… and he’s not going to take it any more. He’s — understandably — annoyed with the outrageous Wi-Fi rates at hotels and conferences, with Hilton hotels on the end of this particular rant. The 30 euros per day they want at their Vienna location (where he’s attending an event last week) was the final straw, and he now says he’ll think twice about attending or speaking at anything held at a Hilton, and he certainly won’t be staying at their hotels any more.

I’ve experienced similar frustrations due to pricing or reliability issues with the Wi-Fi access at many events, and the sheer uselessness of the Wi-Fi at CTIA made me decide to bring along an Airport Express or some other small access point in future, in hopes of setting up a rogue network plugged into one of the eminently more reliable Ethernet cables. Dean’s got a better idea, though:

And if any cellular operator would like to loan me a 3G-backhauled portable WiFi AP like this one from Voda & Linksys to take to conferences & run my own “rogue WiFi” I’ll be more than happy to write about it here. After all, I give plenty of space to IP-oriented companies that can arbitrage around cellular operators’ ripoffs, so it would be nice to see the HSDPA guys getting their own back…..

I’d like to extend a similar invitation to carriers or equipment manufacturers — anything you can do to make writers’ and bloggers’ jobs easier at these events won’t go unnoticed, As Dean points out, there’s plenty of talk about Wi-Fi and other IP technologies that promise to free users from the rip-offs of mobile operators — but there are plenty of times when these methods are just as bad, or even worse. Here’s a chance to show off your 3G connection-sharing products (like the EV-DO ones from Sprint pictured here), in a use case that makes sense.

[tags]mobile, 3g, wi-fi, bubley, disruptive analysis[/tags]