Marriott’s Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville made sure it had a corner on the Wi-Fi market by blocking the competition and charging $250-1,000 to gain access to the hotel’s Wi-Fi.

Marriott International, Inc. and its subsidiary, Marriott Hotel Services, Inc., have been fined $600,000 after a Federal Communications Commission investigation uncovered hotel employees intentionally interfering with personal Wi-Fi networks during convention events, forcing guests and exhibitors to use the hotel’s Wi-Fi network, at a cost of up to $1,000.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau, in response to a guest’s complaint that the hotel was intentionally jamming every Wi-Fi network except their own, discovered hotel workers were using a Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville to prevent visitors from using their personal mobile broadband hotspots, a serious violation of Section 333 of the Communications Act.

Employees of Marriott, which has managed the day-to-day operations of the Gaylord Opryland since 2012, were tasked with using features of the hotel’s Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland to contain and/or de-authenticate guest-created Wi-Fi hotspot access points in the conference facilities. In some cases, employees sent de-authentication packets to the targeted access points, which would dissociate consumers’ devices from their own Wi-Fi hotspots and lock out the devices to keep them from connecting in the future.

Guests and exhibitors arriving expecting to use their AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile mobile hotspots found them completely disabled while on the property. Even adjacent Wi-Fi networks from nearby properties stopped working the moment users entered or approached the hotel grounds.

At the same time the hotel was blocking connections, Marriott charged conference exhibitors and guests dependent on Wi-Fi to run their exhibits or manage business matters connection fees ranging from $250-$1,000 per device for access to the Gaylord’s Wi-Fi network, the only network available.

“Consumers who purchase cellular data plans should be able to use them without fear that their personal Internet connection will be blocked by their hotel or conference center,” said Enforcement Bureau chief Travis LeBlanc. “It is unacceptable for any hotel to intentionally disable personal hotspots while also charging consumers and small businesses high fees to use the hotel’s own Wi-Fi network. This practice puts consumers in the untenable position of either paying twice for the same service or forgoing Internet access altogether.”

Marriott claimed they were just protecting their guests from cyber attacks and the FCC’s decision to fine the hotel has created confusion across the hospitality industry.

“Marriott has a strong interest in ensuring that when our guests use our Wi-Fi service, they will be protected from rogue wireless hot spots that can cause degraded service, insidious cyber-attacks and identity theft,” Marriott said in a statement. “Like many other institutions and companies in a wide variety of industries, including hospitals and universities, the Gaylord Opryland protected its Wi-Fi network by using FCC-authorized equipment provided by well-known, reputable manufacturers. We believe that the Opryland’s actions were lawful. We will continue to encourage the FCC to pursue a rule making in order to eliminate the ongoing confusion resulting from today’s action and to assess the merits of its underlying policy.”

Several hotel chains have turned to Internet connectivity as a revenue generator, but few hotels have asked as much as Marriott. Some hotel chains charge as much as $22 per day for permission to connect to the facility’s Wi-Fi network, convincing many guests to use their own personal mobile devices as Wi-Fi hotspots instead. But Marriott’s debacle with the FCC allowed several chains to get an edge on the competition and trumpet they are not in the Wi-Fi jamming business:

• Hilton Hotels:  “We do not block or jam any wireless transmissions at our properties;”
• Kempinski and Hyatt Hotels: There are no policies that allow our hotels to jam, block or prevent guests’ use of personal Wi-Fi hotspots;
• InterContinental Hotels Group (Candlewood Suites, Crowne Plaza, Even, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Hotel Indigo, Hualuxe, InterContinental and Staybridge Suites) has no problem with guests using personal networks on hotel property, but why bother when any guest can enroll in the IHG Rewards Club at no charge which gives them free unlimited access to the chain’s Wi-Fi;
• The majority of Wyndham’s hotels are independently owned and operated, but most already offer complimentary Wi-Fi to guests, according to a hotel spokesperson.

Marriott was convinced it was not in violation of the law because it was not using an illegal signal jammer, commonly available overseas and often used in restaurants and theaters to silence cell phones. Marriott’s guests could still make and receive phone calls and text messages. But the Enforcement Bureau found that argument uncompelling after discovering hotel employees intentionally targeting any non-hotel hotspots they could locate to disconnect or block consumers from using them.

The $600,000 fine, the first of its kind for an incident of this kind, won’t mean much to the Marriott Gaylord Opryland. For staying at one of the hotel’s 3,000 rooms, Marriott charges $18 a day in “resort fees” for the “free Internet access,” $6.99 a day for enhanced Internet speed “suitable for downloading files, video chat and video streaming,” and $21-28 a day to park your car there.

