I was going to post saying that I'm really liking Best Western these days.<\/p>\n
But then yesterday morning, my wired Internet connection from my hotel room suddenly stopped working. The IP address disappeared.<\/p>\n
So I switched to wireless, and that worked fine for nearly 24 hours, when this morning the same thing suddenly happened.<\/p>\n
So even though I'm checking out imminently, I thought I should let them know that their Internet connections from this room were broken. So I called their helpdesk.<\/p>\n
And I spoke to a very friendly and competent guy who explained to me that the Internet was working fine, it was just that my machine had been banned.<\/p>\n
WTF?, I said, though much more politely.<\/p>\n
He explained that using filesharing apps like BitTorrent can cause a MAC address (aka Ethernet address) to be banned from their network.<\/p>\n
I explained that I don't use those apps.<\/p>\n
He explained that using MySpace or Facebook can also cause a MAC address to be banned from their network.<\/p>\n
WTF?, I said, though again much more politely.<\/p>\n
He explained that the way Facebook does Internet connections looks to their network management system like filesharing\/BitTorrent.<\/p>\n
?????!!!!!?????<\/p>\n
So, word to the wise: if you stay at a Best Western, don't use one of those ~super-high-bandwidth disruptive applications~ like Facebook<\/em>, or your computer might be banned from their network.<\/p>\n The upside was that the guy was way more knowledgeable and tech-savvy than other hotel-related tech-support people I've talked with, and he was friendly and apologetic. But it's a ridiculous situation. I asked him if he could request that it be documented, but of course that doesn't really solve the problem.<\/p>\n It looks like Best Western's tech (at least in Montana) is handled by a company called e|communications+networking. Maybe later when I have more time I'll follow up on this.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was going to post saying that I’m really liking Best Western these days. But then yesterday morning, my wired…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-technofailure"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}