In October, Marriott International paid a $600,000 civil penalty for jamming its US customers’ WiFi services.
Just before new year, the hotel group pleaded for understanding, saying it was only trying to protect its guests’ online security — attracting the scorn of technology writers who said people looked after themselves all the time without Marriott’s protection.
The story began in March 2013 when someone attending a function at the Marriott-run Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville complained to the Federal Communications Commission that staff were “jamming mobile hotspots so that you can’t use them”.
These hotspots were the conference goers’ own WiFi connections. Why were they using them? Because they did not want to log on to the hotel’s WiFi, which would have cost anywhere from $250 to $1,000 for each device.
