[PLUG] Internet Gateway for Hotel

[Aaron Burt]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 08:39:45PM -0700, Holger Stephan wrote:
> Aaron Burt wrote:
> >http://nocat.net/
> 
> Hey, thanks Aaron, that's a pretty good starting point. And it lead me 
> to a couple of commercial vendors as well (thanks to Google Ads). First 
> have to check what a finished product would cost. The one I liked best 
> so far is offered by Wiology (needed three attempts to spell that name) 
> and apparently costs around $1k. All open source (plus Java), interesting.

Sounds about right.  You could knock something together yourself and
bill the time, but consider support/maintenance costs.

I was just thinking that a cute way to do things would be to generate
a bunch of random passwords, each good for 24 hours of access, and
laser-print 'em on business card stock with instructions.  It'd make
it dead easy for the clerks, who could just pull a card out of the
register and add a charge to the bill.  Heck, selling password refills
might be a good way to cover your support costs.

> >As an aside, charging for access is typically more trouble than it's
> >worth.  <snip>
>
> Yeah - I thought about this too. Thing is I don't own that hotel though. 
> Unfortunately, I'd be enjoying life in Hawaii otherwise.

Heh.  Sounds like you'll have to do the installation onsite. 
It'll take a couple weeks, brah. ;)

> >Waiting to see "Free VoIP long-distance" next,
> >  Aaron 
> 
> Doesn't that already exist? I scraped this from FatWallet the other day:
> http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/489656/: the best thing to do is buy a 
> Sipura VOIP adapter {im using the SPA-2100} and sign up with stanaphone 
> for free incoming, and globe7 for free outgoing and for international calls.

Sorta-free, and limited to 1 minute.  But if you're a commercial
customer, you can buy VoIP minutes to regular land-line phones for
around $1 an *hour*.  I can imagine a hotel in a tight market getting
a leg up on the competition by advertising (limited) free LD calls.