In fact, according to a study reported on by CNN, if you want cheap and/or free Internet while staying at a hotel, you would be wise to avoid the five star offerings, and stay at cheaper hotel instead. According to the report, most of the higher end hotels charge customers a premium for Internet access, which, after paying in excess of $500 a night to stay, is pretty ridiculous. It becomes even more silly when you realize the cheaper hotels don’t go that route, instead preferring to “comp” Internet access for their customers.

From the findings:

Three-quarters of luxury and “upper upscale” hotel chains — segments that include brands such as Four Seasons, Hilton and Marriott — charge for in-room Internet access, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association 2010 Lodging Survey conducted by STR Global.

In comparison, just 2% of full-service midrange hotel chains — a segment that includes brands such as Holiday Inn — ask you to pay a fee for surfing the Web in your room, the survey found.

Clearly, the lesson here is avoid the big time hotels if you’re a business traveler who needs to connect to the Internet while in your hotel room. This becomes even more obvious when the reason why these expensive hotels charge a premium for Internet access–because they can.

Granted, the sheets and pillows at the four seasons are better than they are at the Holiday Inn, but is luxury the motivating factor when deciding on a hotel or is affordability? Obviously, if you’re paying for $500 a night, you can probably afford to pay for Internet access, but the question is, why would you? Especially when less expensive hotels don’t gouge customers in such a manner?

As with most things related to supply and demand, as long as these customers willingly pay for their Internet access, these expensive hotels will continue to charge for it. If business travelers began eschewing the more expensive hotels that charge for cheaper places that don’t, it’s easy to see these charges either reducing or disappearing altogether.

The question is, are these kinds of travelers willing to swallow their pride and stay in cheaper hotel that has free Internet access or is the allure of the local Four Seasons just that hard to overcome?

You don’t have to look very far to see the impact that text messaging has had on the way that people communicate these days. Take Twitter for example. People are going crazy for the service, which basically is just at mass text messaging platform to let everyone know what you’re currently up to. Mobile providers, however, are using the service as yet another method of price gouging their users.

Over a year ago, my colleague David A. Utter brought to light some very interesting numbers comparing the cost of providing broadband service to users to what consumers actually end up paying, and the gap is ridiculously huge.

So, it really shouldn’t be any secret that mobile providers would employ similar tactics in pricing ancillary services for their own users.

First, let’s look at the standard rate of $0.15 cents that Verizon charges per text message for users who haven’t purchased a text package. It seems like a small figure at first glance, but in truth it represents a gargantuan markup compared to what most other data transfers cost.

Ben Popken over at Consumerist has a great write-up on this. When he did all the figuring between how much it costs to send a text message kilobyte versus a data kilobyte (which would be handled exactly the same by the network) he came up with these numbers:

That’s $.015 per data kilobyte versus $1.09 per text message kilobyte. In other words, a markup of 7314%. Other cellphone companies charge comparable rates.

You read that correctly. Verizon text messages cost 7314% more to send per kilobyte than an equivalent amount of data.

So why the enormous difference in pricing? One possibility is that mobile providers such as Verizon would rather that customers purchase a text messaging package rather than pay on a per-use basis, so that the company could enjoy a guaranteed monthly revenue stream. And when you’re only looking at $0.15 cents a text message, it’s pretty easy to disguise the markup.

Verizon had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.