The market will quickly sort this out. I don't patronize hotels that don't provide broadband. If I discover that they are blocking VOIP over the broadband that they provide, I will inform them that they have placed themselves on my "do not patronize" list.
Actually, I don't believe this will ever be a serious problem. Most hospitality operators are far to savvy to think that they could get away with this. Moreover, the use of cell-phones has pretty well gutted the revenue from hotel phones anyway.
A few chains in the US are starting to offer broadband, and many offer internet service (for a charge) - VoIP would ride on the latter - so they get their cut.
I would think that it is only a matter of time before hotels, and any other business that derives revenue from customers' use of their telephone facilities, decides to block VoIP on their data networks, forcing us to pay them when we make calls.
Why do you think that ISPs are regulated by the FCC? They aren't.
Hotels usually charge enough for Internet access that they're not hurting even if you did make VoIP calls. What they really would like to block, of course, is mobile calls.
How?? Even without broadband, it's only a rare (or rich) goofball that pays hotel phone charges. Hotels are why god originally invented calling cards!
But assuming that there =are= some rich goofballs out there who are paying hotel phone charges... would such a person also be doing a frugal thing like using VoIP?
As for the rest of us... the hotel will lose no money by allowing a frugal calling-card user to switch to being a frugal VoIP user. (Matter of fact, they free up phone lines.)
(For the sake of the argument, perhaps hotels exist that charge for calling-card calls... I haven't seen any... If so, would a hotel that is so rude as to charge for 800 numbers be caught dead providing broadband for free?)
I don't think any hotel chains are smart enough to do so. If they do so, its probably by accident. They usually just drop in a DSL connection and NAT everybody behind whatever router the IP provider gave them and forget about it.
How much revenue do they get anyway..? I assume we're talking about the USA here..? All the recent hotels I've stayed at in California provided free local calls within the same area code anyway, and as all I used them for were just that, I didn't pay any extra.
I remember AT&T taking out ads in travel magazines, back in the 1980s, warning Americans to beware of heavy hotel surcharges on phone calls back to the US.
Some foreign hotels were tacking on a US$10 surcharge!
AT&T recommended using public telephones rather than making calls from the hotel room. They also inaugurated a service where you could go to a payphone and dial an access code to be connected to a US operator, who would complete the call and bill your AT&T card at US rates. I cannot remember the name of the service. They provided you with a pocket card listing the access numbers to dial for each country that you were in.
I have even heard of hotels that jammed cell phone signals so that guests were forced into using the hotel's phone system, and paying the hotel's exhorbitant rates. That practice is illegal in the US, but some posters in the cellular NGs have noted that they've experienced it.
Telephone revenue was a big moneymaker for hotels--I don't know what the current state of affairs is though. It seems to me that a hotel would try to get you to use their own lines, if they could possibly get away with it.
I've never had the problem. In any case, at the last motel I stayed at in San Diego, there was a payphone around 30ft from my room door..! I never needed it as the room phone gave free calls within the 619 area code and I had two mobile (cell) phones (one US, one UK) with me anyway.
If this becomes commonplace then people will quickly sort out ways around it.
More troublesome is the possibility of adding heavy jitter, which won't be noticed by web and email users but which will play havoc with VoIP call quality.
VoIP isn't always just about being cheap. It's also potentially about being portable. Being able to have your calls follow you is a handy feature of VoIP.
An important distinction some don't realize is phone calls require a fixed number of trunk lines. That is, in a hotel of 200 rooms you don't have the ability to make 200 outgoing calls all at the same time. More like about 20 or so. Same thing does in office environments. That handset on your desk does not have it's "own" outside line but shares one of the many outside trunks. (yes, technically, a PBX could be configured to dedicate a trunk line to just one handset but that's tangental). Some PBX systems can support use of PRI, BRI, fiber or other types of lines that don't require one pair per trunk. But the channel bank will still have a limit on the number of simultaneous calls that can be handled.
This is part of the reason why hotels hated modems and are offering free broadband. Having 200 guests try to make 200 modem calls immediately overloads the PBX and ties up the lines. Moving to shared broadband lets them all share just ONE connection. This is a HUGE win for the hotel.
It's all a matter of balance. I'm sure somewhere there's a hotel manager too stupid to realize that nickel-and-diming the customers for these things is a bad idea. But just as there are far too many stupid manager, so too are there enough customers gullible enough to go along with it.
I'm pretty sure whole ISP in some countries are doing this! Further, they'd love to do it in most places if they could get away with it, but they can't for now.
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