Requirements seem simple:
* On the beach * Nice porch to sit on * Breakfast daily * Wifi
AirBNB and VBRO won't make me breakfast. BedAndBreakfast.com won't tell me if the wifi is in the room.
How do you solve this issue without pounding through 50 B&B websites? Is there a market niche here?
There's nothing like that yet as far as I know. Most hotels and B&B will indicate whether they've got wifi access. Typically, if wifi isn't mentioned, it means no wifi.
But knowing that wifi is available isn't actually all that helpful. You'll often find that wifi is available but costs more than the room itself. Or, even more often, it just doesn't work or is unusably slow.
So we always try to get a place with wifi but also always carry an unlocked MiFi with us. In the UK, you can get one for £50 on PAYG on Three and unlock it for a few quids. PAYG data topups in the UK on Three are reasonably priced (£15 for 3GB of data). When we go abroad, we first check this wiki to find local operators with decent PAYG data plans and we buy a local SIM card as soon as we land: http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data
It's a hassle but if you really need internet access, that's the only option at the moment I'm afraid. There is definitely a niche for a way to identify hotels and B&B with free / reasonably priced and reliable wifi connection (and also cafés while we're at it - it's an incredible pain to find café with working wifi).
When did that become "reasonably priced"?
If you limit yourself to what the Internet could do in the days of 56k modems, 3GB works just fine. However, I wouldn't exclusively call that "entertainment".
It seems fairly unreasonable for heavyweight web applications as well, with piles of JavaScript and various rich content that includes more than just text and markup. It also won't nearly suffice for the purposes of pushing and pulling code via version control, which I do regularly for work.
More to the point, it just seems unreasonable by the standards of non-cell Internet connections, and unreasonable even by the standards of cell Internet connections back when every provider offered "unlimited" plans.
> If you just need to send emails and be able to restart your server then 3GB will basically last forever, not so if you want to torrent 1080p copies of Game of Thrones.
There exists some middle ground there. If you want to view pages with heavyweight content, including the occasional video or large image, 3GB might last a couple of weeks at most.
If you regularly do OS upgrades, download software packages, clone version control repositories, perform backups, and otherwise use it like any other computer professional would even without including entertainment, 3GB might last a few days. (This does not represent an off-the-cuff guess; I've measured this.)
In any case, I intended my original comment simply to express astonishment that we've gone from "how dare 'unlimited' not mean 'unlimited'" to "3GB/£15 (3GB/~$25) seems pretty reasonable" so quickly. Apparently that sentiment did not go over well.
Honestly, only the editing of binaries hurt at all. I didn't push as often, but it was still fine when I did.
I've often thought it would be a cool idea if these websites had a tool which automatically assessed a property's wifi quality via a quiz and/or a series of tests. But if you have the modem, a landline becomes a luxury not a requirement.
Do a search, then look on the right side of the page for the "Amenities" widget (you have to scroll all the way down). You could also add "beach" and/or "ocean" as a keyword in the widget right under that.
Voila.
Given that your using tools used to sellbed and breakfasts on the internet chances are high that the proprietor has both breakfast AND wifi.
I don't think relying on the information the Owners give can be a solution. They want to sell and they'll consider their shared wifi connection always "fast", whatever that means.
We have developed a niche platform for vacation rentals which would allow you to build a website dedicated just to vacation rentals with internet connection. (some call it an Airbnb builder, but this is not accurate for many reasons. One of them is that we don't do peer to peer).
Anyone wanting to open a small business to fill this niche could use our CMS to build the site and select the accommodations from the thousands we have. We have local Managers who visited personally most of these Owners and Accommodations, so they can provide you with hard data such as Actual Internet Speed. SpeedTest.net results for instance.
This is different from letting the Owners check that "wi-fi" checkbox.
I had the "only fast internet accommodations" idea long time ago, but we're waiting for the right person/team to come in and do it.
The system is http://www.adormo.com and these are some other niches we built already just to give you an idea: http://www.topfamilyhomes.com http://www.kitesurfsleep.com http://www.petfriendlystays.com
If anybody is passionate to solve this problem with us, please send us an email!
Better than searching through sites when a lot of the time they don't have that info on it.
It should be listed though... it should.
So, it's probably worth more to complain to BedAndBreakfast.com to be doing this since they likely already pay someone to pursue details like the one's they already do have. They probably just don't think it's very important and nobody is telling them otherwise.
A site full of hotel wifi ratings, speeds and passwords would be so awesome. Kind of like bugmenot or maybe hipmunk with an agony rating for hotels.
It would involve manual data collection but it could be a very useful service. Configure a handheld of some kind that can sit in a (vacant) room for a few hours--maybe a day--and measure ambient noise, wifi signal strength, even the amount of sunlight.
I know you're trying to make a point about working remotely, but see if you can go (somewhat) analog and single-threaded for the work day, then find an offsite location to sync and get connected for a brief period later in the day.
If not for the whole vacation, at least for a few days. It might surprise you how disconnected you really need to be. Can you condense your connectedness to an hour at a mid-afternoon coffee shop visit?