.

Technically, you can see how this is done. The internet provider here obviously registers the MAC address of your computer, and recognises it when you plug back in. And the MAC address of your wired Ethernet card is a different MAC address from the wireless adapter. So when you pop up as a wireless user, you are a stranger.

As any Starbucks T-Mobile user can assure you, this is an easy problem to solve. When the user signs on, you give them an ID and password for the day. And you embed that data as a "cookie" in the browser, so that however often they drop out and come back, they will be recognised.

Apparently, Hilton customers aren't intelligent enough to enter passwords, and don't care about being charged twice.