Following our September 2 QoD on WiFi hotspots in Las Vegas, we received an email from a network engineer for a major high-tech corporation offering a possible alternative to seeking out hot spots while you're in town. This is rather technical and slightly salesy (though he doesn't work for the companies mentioned). But since connectivity is such an important consideration these days -- as witnessed by our recent Reader Poll about what technology you bring to and use in Las Vegas -- we decided to run it. Here is the first-person explanation from our tech that we hope provides useful information to at least a significant portion of our readers.
If possible, check out the New York Times story from September 2, 2010: "Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap." It’s relevant to the 9/2 QoD on WiFi. It's an article on Virgin Mobile's very new offer of a "MyFi" box that works on "their" network, which is really the Sprint network, since Virgin doesn't have its own cellular infrastructure.
If you're unfamiliar with the MyFi box, it's a portable "make-your-own-WiFi-hotspot" device that comes in variants for different cell-carrier networks.
Several Virgin-specific features are mentioned in the article. First, the important ones are:
a) No contract required.
b) For $40 per month, you get unlimited bandwidth. No "5-gigabyte" or similar (monthly) usage cap. Going on a road trip? Sign up for a month. When you get back, just don’t renew and you're done.
c) Perhaps you need it, but you're not sure whether you need even $40 worth. OK, Virgin offers an alternate $10 plan that gets you 100 megabytes of usage that expire after 10 days. Use it or lose it. A hundred megs isn’t very much, but if you need a just-in-case alternative, it's viable.
d) Finally, as I mentioned, VirginMobile is really "just a reseller of Sprint's network." That's better than the really limited-coverage cell carriers like MetroPCS.
I might experiment with a Virgin/MyFi box because:
Earlier this year, I received an iPad (WiFi+3G variant) as a birthday present. I signed up for the AT&T "iPad Plan" that, at the time, was unlimited. Having the iPad along on my last trip to Las Vegas trip was useful.
It's an OK (not great) device. I wouldn't recommend it to those who are less than starry-eyed about Apple products. Having an iPad along as a portable mapping, Google, etc. information device is a good thing when you're traveling. However, for many things, it doesn’t replace a real laptop. If you have to carry a laptop anyway, buying/carrying an iPad is redundant. It was useful on my trip, because I didn't have to take my corporate laptop along.
But back to the Virgin/MyFi story. One of the problems with Apple is that they’re exclusive to AT&T [Editor’s Note: Bloomberg has reported that Apple will start offering the iPhone on Verizon Wireless in January 2011.] Since I've had my iPad, I've noticed several things that are probably non-obvious to the unitiated.
First, you might assume that since WiFi is "available everywhere," you might be tempted to get the (cheaper) "WiFi only" flavor of iPad. But if you’re going to rely on an iPad as a very portable information terminal, that would be a mistake.
The first thing I learned is that, with the current iOS version anyway, iPad WiFi is a little flaky. It has problems with some of the WiFi Security (WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc.) standards. I had to replace my (three- to four-year-old) home Wireless Access Point in order to be able to handle the iPad along with my corporate laptop and my two existing TiVo DVRs that use WiFi to "phone home" nightly for their program-schedule updates.
Even with my brand new Wireless Access Point with its firmware that supports current-generation WiFi standards, I still had to play annoying network-configuration games to get everything to work. I do have everything working now, but I shouldn't have had to jump through the hoops that I did because of the iPad. There's no way that civilians are likely to be able to figure out the required tricks.
In Las Vegas (and on a subsequent trip to New York), I was really surprised at the number of places I found myself at where I would have been screwed if I had the WiFi-only flavor of iPad. In short, with an iPad, there are times when you NEED "3G" (cellular) Internet access. WiFi alone won't be enough.
In Las Vegas, I was also surprised at the number of places (Summerlin, a coffee shop on Tropicana west of the Strip, etc.) where the AT&T data network just wasn’t available.
One of the things the iPad does is keep track of its cellular usage. Now that I have my home WAP working, my AT&T usage is effectively zero.
All of the above is why I find the Virgin/MyFi thing interesting. So, I'm going to get one of the boxes and try it for a month. If it does, in fact, work with the current iPad iOS version, hasta la vista AT&T! I might wait a month or two before I do the test. Apple is supposed to upgrade iPad iOS from the current V3 to the new V4 that’s already shipping with the newest iPhone.
OK, here endeth the sermon on Apple and AT&T. Back to the LVA QoD …
The original question was "Which hotels offer free Wi-Fi for guests?"
WiFi in LV hotels has -- like 6-5 blackjack, a lot of the current video poker inventory, and resort fees -- become a hidden surcharge conduit.
Take Red Rock Resort, which charges you for in-room Internet access on a per-MAC-address basis. I defeated this, because I carry a "travel router" with me and the hotel therefore couldn’t know that there were actually two laptops in the room sharing one ("wired" in this case) Internet connection. Their infrastructure could "see" only my travel router. This is another reason for testing the Virgin/MyFi box. If it works, I'll be able to avoid paying any in-room Internet access fee.
In summary, the real QoD for 9/2 should have been "Which hotels charge for in-room Internet access, how much do they charge, and is the charge levied on a per laptop basis?"
A related question that LVA will never really be able to answer is, "How good is the hotel's Internet access infrastructure?" That will simply require too much technical knowledge and testing/verification. But this question is a valid one, especially in business hotels.
A friend of mine spent a lot of time at various La Quinta locations over a three-year period. Those La Quintas, he reported, had fairly lame Internet infrastructures. They never had sufficient capacity during prime time (the Internet equivalent of not enough hot water). Forget even trying to check email between 7 and 11 p.m., etc. I'm sure that hotels will eventually figure this out, but I'm also equally sure that it will take a few years before they do so.
All of this is what makes the Virgin/MyFi thing worth checking out.
