I’ve just returned from one of my regular trips to the US and have an interesting experience to share.

I’ve become heavily dependent on Skype for communicating with business contacts and family, and have had no problems using it in hotels other than the usual network congestion at some hotels with saturated connections.

I was staying towards the end of my trip at the Hilton by LAX. I was able to connect for a very short time, then my connection dropped. Repairing, rebooting etc didn’t restore it.

My initial connection was wireless, but there was also wired Ethernet in the room so I tried that. Same thing. It worked for a short period after the initial connection, then I lost everything.

Calling the help desk and giving them my MAC address revealed that my laptop had been blacklisted by the network for inappropriate activity. This normally happens when people are sending out spam via the network apparently, and the blacklisting applies to the entire Hilton chain. Nice to enjoy such notoriety!

I assured the help desk technician that I had current antivirus software etc, and eventually got her to remove me from the blacklist. I connected fine again, but when I started Skype, my connection was gone within 30 seconds.

I called back, convinced them to remove me from their blacklist one more time, kept Skype closed, and all was well for the rest of my stay.

On the one hand, I do have some sympathy with what they did. I appreciate that Skype is based on p2p architecture, and that if your machine is somehow chosen as a Skype supernode that it can consume a huge amount of bandwidth. I can also imagine that trying to keep a hotel network safe, when you could have all kinds of machines with all kinds of nasties connecting to it, is a considerable challenge to say the least. However, on the other hand, Skype has become a critical business tool for many of us, and surely ways can be found to differentiate Skype traffic from genuinely harmful traffic.

I’ve stayed at this hotel before with no such problems.

I wonder if hotel networks are starting to come down hard on Skype, and whether those of us dependent on this for our businesses might need to look at other options?

A Google on this has revealed this happening in some other hotels.

Anyone else experienced similar issues?