I was tired of the hotel I was staying at and my friend Martin told me about a new Holiday Inn Express that had just been built not too far away from our project. We went to check it out and when compared to the one star hotels that I had been frequenting, it looked like paradise.
The situation was they had free Internet and in Germany that is a huge draw with everything else being equal. I don’t understand how some other hotels manage to charge between ten and twenty five euros per day extra for wifi access, but I digress. The hotel wasn’t that full and the Internet speed was just perfect. Of course some doofus had to ruin it for us. Rather than to pay for a e-book, he or she, managed to find it on the Internet and simply download a pirated version to their computer while at the hotel.
Don’t believe the hype, German has just as many lawyers as America does and they are out trying to make doing just about anything difficult. In this case it was probably justified as when they contacted the hotel to determine which guest did this heinous crime they were probably told, “I don’t know we just rent rooms to people”. I never heard if the hotel ended up paying off the lawyer or if simply changing their setup was good enough although I suspect they had to do both.
The new setup was not that different from any other hotel or airport. You have to register with someone to get a username and password which will then be associated with your room. It didn’t always work as smooth as described but it did work much much slower. Yet this is where it gets a bit more interesting.
Martin worked for a telecommunications company who had a few ideas of their own about network security. You had to put a special card into a card reader on the computer when making a connection to their network. He needed to do this several times a day to pickup his email, enter his billable hours and book his train tickets. The sad thing was that this solution didn’t seem to work unless you had a simple connection to the Internet. So he could use his company laptop from home, but not on the wireless hotspots in the train, a coffee shop, or his hotel room.
His solution was to use the project DSL line at the client site, which actually was a fairly elegant solution for the longest time. Unfortunately, the client decided that to provide this service was making things too comfy for the externals and discontinued the service. In the end, Martin ended up using his personal cell phone to create a wireless hotspot just so he could do his time reporting.
I am glad I never saw Martin’s company provide any actual telecommunications work because they didn’t seem they were even capable of setting up a simple vpn for their own employees.