But the FCC enforcement action has put a stop to this kind of access blockade spreading further. Under the terms of Marriott’s agreement with the FCC announced today, Marriott must cease the unlawful use of Wi-Fi blocking technology and take significant steps to improve how it monitors and uses its Wi-Fi technology at the Gaylord Opryland. Marriott must institute a compliance plan and file compliance and usage reports with the Bureau every three months for three years, including information documenting any use of access point containment features at any U.S. property that Marriott manages or owns.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee, but mostly AT&T and Comcast)

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is angry that FCC chairman Tom Wheeler is sticking his nose into AT&T, Comcast, and Charter Communications’ private playground — the state of Tennessee.

In an editorial published by The Tennessean, Blackburn throws a fit that an “unelected” bureaucrat not only believes what’s best for her state, but is now openly talking about preempting state laws that ban public broadband networks:

Legislatures are the entities who should be making these decisions. Legislatures govern what municipalities can and cannot do. The principles of federalism and state delegation of power keep government’s power in check. When a state determines that municipalities should be limited in experimenting in the private broadband market, it’s usually because the state had a good reason — to help protect public investments in education and infrastructure or to protect taxpayers from having to bailout an unproven and unsustainable project.

Chairman Wheeler has repeatedly stated that he intends to preempt the states’ sovereign role when it comes to this issue. His statements assume that Washington knows best. However, Washington often forgets that the right answers don’t always come from the top down.

It’s unfortunate Rep. Blackburn’s convictions don’t extend to corporate money and influence in the public dialogue about broadband. The “good reason” states have limited public broadband come in the form of a check, either presented directly to politicians like Blackburn, who has received so many contributions from AT&T she could cross daily exercise off her “things to do” list just running to the bank, or through positive press from front groups, notably the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

According to campaign finance data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, three of Blackburn’s largest career donors are employees and PACs affiliated with AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. Blackburn has also taken $56,000 from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the lobby for the big telecoms.

Combined, those organizations donated more than $200,000 to Blackburn. In comparison, her largest single donor is a PAC associated with Memphis-based FedEx Corp., which donated $68,500.

Phillip “States’ rights don’t extend to local rights in Blackburn’s ideological world” Dampier

Blackburn’s commentary tests the patience of the reality-based community, particularly when she argues that keeping public broadband out protects investments in education. As her rural constituents already know, 21st century broadband is often unavailable in rural Tennessee, and that includes many schools. Stop the Cap! regularly receives letters from rural Americans who complain they have to drive their kids to a Wi-Fi enabled parking lot at a fast food restaurant, town library, or even hunt for an unintentionally open Wi-Fi connection in a private home, just to complete homework assignments that require a broadband connection.

Blackburn’s favorite telecommunication’s company — AT&T — has petitioned the state legislature to allow it to permanently disconnect DSL and landline service in rural areas of the state, forcing customers to a perilous wireless data experience that doesn’t work as well as AT&T promises. While Blackburn complains about the threat of municipal broadband, she says and does nothing about the very real possibility AT&T will be allowed to make things even worse for rural constituents in her own state.

Who does Blackburn believe will ride to the rescue of rural America? Certainly not AT&T, which doesn’t want the expense of maintaining wired broadband service in less profitable rural areas. Comcast won’t even run cable lines into small communities. In fact, evidence has shown for at least a century, whether it is electricity, telephone, or broadband service, when large corporate entities don’t see profits, they won’t provide the service and communities usually have to do the job themselves. But this time those communities are handcuffed in states that have enacted municipal broadband bans literally written by incumbent phone and cable companies and shepherded into the state legislature through front groups like ALEC.

Chairman Wheeler is in an excellent position to understand the big picture, far better than Blackburn’s limited knowledge largely absorbed from AT&T’s talking points. After all, Wheeler comes from the cable and wireless industry and knows very well how the game is played. Wheeler has never said that Washington knows best, but he has made it clear state and federal legislators who support anti-competitive measures like municipal broadband bans don’t have a monopoly on good ideas either — they just have monopolies.

That isn’t good enough for Congresswoman Blackburn, who sought to strip funding from the FCC to punish the agency for crossing AT&T, Comcast and other telecom companies:

Marsha is an avowed member of the AT&T Fan Club.

In July, I passed an amendment in Congress that would prohibit taxpayer funds from being used by the FCC to pre-empt state municipal broadband laws. My amendment doesn’t prevent Chattanooga or any other city in Tennessee from being able to engage in municipal broadband. It just keeps those decisions at the state level. Tennessee’s state law that allowed Chattanooga and other cities to engage in municipal broadband will continue to exist without any interference from the FCC. Tennessee should be able to adjust its law as it sees fit, instead of Washington dictating to us.

