Hotel review sites should include a section where reviewers can share the internet speed
20h 54m ago by pawb.social/u/jode in showerthoughts
I travel pretty regularly for work and where I'm at right now is beyond pathetic. It would be nice to compare users experience with internet speed when making a booking decision.
To add to that the overall internet "experience" could be a rating. Some places I stay have decent speed but they boot you off every 6 hours. Some make it extra difficult to log in. Some sneak access in as an optional extra. Some do all three.
It's fine to ask the hotel if they have wired Ethernet in rooms before you book, some do.
Typically wifi, even in the best hotels, can get pretty terrible at peak times.
The problem with speed as a metric is that it isn't just up to the hotel infrastructure if you as a user actually get it. You'd be rating the hotel on the performance of their ISP and other factors not under their control. Let's say you traveled from far and try to access websites from home, and the undersea cable got disconnected by mad shark, it's not the hotel's fault but you cannot expect that all users will consider that it isn't the hotel's fault when they give it a one-star rating on internet speed. If you're behind the great firewall of China anything but local sites are fast.
Well even if its not their fault, if the connection I can get in the hotel is insufficient for my needs, I want to know and book something else.
I get that. But a rating system by the unwashed masses is going to give you shit data to base your decision on. Because they cannot tell if it was a setting on their device, the hotel network, their ISP, or an act of god that fucked up their internet speed. People are dumb, attribute fault preferably externally. They'll all blame it on the hotel. You could be reading five reviews from last week about bad internet when there was an unfortunate power outage at the big brand ISP and they were running on the backup satellite internet the hotel had ready for just that case. That doesn't tell you shit about what it's like on any other day when everything is working fine. And the reviews end up hurting their business.
Ratings work if you get thousands of them to get enough variety, which I think you probably won't here. Or if you find a trusted source, a reviewer who knows what they're doing. Internet speed is in the reviewer category for me.
Guess what, my work doesn't have network performance issues, and I don't have network performance issues.
Guest networks at hotels are notoriously shitty, stop excusing it by creating a strawman.
Using satellite as their Internet fail over solution should rightfully hurt their business.
I mean I understand that but if there are 5 hotels in a given area at least it gives me an option to reward the one with the better internet with my business.
The review would stay and hurt their reputation.
Also, if the service you use is in the far east and the damaged cable in the far west, the results would deceive you and make you believe the internet connected to your service is good while it’s not.
The best option is to advertise the maximum speed in rush hours from local or nearby server.
If I'm annoyed by an internet connection, it's rarely due to one site. Sure, the onward connection is out of their hands, but they have choice of provider and deploy the local infrastructure.
I'd say it's almost better to use the mobile data of the domestic SIM or use a travel SIM with unlimited data instead.
Am I the only one who would never trust hotel wifi with a device I actually care about?
They don't care enough to monitor what you're doing. That's money they won't spend, generally they don't even want to spend on necessary things if nobody's going to sue and/or die from it. That said, treat it like an open network and take your own security precautions because theirs will be minimal.
That's what I meant, yeah.
Good use for VPNs
I'd much rather just use a hotspot or something if I could. I don't trust the other guests, and I wouldn't trust the big hotel chains not to monetize your traffic in some way.
When I traveled to Sri Lanka, one hotel didnt have isolated devices active.
Had some fun with another guest that used the android casting by remote controlling the volume ;)
I use a travel router that feeds everything through a VPN.
I wish I could do that but I need a special certificate.... So I bring an extra phone that does basically the same.
It’s just a normal review on google or yelp.
Download speed doesn't matter as much as ping times.