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FCC Says Convention Centers Can't Block Your Wi-Fi Hotspot

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 19 2015, @07:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the fire-across-her-nose-not-up-it dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Smart City Holdings, a Wi-Fi provider for convention centers across the country, just got slapped with a hefty $750,000 fine from the FCC. The issue at hand? Blocking personal Wi-Fi hotspots on convention premises.

To call convention center internet prices a ripoff is a bit of an understatement. Smart City Holdings charges around $80 per day for access to their networks. By blocking personal Wi-Fi hotspots, it forces attendees to pay into this exorbitant scheme. "All companies who seek to use technologies that block FCC-approved Wi-Fi connections are on notice that such practices are patently unlawful," FCC commissioner Travis LeBlanc said in a statement, firing a warning shot to other would-be blockers.

This is good news for road warriors.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:58PM (#225085)

    I seriously doubt it. I've no direct experience with the cheap jammers you're talking about, but everything I've heard agrees with you about their crudeness. However, that crudeness would make them useless for forcing customers from their own WiFi tethering to your pay WiFi; it'll jam you WiFi as well as theirs.

    Enterprise WiFi systems (the sort sold by Cisco, Juniper, etc.) have some pretty slick capabilities, including the use of multiple APs to trilaterate any "Rogue APs" so you can track down and exterminate the "Rogue AP". The sales pitch to make this feature seem essential to suits revolves around industrial espionage, but I expect it's far more often used to sack someone for using WiFi tethering to bypass the corporate webfilter and get real work done. I'm pretty sure some of these systems do have the ability to automatically jam "Rogue APs", so I expect that's what these guys were using. They can either move all nearby APs off the Rogue AP's channel and jam that channel indiscriminately, or leave your own channel assignments alone and jam only when you hear the start of a packet on that BSSID. Either way, your own WiFi will suffer much less than with a whole-band jammer.