Just to be clear... While it's kind of hard to restrict radio (along the same lines as restricting the right to breathe the air in the building... you can't control what flows through the air), nothing restricts the hotel from lining the exterior walls with your basic faraday cage preventing those signals from entering at all. Of course, this also blocks cell phones, walky talkies, sattelite, and anything else that uses RF for communication. If they choose to allow any of these signals in, they pretty well have to allow ALL of them in. (And filtering cell phones esp in a building where every single interior door is locked could be argued to interfere with 911 emergency services and be a threat to public safety.) So the restrictions they're trying to put into place have more to do with what activities they, as the property owner, allow you, as a visitor, to engage in while on the premises. That kind of grey line rule making can get very tricky to both claim and to enforce. The whole thing is an ooey gooey quagmire that I want no personal part of. :-) On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 02:35:43PM -0600, Carl Karsten wrote:
me again.
So wifi at pycon 07 was 'better than 06' witch I hear was a complete disaster. More on 07's coming soon.
Now we are talking about wifi at pycon 08, which will be at a different hotel (Crown Plaza in Rosemont, IL) and the question came up: Can the hotel actively prevent us from using our own wifi?
_maney: although - wasn't the hotel stuck on "our wifi or no wifi" at last report?
CarlFK: only the FCC can restrict radio
tpollari: it's their network and their power the FCC has no legal right to that. and no, you show me where they do. I'm not wasting my day with that tripe -- the caselaw you're likely thinking of has to do with an airline and an airport and the airline's lounge, in which case they're paying for the power and paying for their bandwidth from a provider that's not the airport. We're not.
I know that there are all sorts of factors, and just cuz the FCC says boo isn't the end of the story, but i don't even know what the FCC's position on this is. google gave me many hits, and after looking at 10 or so I decided to look elsewhere.
Carl K
--- Wayne Bouchard web@typo.org Network Dude http://www.typo.org/~web/