We were at a hotel this past weekend that had free WiFi everywhere. Rooms, lobby, bar and restaurant, no password required. When we tried to use it on their outdoor patio, it wouldn't work, no signal and it didn't show the network. If we stepped back into the restaurant (about 5 feet) it immediately saw the WiFi. If we then just stepped out the door, poof it was gone, no network visible. Did we just hit a dead spot, or is their a way to limit WiFi to within the physical building? All glass windows from the restaurant facing the patio. Thanks,
Enterprise wi-fi installations can be fairly precisely ranged these days, but concrete walls or glass don't help any.
I projected managed the wi-fi installation at a large UK music festival a couple of years ago (150,000+ attending) and it was fascinating to get to grips with this technology. Without going into too much detail you could basically draw a perimeter line that you wanted the signal to follow through the multi directional antenna arrays and attenuation software.
The glass was actually what came to mind first for me. While it's indeed feasible to target the range like that, I can't imagine a hotel actually going through the trouble to do all that just to block access from the patio of one of their restaurants. While glass shouldn't interfere too much, my understanding is that some UV coatings will also incidentally block wifi signals; that's my guess as to what could have been happening.
It's dead easy, you just tell it to cut off when a signal goes to a certain level and walls and glass provide pretty clear break points to tune this to. Even on relatively cheap hardware and software it shouldn't take an engineer more than an hour to configure for a set area.
What about the free-loaders They would all go to the patio and just order a cup of coffee and sit there all day as a private office from themselves at that Hotel. When I go shopping at Target in my neighborhood I notice there is always a young man sitting there at the Starbucks everytime I go there to drink something. He gets real loud on his cell phone and just bothers me a lot who has to sit near him because all of the tables are taken far away from him. He has it like his private office with all his personal tote bags and stuff. He is a wifi free loader as far as I am concerned.
Not exactly a free loader if he purchases a drink from Starbucks. I usually work at Starbucks too when I want to get away from home or the hotel I'm staying at. However, I don't talk on the phone that much.