Was wondering the Wifi situation.  At the last Gencon I went to, back in 2004, there was paid Wifi and I did pay for it. 

When I was in the convention center last week, I saw signs that said "FREE WIFI", but when I tried to connect my tablet PC to it, I was redirected to a page where I was prompted to pay.

So what is the Wifi situation these days?  I don't carry a cell phone, and my tablet only gets Wifi (no cellular service).  I would need Wifi to use it, but if it's not free, I'm too much of a cheapskate to pay for it and I'll just go without. 

No wifi. 

May still be some super expensive private services available. 

If you were to have a smart phone with wifi hotspot functionality, at least you shouldn't see significant issues any longer with using your wifi hotspot.  Around the time of Gen Con 2015, Smart City (the wifi hosting company for the Indiana Convention Center) was fined by the FCC for deliberately interfering and compromising people's ability to utilize the wifi hotspots on their phones or other wireless devices.

https://consumerist.com/2015/08/18/company-fined-750k-for-blocking-wifi-hotspots-at-convention-centers/

Verizon had free wifi there.  It was smoking all weekend so I don't know how crowded it was (it looked like you needed a password but it was a generic TOS type of thing).  I ended up not using much data at all this week.

I did check a non VZW phone and it wasn't showing so maybe it was company specific?

I used the hotspot on my cell phone to get on the internet at the Con. :) 

I too had an easy time connecting to and using the VZW wifi.