I’ve just run into some unbelievably expensive Internet access charges to make use of hotel WiFi. In the middle of London, where the price of a 2Mb ADSL line tops out at about £10 a month for residential and maybe £30 a month for business with unlimited data trasnfer, the hotel I am staying in is charging £9.99 per 24 hour period for access to a shared 2Mb ADSL connection. That’s £300 a month, or ten times what a normal business ADSL line will cost.

Either the company providing the billing solution is charging them a fortune, or the hotel has discovered a cash-cow - after all, three customers using the Internet service once pays the month’s ADSL bills, and anything over this is pure profit. It’s actually cheaper, given the amount of work I am doing on the Internet at the moment, to use my 3G mobile phone as a connection device than to use the hotel’s shared WiFi.