Notice that Blackburn’s ideological fortitude has loopholes that protect a very important success story — EPB Fiber in Chattanooga, one of the first to offer gigabit broadband service. If municipal broadband is such a threat to common sense, why the free pass for EPB? In fact, it is networks like EPB that expose the nonsense on offer from Blackburn and her industry friends that claim public broadband networks are failures and money pits.

In fact, Blackburn’s idea of states’ rights never seems to extend to local communities across Tennessee that would have seen local ordinances gutted by Blackburn’s telecommunications policies and proposed bills. In 2005, Blackburn introduced the ironically named Video Choice Act of 2005 which, among other things:

• Would have granted a nationwide video franchise system that would end all local oversight over rights-of-way for the benefit of incumbent telephone companies, but not for cable or other new competitors like Google Fiber;
• Strips away all local oversight of cable and telephone company operations that allowed local jurisdictions to ensure providers follow local laws and rules;
• Prohibited any mechanism on the local level to collect franchise payments;
• Eliminated any rules forbidding “redlining” — when a provider only chooses select parts of a community to serve.

More recently, Blackburn has been on board favoring legislation restricting local communities from having a full say on the placement of cell towers. Current Tennessee law already imposes restrictions on local communities trying to refuse requests from AT&T, Verizon and others to place new cell towers wherever they like. She is also in favor of highest-bidder wins spectrum auctions that could allow AT&T and Verizon to use their enormous financial resources to snap up new spectrum and find ways to hoard it to keep it away from competitors.

Not everyone in Tennessee appreciated Blackburn’s remarks.

Nashville resident Paul Felton got equal time in the newspaper to refute Blackburn’s claims:

Rep. Marsha Blackburn is on her high horse (Tennessee Voices, Oct. 3) about the idea of the Federal Communications Commission opposing laws against municipal broadband networks, wrapping herself in the mantle of states’ rights. We know that behind all “states’ rights” indignation is “corporate rights” protection.

The last I heard, there was only one Internet, and anyone can log into Amazon or healthcare.gov just as easily from any state. Or any budget.

No, this is about the one Internet being controlled by one corporate giant (or two) in each area, who want to control price and broadband speed, and now want to link the two. They don’t want competition from any pesky municipal providers hellbent on providing the same speed for all users, at a lower price. Check the lobbying efforts against egalitarian ideas to find out which side of an issue Marsha Blackburn always comes down on.

But comments like these don’t deter Rep. Blackburn.

“Congress cannot sit idly by and let a federal agency trample on our states’ rights,” she wrote, but we believe she meant to say ‘AT&T’s rights.’

“Besides, the FCC should be tackling other priorities where political consensus exists, like deploying spectrum into the marketplace, making the Universal Service Fund more effective, protecting consumers, improving emergency communications and other important policies,” Blackburn wrote.

Remarkably, that priority list just so happens to mirror AT&T’s own legislative agenda. Perhaps that is just a coincidence.

Comcast’s customer relations team apparently is better at ferreting out contacts at their customers’ employers than fixing problems with their service, despite being given multiple chances to make things right. When one customer made a seventh attempt to resolve his problems, Comcast called his boss and got him fired.

The Consumerist details the latest Comcast Customer Service Horror Show. On one side, Conal, who signed up for Comcast after being sold on a 9-month new customer promotion. On the other, Comcast’s billing and customer service department. Almost from the beginning, the two were locked in combat over service and billing issues:

• Comcast misspelled his last name in their records, which meant some of his bills were allegedly returned to Comcast by the post office;
• Comcast charged him for set-top boxes that were never activated on his account;
• After multiple complaints, Comcast reduced his promotional discount, raising his bill $20 while adding new charges for a second cable modem he didn’t have and continuing charges for set-top boxes he never used;
• Conal tried to cancel his service in October 2013 because of the mishaps, but a representative convinced him to stay after promising to fix his account. Instead, Comcast sent him a dozen pieces of equipment he never ordered and billed his account $1,820 for the unwanted equipment.

Conal returned the unrequested DVRs, cable modems, and everything else Comcast sent, and brought along a spreadsheet detailing his ongoing dispute, including every overcharge he incurred. He’s a professional accountant used to dealing with companies that understand numbers, and was convinced putting everything on paper would finally get through to the cable company.

Not a chance.

Comcast was unmoved and unconvinced by Conal’s spreadsheet, denied there was ever a problem with his account, and upon learning he intended to continue contesting the equipment charges, turned his account over to collections despite the fact it was not past due.

