Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn-ternet

Ouf, was this a rough trip for internet connection. For context, my family and I went on a 2 week vacation in the city of Los Angles, where we stayed at a very pleasant hotel, and generally had fun. The issue was that when we booked we had assumed the hotel would have complimentary internet, because what kinda hotel doesn't have that? Turns out the kind that we stayed at doesn't, and we'll probably hesitate to stay there again.

So my internet woes began as we were settling into the hotel. As I do with all my trips now-a-days, I started by setting up a local travel router. The travel router unifies all of the annoying "connect to the internet" gateways that you have to pass through for each of your devices, so by having 1 travel router repeat the wireless, I only have to connect 1 time for the 3-5 devices I bring along (phones, laptop, Roku, and now tablet). It also sets up a VPN link back to my house so I can continue with my normal "routines", such as the automated phone backups to my NAS. This simplifies and streamlines a lot of headache for me and my wife in terms of setting up internet for each device (or it does in the best of times, which this was not). 

The first issue I saw was that while my phone, and laptop would get redirected to the "login" page, the router would not, and any attempts to directly connect to that page would fail with a timeout. After much mucking around, and a day or two of "WTF", I noticed that router had a firmware update, which I applied after some more hoop jumping just to get the router some kind of internet. I was hoping that the firmware update would solve the issue that I was seeing about the inability to get to the login page. Long story short, it didn't solve it at all. So I decided to just fully reset the router, and see if that fixed it. That did fix the issue, and I could now get to the login page from the router. 

Thus two days into the trip I finally got the router to the point that I'm like "yep connect to the complimentary internet!"; That's when I noticed that it didn't exist. Only paid internet existed, and only $10/day "basic", or $15/day "enhanced", where only the "enhanced" plan mentioned streaming. After raging about that for a while, I decided to enact an idea that I've had bouncing around in my head for a while. I decided that I would try cellular internet this round, since I didn't have hotel wireless. 

I had planned to try out cellular internet for a while, I bought a 4G modem years ago, and had done a little testing to validate that I could get it working. So I headed down to the local Walmart to grab a prepaid phone plan with internet. I grabbed a straight talk bring-your-own-phone sim and a prepaid plan, mostly because the plan stated that along with the phone having unlimited data, the hot spot also had unlimited data. In my testing the router had always been using hot spot data when using the 4G Modem, instead of the normal phone data. Once I acquired those components, I went back to the hotel.

At this point I had high hopes, as I had briefly tested the setup at home, and it had worked well there, so I was expecting a fairly easy setup, as compared to what I had already endured fro the last two days.  What elapsed was not easy, nor what I expected. 

It started with me filling out all the registration information on my phone. Which was clunky but I was able to fill it out including the IMEI number of the modem. Once set up I checked and I was not able to get internet, no panic, as the site said it could take up to 5 minutes before becoming active. So I waited, and still nope, no connection. So I waited longer, which still didn't fix the issue. Finally I decided to rig up my active phone to the router and see if I could re-register the modem on the desktop version of the site. Turns out that no, I couldn't, In fact, a notification appeared on the desktop version of the site stating that the IMEI was not supported, which did not appear on the mobile site. So, in short, the mobile version of the website let me sign up and attach a service card to an unsupported IMEI, which now won't ever activate.

SIGH, great that means that I need to go back to Walmart and buy a new "modem" device that I can use to tether the cellular data to the router. At this point I'm already $70ish dollars in and wondering if I should just bail on this idea and buy internet from the hotel. I decide against this for a couple of reasons, first and foremost; Pride, I want this to work darn it, and based on my history of hotel internet, Cell data is often equal if not better then the provided internet. Second, If I don't fully flush out the idea now, then I will just put it off till the next time as "viable", which is the state that it was when I began, that is kinda unacceptable for a $70 investment. Third, is also pride, I think; I'm already spending $$$ just to stay at your dumb hotel and you can't even provide me the ability to check my email? What kinda fraud is that? We live in 2020's now, Internet is a staple to all things, including your own TV system(we'll talk about this later), and you won't provide that to your clients? F*** you hotel.

Thus my second attempt at getting cell internet working on the router begins. I head down to the local Walmart and pick up an $50 5G phone from Straight talk, which should work with the plan that I bought earlier. I bring it back to the hotel and fire the thing up. All seems well until I try to activate the phone with the previously bought service plan. This fails; Because I had tied the service plan to the modem, I could no longer use the service plan for the phone, and any attempt to remove the modem from my account is met with a popup telling me to call the customer service line, since its forever stuck in an activating state. This meant that I needed to buy another service plan just to get the phone working there goes $65 more down the rabbit hole. Finally the phone activated and I could tether the router to it like I had wanted to for the last 3 days. And It was glorious for the first 12 hours. 

Turns out, that well they do offer unlimited hot spot data, Straight talk throttles you hard after so much. To the point that by the end of the day, I could no longer pull up Youtube streams, nor any streaming in general. I could check email, purse web pages, and various other lightweight tasks. This meant that instead of having the freedom to watch whatever I wanted, I was once again stuck watching whatever the hotel provided. Which did not peak my interest nor do I care to watch 5 mins of ads every 10 min of show. So I resigned myself that I would be doing a lot of coding/blogging/etc on this vacation. That is until I realised that the TV had a "YouTube" channel, and I could load any video from YouTube with it. This meant that the TV had to have internet of some sort, since you can't play on demand videos with "just a coax cable" hooked to the TV.

So I started looking, and sure enough, not only did I find out that the TV had internet via a third party module, presumably the module that handled the YouTube requests, but there was a free Ethernet port for the taking. So, finally halfway through my vacation, I suddenly got stable, working internet. And of course the first thing I had to do was obvious. I had to sync our phones to the NAS.