On Feb. 6 Conal dared to escalate his concerns to Comcast’s Office of the Controller. A subsequent callback from a testy representative began with, “how can I help you.” There was no greeting or mention she worked for Comcast, but there was plenty of attitude. The mysterious rep disputed Conal’s claim that a Comcast technician never showed up for an appointment, but could not tell him which appointment she was referring to. After that debate ended, the only remaining question on her mind was the color of Conal’s house.

Realizing a short time later that call was a waste of time, Conal called back the Controller’s office to let them know Comcast’s latest ambassador of goodwill was unhelpful. At this point, he casually mentioned the unresolved accounting issues with his bill should probably be brought before the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a private-sector, nonprofit corporation created by the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 to end the accounting tricks and executive-ordered embargoes on bad news that fleeced investors in the 1990s. A professional accountant would be familiar with the PCAOB and how to appeal for an independent review, ordinary consumers would be unlikely to know the Board even existed.

That Conal would raise the matter of the PCAOB to the Controller’s Office apparently piqued the interest of someone at Comcast, who launched a small research project to determine who Conal was and where he worked. When they discovered his employer did work for Comcast, the cable company struck gold in the leverage department.

Comcast called Conal’s employer and spoke with a partner at the firm, who also received e-mail containing a summary of conversations Comcast evidently recorded between Conal and its various representatives. Comcast complained Conal was using the name of his employer to seek an unfair advantage with customer service. Conal told the Consumerist he never mentioned his employer by name, but once the Controller’s Office learned he was an accountant willing to escalate his complaints outside of the company, it would be a simple matter to look him up online and learn where he worked.

Conal’s employer in fact does consulting work for Comcast, so the outcome of a brief ethics investigation predictably led to Conal’s termination. Conal was never allowed to see the transcripts of conversations with the cable company, nor given access to any recordings of those calls. Conal said before he tangled with Comcast, he had received only positive feedback and reviews for his work.

Conal’s lawyer has been in contact with Comcast over the matter and received a pithy reply from Comcast’s senior deputy general counsel, who likely fears a forthcoming lawsuit, admitting Comcast did call Conal’s employer but said Conal “is not in a position to complain that the firm came to learn” about his dispute with Comcast.

“Our customers deserve the best experience every time they interact with us,” reads a statement from Comcast. The company says it has previously apologized to Conal, but adds “we will review his lawyer’s letter and respond as quickly as possible.”

Comcast had no comment about whether the company considers it proper to identify and contact customers’ employers and push its weight around when it feels the need to do some complaining of its own.

The many stages of denial

It took Google Fiber to change the paradigm that you only need enough broadband speed to run the basics — anything extra is extravagant and unnecessary. At least that is the argument broadband providers continue to make when asked about speed upgrades.

“When Google announced it was offering a gigabit, everybody was (like), ‘Huh? What are you going do with that?'” said Heather Burnett Gold, president of the Fiber to the Home Council Americas.

Time Warner Cable and AT&T are in the process of finding out in both Kansas City and (soon) in Austin, Tex. But when you don’t have what the other guy is offering, providers predictably switch to the cheaper-than-upgrades-argument, ‘you don’t need it.’

Before Google Fiber began a serious advance into Time Warner Cable territories and the cable company’s top speed of 50/5Mbps became an embarrassing outlier, then chief financial officer Irene Esteves poo-poohed the notion that people need anything faster than what Time Warner was already delivering. Esteves told an investment-phobic crowd of Wall Street analysts at a Morgan Stanley Tech Conference everyone was happy with what they already had.

“We just don’t see the need of delivering that [gigabit speed] to consumers,” Esteves said back in 2013.

Comcast didn’t think much of speed upgrades either… until it did in its regulatory filings to acquire Time Warner Cable, where Comcast championed the fact it offers more speed upgrades than Time Warner Cable ever did. But who can forget Comcast repeatedly telling customers their speeds were fast enough, and with their then-ubiquitous 250GB usage cap, you couldn’t use faster speeds for that much anyway.

“For some, the discussion about the broadband Internet seems to begin and end on the issue of “gigabit” access,” David L. Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president, wrote in an editorial in the summer of 2013. “The issue with such speed is really more about demand than supply. Our business customers can already order 10-gig connections. Most websites can’t deliver content as fast as current networks move, and most U.S. homes have routers that can’t support the speed already available to the home.”

(Today, Comcast touts it has new routers that will support the fastest speeds on offer from cable companies and promises Time Warner Cable customers long overdue speed upgrades.)

Other providers that cannot possibly compete with Google Fiber’s speed also like to change the subject.

The Wireless Cowboys blog, run by a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP), believes the real issue isn’t about speed at all.

“All of the discussions about ‘Gigabit Internet’ and coming up with uses for it focuses too much on the American obsession with ‘bigger, faster, moar!’ while obscuring what I feel are the more important issues of accessibility, affordability, choice of provider, freedom from data exploitation and dependency on the cloud,” wrote the editor.

Unfortunately for him, it isn’t the American obsession with ‘bigger, faster, moar’ that is the issue. It is just about everywhere else where nations are treating major broadband upgrades as a national priority, while we depend almost entirely on a barely competitive private sector to deliver upgrades most of them don’t believe we need in the first place.

Dan Tesch wrote in InformationWeek earlier this year he wants the United States to sit this one out.

“Even if Latvians enjoy faster connections than Texans (2.5 x faster), I’m really curious how broadband speeds of more than a few Mbps for average households can have a material impact on the economy,” he writes. “A 6Mbps connection could easily support several home users simultaneously shopping on multiple e-commerce sites, downloading iTunes, streaming Spotify, and so on. Do Americans really need gigabit to the home?”

Back in the early 1990s, dial-up was plenty for the online applications of the day and faxing managed just fine at 9600bps over landlines, so why do we need more? Perhaps because dial-up is effectively dead to us and faxing has become quaint, like carrying cassettes in your car. Technology marches forward, and providers must follow (or preferably lead).

It is inevitable that faster broadband will drive development of new applications designed to take advantage of gigabit speeds as they become more common. That isn’t likely to happen for years in the United States and Canada, but those speeds are already becoming common in Europe and Asia. Where superfast broadband predominates, so shall high-tech app developers and other digital economy businesses. North America will be left behind until we finally catch up to Romania, Bulgaria, and South Korea.

The evidence is already there.

“I just returned from Stockholm where fiber connections are cheap and as available as running water,” said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry & Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.” As a result, she said, developers there have “a digital sandbox to play in,” which means they are more likely to develop the next generation of software and hardware.

“Most people don’t really get it yet,” Synthia Payne, who moved from Denver to Kansas City, Kan., for a $70-a-month Google Fiber connection told the New York Times. She needed superfast broadband to develop an app called Cyberjammer that allows musicians around the world to jam online and in real-time. “People just haven’t conceived of what fiber will mean and how it will change the way we live and work.”

Brad Kalinoski and Tinatsu Wallace fled Time Warner Cable country in Los Angeles and moved to Wilson, N.C. They co-own Exodus FX, a company that provides special effects for commercials, television and feature films like “The Black Swan” and “Captain America.”

“We were doing so much business that we had to have increased bandwidth, so we started looking around and found Wilson,” said Kalinoski.

If they stayed in Hollywood, gigabit fiber broadband requires an extremely expensive commercial account with a substantial buildout/installation fee to reach the building and monthly charges starting at $1,500-3,000. Today, he pays Greenlight, Wilson’s publicly owned fiber to the building provider, $150 a month for gigabit access.

Any digital economy business dependent on fast Internet can see the economics, and often relocate.

“In New York, I pay four times as much as someone in Stockholm would pay for a connection that is 17 times as slow on the download and 167 times as slow on upload,” Crawford noted. “Most of us are paying enormous rents for second-class service.”

It’s the same in Seattle, where Eric Blank moved his 20-employee IT security firm from Seattle to Mount Vernon, Wash., which has its own fiber network. Blank could have kept paying CenturyLink or Comcast around $985 a month for vastly slower service or pay Mount Vernon for access to its public broadband service, which costs $250 a month. Blank told the New York Times he gets better service for his $250 in Mount Vernon than what he got at a higher price in Seattle.

Remarkably, for all the talk about why Americans don’t need faster Internet service, the moment a competitor starts selling it, the cheap talk turns into service upgrades (or at least press releases promising upgrades).

In Kansas City, speeds are rising not just because of Google Fiber. Akamai has found AT&T and Time Warner Cable are upgrading to deliver faster speeds as well.

We’re seeing faster speeds everywhere,” said David Belson, who authors the State of the Internet Report for Akamai. “Part of that is that the technology is improving to get better speeds out of existing networks, part of it is consumer demand, and part is the pressure that Google Fiber’s existence creates on everybody else.”

Today Time Warner Cable delivers 50Mbps for what it used to charge for 15Mbps service in Kansas City. AT&T has also boosted speeds of its U-verse service in many Kansas City neighborhoods, with promises to deliver gigabit speeds in Overland Park in the not-too-distant future.